Sunday, November 16, 2008

Never drive at night.

I found an engineering bible from 104 years ago. People used to make books a lot more durable than they do now. So far, I have found only one page that has any actual damage, and the pages feel like they are made of silk, compared to today's modern "paper..." The binding is quite worn, but its probably still going to last a long time more.

It is easy to forget how much we take calculators for granted, and this book shows how life was like before we had them to do all the dirty memorization and the works for us. Its got tables and tables of raw data about sine values, circumferences, logs, squares, reciprocals... Everything you can imagine, and not be able to work out quickly in your head.

With a 100 foot wide road, there are 12.1 acres of surface area in a mile of road. The reciprocal (multiplicative opposite) of 666 is .001501502. A length of pipe with a diameter of 1 foot, and a length of 1 foot, has an area of .7854 cub ft. Hehe, random data.

Actually, the copy I have is almost identical to the one referenced in this article, except for the fact that mine is in better condition, and doesn't have the handwritten notes at the back. Mine still has all of its pages, but the binding is still slightly flaking.

No comments:

Post a Comment