chalkdust It is a pity that these marvels have now become largely forgoen. They remain very useful tools— not only for the automobile enthusiast like me, who wishes to convert between miles and kilometres or quickly calculate fuel consumption data—but also for every student who seeks an intuitive understanding of logarithms. So if you ever find a slide rule at a flea market, buy it! You will see that it is a thing of beauty and a joy to use. Bernd Ulmann Bernd is professor of business informatics at the FOM University of Applied Sciences for Economics and Management in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany. His primary interest is analogue computing in the 21st century. If you would like to know more about analogue computing, you can visit his website. analogmuseum.org
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My least favourite number
Googolplex
Belgin Seymenoğlu
Ever heard of googol (10100 )? You have? What about googolplex (10googol )? No? Well, while a googol is a one followed by a hundred zeroes, a googolplex is a one followed by googol zeroes. So it can be wrien as 100 1010 , which is not nice at all. Most calculators already can’t handle googol, which is bad enough, but googolplex takes it even further. One morning I asked my computer to print googolplex; it never got back to me. (log10 log10 10)/10
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