The joy of finding an app for simulating my vintage scientific pocket calculator

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the April 28th meeting of the Pioneer Toastmasters club the theme was Love Those Gadgets! I’m a retired engineer so calculators are one of my favorite gadgets. On March 27, 2021 I blogged about The joy of changing to an iPhone. I was not impressed when I looked at the very basic calculator app supplied under the Utilities icon. At the App Store I was pleasantly surprised to find that for $10 I could purchase the RLM-11CX. It simulates an old friend, my vintage HP-11C scientific pocket calculator (shown above). Having that app means one less thing to carry on trips.

 

The HP-11C scientific calculator was manufactured between 1981 and 1989, so mine might be almost four decades old. It has a liquid crystal display (LCD) rather than the red light emitting diodes used previously on my HP-45 and HP-97. Those calculators used rechargeable batteries and came with a jack for plugging in an AC adapter. The HP-11C calculator uses three A76 or 357 button batteries which typically last me for over two years. It has no AC adapter. The 11C is in the Hewlett-Packard Voyager series, which also includes the HP-12C financial calculator that also was introduced in 1981 and is still available as an updated version – the HP12C Platinum. 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My father was a chemical engineer who always had a calculator at home. I grew up using his mechanical Marchant and electronic HP9100A, which I mentioned in a March 27, 2012 blog post titled Do words keep their original definitions? But the very first calculating device I owned was analog rather than digital. For my tenth-grade chemistry class I learned to use a 10” Pickett Simplex aluminum slide rule (shown above), which I mentioned in a November 25, 2020 blog post titled A million times too large.

 

Bogus history about the U.S. Supreme Court

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the blog for the Gem State Patriot News there is a post (or article) dated April 30, 2021 by Art daRosa titled Packing the Supreme Court. In it he makes an incorrect claim that:

 

“FDR increased the number of justices from six to nine. Doing so, he encroached into the Judicial Branch with the full intent of ignoring the Constitution and collapsing the principle of Separation of Power. The fact that the Democrats want to repeat what FDR did is the best proof that politicizing the Supreme Court will not work in the long run.”

 

But that is nonsense, and a careful editor would have asked daRosa where he got that. If you look at a web page for the U.S. Supreme Court you will instead find the following sentence:

 

“The number of Justices on the Supreme Court changed six times before settling at the present total of nine in 1869.”

 

As is shown above, an image from the Library of Congress has all nine justices in the 1886 Supreme Court. What FDR actually tried to do in 1937 was add up to another six justices, as is discussed by William E. Leuchtenburg in a May 2005 article in the Smithsonian Magazine titled When Franklin Roosevelt clashed with the Supreme Court – and lost.

  

A good writer edits drafts of his story, speech, or song

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A writer needs to edit his drafts both for grammar and spelling. The April 27, 2021 Pearls Before Swine cartoon has dialogue where Rat tells us what NOT to do:

 

Goat: Hey, Rat. What are you doing?

Rat: Just got to the end of a story I’m writing. I’m hoping to get it published.

Goat: That’s great. How much time will you need for the re-writing?

Rat: My writing’s perfect the first time.

Goat: I see.

Rat: Revisions are only for sad little losers.

 

Recently I was listening to the radio and heard a 2008 song Human by The Killers. Its chorus is shown above. Use of dancer rather than dancers makes me cringe, and my suggestions for five changes (adding s) are shown in red. Some who couldn’t understand the lyric had transcribed it as saying denser. Brandon Flowers refused to change it, but he claimed to have gotten the idea to use dancer from this quote from Hunter S. Thompson:

"We’re raising a generation of dancers, afraid to take one step out of line"

 

Other songwriters are not afraid to edit their lyrics. Josh Ritter has a song titled Harrisburg on his album The Golden Age of Radio. One version of its second verse says:

 

“Could have stayed somewhere, but train tracks kept going

It seems like they always left soon

And the people he ran with, they moaned low and painful

Sang sad misereres to the moon”

 

I had to look in the Merriam-Webster dictionary to find out the obscure word miserere means a vocal complaint or lament. The acoustic version on the Deluxe Edition and a live version have that verse changed to instead read:

 

“They could have stayed somewhere, train tracks kept going

It seems like they always left soon

And the wolves that he ran with, moaned low and painful

Sang their sad lullabys at the moon, at the moon”

 

Some lyrics are memorable because they contain an unusual phrase, like the title for the popular song Seven Nation Army by the duo The White Stripes. You can watch and listen to it in this YouTube video. I imagine a Seven-Nation-Army might have appeared somewhere in the J. R. R. Tolkien novel The Return of the King. But actually as a child Jack White misheard it as being what is the Salvation Army. There also is a YouTube video with Homer and Bart Simpson starting to play the song. But the murderous opening riff really isn’t played on a bass – it’s on a guitar lowered an octave.   

 

Fixing misfit ballpoint pens

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last week my wife showed me a half-dozen BIC Round Stic Grip ballpoint pens she had a problem with. Normally you can easily pull the cap off before you use one, as shown above. But when she tried to do that instead the 3-7/8” long gray handle came off. These pens provide a lesson about fits and failure in the assembly of products from components.

 

The Wikipedia article about engineering fit says there are three types of fits: clearance, transition, and interference. They can be illustrated using the example of a cylindrical shaft and a hole. The first is a clearance fit where the hole is larger than the shaft so the two parts can slide freely (like the beads on an abacus). A second is a transition fit where the hole is smaller than the shaft and a small force is required to assemble or disassemble (like the caps on most stick pens). The third is an interference fit where a large force is required to assemble or disassemble (like the handle and body on most stick pens).  

 

These pen handles just had a transition fit instead of an interference fit. But I was able to easily fix them by applying a few drops of Super Glue (cyanoacrylate adhesive) to the joint between the body and handle. A single 0.01-ounce tube (from a dollar-store package containing four tubes) got the job done. Tubes on better steel bicycle frames also have a transition fit with their lugs, and then are permanently assembled via brazing.

 

If the dimensions are chosen properly, then an interference fit can be quite strong. Wheels for railroad cars routinely are press-fitted onto their axles. But if dimensions are improper a wheel can loosen, as was described in a 1999 report from the New Zealand Transport Accident Investigation Commission.

 

The Joy of Search, a 2019 book by Daniel M. Russell, is an extremely useful guide about how to do research both online and offline

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I borrowed Daniel M. Russell’s 2019 book The Joy of Search (A Google Insider’s Guide to Going Beyond the Basics) from my friendly, local public library and greatly enjoyed reading it. His book is a fascinating collection of stories that give you a whole set of tools and a helpful attitude for conducting research. Dan also writes the SearchReSearch blog. There is a web site for the book, and you can download a sample of Chapter 2. You also can look in it online at Google Books. The twenty chapter titles from this book are:

 

 1] Introduction: How You Can Harness the Power of Online Research – Why You Should Improve Your Online Researching Skills

 2] Finding a Mysterious Location Somewhere in the World: How to Use Multiple Information Sources to Zero In on a Resource

 3] Do Lakes in Africa Sometimes Explode? How to Focus Your Search with “site:” and Using Specialized Terms

 4] Things You Notice While Traveling: How and When to Switch Search Modes to Find Information

 5] Is That Plant Poisonous or Not? How to Find Highly Localized and Domain-Specific Information

 6] What’s the Most Likely Way You’ll Die? How to Be Explicit about What You’re Searching to Find (and Why That Matters)

 7] When Would You Want to Read the Italian Wikipedia? How to Look for Information from Other Languages in Wikipedia and Other Sources

 8] Why Are the Coasts So Different? How to Use Online Maps Resources to Answer Broad Geographic Questions

 9] Mysterious Mission Stars: How to Read Snippets in the Search Results and Pay Attention to Search Details

10] When Was Oil First Discovered in California? How to Discover and Work Through Multiple Competing Claims in Online Resources

11] Can You Die from Apoplexy or Rose Catarrh? How to Find (and Use) Old, Sometimes-Archaic or Obsolete Terminology

12] What’s That Wreck Just Offshore? How to Find Archival Imagery and Use Metadata from Photographs

13] Do Flies Have the Pattern of a Spider on Their Wings? How to Check the Credibility of a Resource You’ve Found

14] What’s the Connection Between “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the General Who Burned the White House? How to Search for Vaguely Remembered Connections Between Ideas

15] What Causes the Barren Zones around Some Plants? How to Know When You Should Go Offline and Do Research in the Real World

16] Is Abyssinia the Same as Eritrea? How to Find Additional Context Information for Your Research

17] The Mystery of the Parrotfish, or Where Does That White Sand Really Come From? How to Triangulate Multiple Sources to Find a Definitive Answer

18] Did Perry Ever Visit the Island of Delos? How to Follow a Long Chain of References to the Ultimate Answer

19] On Being a Great Searcher: Rules of Thumb for Asking Great Questions

20]The Future of Online Search: Why the Research Skills You Learn Today Will Continue to Be Useful in the Future

 

It isn’t perfect. Dan omits or has incomplete descriptions of some very useful items. In Chapter 3 he mentions using “site:” but not the Google Advanced Search page that has it as one of the options. I blogged about that web page on July 6, 2010 in a post titled Web search tactic: Use the Google Advanced (Helpful) Search screen. Chapter 3 also talks about using specialized terms. One good way to find them is in your public library databases such as EBSCOHost. I discussed those on February 24, 2015 in a lengthy blog post titled How to do a better job of speech research than the average Toastmaster (by using your friendly local public and state university libraries). Once you have found a specialized term, you can look for other articles via the subject index.

 

He mentions using “cached:” to find versions of web pages up to six months old, and then the Internet Archive (but not the specific page called the Wayback Machine).

 

When he discusses whether you can die from apoplexy in Chapter 11, he never mentions the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed abstracts database or the PubMed Central (PMC) database with full text of millions of medical articles. For example, apoplexy is discussed in a 2020 article by Axel Karenberg in Neurological Research and Practice titled Historic review: select chapters of a history of stroke. On February 16, 2021 I blogged about PMC in a post titled Giving an effective medical lecture.

 

In Chapter 18 he mentions Worldcat only in connection with Google Books. Back on February 28, 2012 I blogged about 40.5 years of WorldCat – a great tool for digging up books, magazine articles, etc.

 

Dan points out that not everything can be found online for free via Google. Google Scholar won’t lead you to all the magazine articles on a topic. In a post on February 4, 2019 titled Reliable places to find information for your speeches I mentioned Web of Science as one of the preferred online places to look when using one of the public terminals at the Boise State University Library.

 

In my previous post on April 24, 2021 titled What percent of internet browser users know how to find text within a web page I linked to an hour-long YouTube video at MIT Press about Dan’s book, which you might prefer to watch, if you don’t have time to read it.  

 

An image of a 1912 motorist’s tool roll came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

What percent of internet browser users know how to find text within a web page?

Earlier this week I watched an hour-long YouTube video from The MIT Press posted on July 8, 2020 and  titled Author Talk: The Joy of Search by Daniel M. Russell. He discusses his book, The Joy of Search. At about 42 minutes he talks about something not mentioned in the book - using the Find (Control F) command of a web browser to locate text in a web page. Then at 44 minutes he relates three statistics which surprised me.    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As shown above, less than half (48.9%) of teachers using the internet knew how to do this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Even worse, less than a tenth (9.5%) of U.S. English internet users knew how to do this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And, most amazingly, just 7% of 50,000 Firefox browser users knew how to do this. The other 93% NEVER had used this command. I suspect this occurs because learning to use a browser is considered too simple to require careful instruction, so we often just get the Blind Leading the Blind.

 

Dan initially discussed this topic in a post at his SearchReSearch blog on February 22, 2010 which is titled Why Control-F is the single most important thing you can teach someone about search. It also is discussed in a pair of articles by Alexis C. Madrigal in The Atlantic: one on August 18, 2011 titled Crazy: 90 Percent of people don’t know how to use CTRL+F and another on August 22, 2011 titled Why using Control+F may be the most important computing skill. Daniel M. Russell and Mario Callegaro had yet another article at the  Scientific American Observations Blog on March 26, 2019 titled How to be a better web searcher: Secrets from Google scientists in which they said to learn some tricks:

 

“One is the find-text-on-page skill (that is, Command-F on Mac, Control-F on PC), which is unfamiliar to around 90 percent of the English-speaking, Internet-using population in the US. In our surveys of thousands of web users, the large majority have to do a slow (and errorful) visual scan for a string of text on a web site. Knowing how to use text-finding commands speeds up your overall search time by about 12 percent (and is a skill that transfers to almost every other computer application).”

 

The image was modified from Sebastian Vrancx’s pre-1650 painting of The Blind Leading the Blind at Wlikmedia Commons.  

 

 

How do ‘seconds’ get sold?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the Fairview Ave. Grocery Outlet store in Boise I saw pound bags of Belly Flops - irregular jelly beans marketed by Jelly Belly (as shown above). That got me thinking about other examples of how less-than-perfect products get sold by clever manufacturers. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A couple decades ago, when I lived in metro Chicago, Lands’ End had outlet stores, and they sold clothing and other monogrammed products which had been returned by customers. As shown above, I got a large, leather-trimmed, soft-sided suitcase with three compartments for way less than retail. It was used on car trips until being replaced by another suitcase with wheels.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I used a #11 scalpel (shown above) and tweezers to cut and remove the monogram. (Those tools both came from the local American Science & Surplus store).

    

I also found that Pepperidge Farm had retail stores which sold cosmetically imperfect products (and bulk packages). About once a month I’d stop by and get myself a frozen layer cake as a treat.

 

Four decades ago, when I lived in Ann Arbor, I wanted a place to store my woodworking tools. It turned out that the Kennedy Manufacturing Company had a factory store in Van Wert, Ohio that sold their seconds for about 30% below retail. I drove down there on a Saturday and filled my car up with an 8-drawer Machinist’s Chest, a Two-Drawer Base Cabinet, a Chest Riser, and a 7-Drawer Industrial Cabinet with wheels. What had made that 7-Drawer Industrial Cabinet a second? It just had a single, thumbnail-sized paint defect on the back!

  

Tater Tots are the best story of a ‘second.’ An article by Kelsey McKinney at EATER on August 28, 2017 is titled The Tater Tot is American ingenuity at its finest. Over six decades ago Ore-Ida took the left-over scraps from cutting potatoes for French Fries, and produced little seasoned cylinders. 

 

Another article in the Boise Weekly 2016 Bar & Restaurant Guide provides more details.

Initially they priced them based on their cost to make. But that was so low customers were suspicious. Market research led them to raise the price, and increase their profits.