Science & Technology Pieces

•International Geophysical Year (MIT conference 2025) Without distributed computers, how did scientists in the 1957-1958 beginning of the Space Age handle the unprecedented rush of big data?

•Electronic Slide Rule Calculators (KDP Books, 2023) What devices swamped the market in the 1970s to replace the manual slide rules?

•Humanity and the Big Dipper (KDP Books, 2020) How have cultures across the Northern Hemisphere regarded those constant seven (really, eight) stars in the night sky?

•Quantum computing and rare earth minerals How do exotic minerals help to prevent decoherence of qubits and usher in the quantum computing era?

•The deaths of the slide rule The instrument did not die instantly in 1972, as is commonly thought; it met a “cascading demise”

•Notes on slide rule production and sales volumes People collect slide rules based on “trading volume” and “last price” without knowing the “market capitalization”; there is no reliable information on the quantity of each make and model. Here is my compilation of what little is known

•Science-fiction calculators What devices are mentioned in the great works of Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein, and what real or “goofball” mathematical operations are performed with them?

•A slide rule for space travel (and an emulation of the rule) A strange 1962 device purports to allow you to calculate how much thrust your rocket requires in order to travel to Pluto (though I advise against relying on it)