NavList:

Noel:

Re your "I was raised with a slide rule", while they are these days, dated and archaic, they still do, for somethings, yeoman-like service. A whole lot of bridges are crossed every day, the structural calculations for which were done with slide rules.

For myself, back when I was doing pipe fabrication detailing, we had to provide dimensions to the 16th/inch. No way to get that degree of accuracy with a slide rule for trigonometry. I used Smoleys Tables, in particular the Parallel Tables of Logs and Squares.

For that "quick and dirty" answer, nothing like a slide rule though, for in a case where the answer didn't look right, it usually wasn't and mistakes were not buried in 10 digit readouts.

Alan
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