Saturday, January 23, 2010

A Girl's Best Friend

In my year at MIT (1957-58) the coeds, as part of the spring follies, did their version of Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend, but in those long-ago days it was "slide rules are a girl's best friend."  My slide rule (given to me by my uncle) and Burrington's was all we were allowed to use in exams. (The picture is from Wikipedia) Now we use our lap tops and desk tops, which seem to have replaced the hand-held calculators that came so soon afterward.  Bob Whalley found this gem on YouTube, but here it is "the prayerbook is a girl's best friend."  I wonder how many other parodies of this song are out there.  Enjoy.

7 comments:

whiteycat said...

Ah, yes ... my wonderful K&E slide rule! I still have it in its leather case. It got me through my undergrad and grad courses in the late 50s and into the 60s. Just seeing the picture brought back a lot of memories!

motheramelia said...

My K&E got rusted parts sometime in Vienna and stopped working. I reluctantly let it go.

Wade said...

I still keep mine on my desk! (Sliderule) When new young Engineers see it they get confused. Show 'em a book of 7 place logarithms and they overload!

motheramelia said...

Wade, I had no idea you were an engineer. BTW, St. Andrew's raised around $10,000 for ERD last week. and the fundraiser dinner is now being sponsored by many churches in Lincoln county. They're expecting 250 people.

Wade said...

That's fantastic, St. Luke's did $4000 last Sunday but today is the big interfaith service at 4:00 with Bishops Steve and Chilton plus Muslim and Jewish leaders.

Brian R said...

In my final year of school, I did general maths which was the lowest level and nearly failed that. Slide rules were not in our curriculum. Thank God for calculators for mathematical incompetents like me.

Wade said...

We DID have hand-cranked calculators in my day. When you divided you had to count the number of times you turned the crank! (I still have one in the lab someplace!)It worked out well because back then many of our field offices had no electricity, they had gas lights. I can't imagine these youngsters today building anything without electricity, broadband and a blackberry rather than a Burringtons!