On 8/30/2012 1:57 PM, Robert Munafo wrote:

On 8/30/12, Mike Speciner<ms@alum.mit.edu> wrote:

...

[...] It's amazing how clever nomographers could be, but of course now that just about everyone carries around an electronic computation device, it is a lost art. It did, however, inspire me some years later to write a pile of PostScript to (amongst other things) plot nomograms: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/17718830/plot.ps I suppose writing PostScript has also become a lost art. I created a nomogram for x^(x^(y-1))=z, which is the lower hyper4 operator (http://mrob.com/pub/math/hyper4.html#lower4); and here is a sliderule that calculates x^y=z and its inverses in the range e^0.001 <= z<= e^100 ~ 10^43:

http://mrob.com/pub/math/sliderules.html#model3

Co-workers noted the immense amount of computer power that has gone into creating this low-precision analogue device.

I certainly still remember PostScript programming, and there is much more to nomography (than I ever learned).

Neat! I have a small collection of slide rules, some of which I used professionally. Among them is a Dietzgen circular rule, the kind with two cursor arms an a single fixed disk. It has an LL scale that makes four turns, from 1.0015 to 946000. But it's not a nice smooth spiral like yours; the scale makes 'steps' to larger radii at 1.0145, 1.15, and 4.0. Do have a hi-res pic of your slide rule? - I might print it out and add it to my collection. Brent Meeker