From: Jeremiah A Blatz <jer+@andrew.cmu.edu>
Date: Fri, 1 Nov 1996 12:53:25 -0800 (PST)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Sliderules, Logs, and Prodigies
In-Reply-To: <v03007802ae9fed297e06@[207.167.93.63]>
Message-ID: <0mSaAA200YUd1PIBY0@andrew.cmu.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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"Timothy C. May" <tcmay@got.net> writes:
> At 9:16 AM -0800 10/31/96, Hal Finney wrote:
<snip>
> Sliderules were just becoming common when I was in high school....
> 
> Seriously, only a very few of us had and used sliderules...mine was a big
> synthetic K & E (Keuffel and Esser, as I recall). The raging "DOS vs. Mac"
> or "RISC vs. CISC" debate of that age was "aluminum" (the yellow Dietzgens)
> vs. the old standby, "bamboo." Plus some oddball circular sliderules.
> 
> Those of us who used sliderules were sometimes characterized as
> "nerds"...perhaps this is why I today have such a strong reation to so many
> young programmers and engineers voluntarily calling themselves "nerds" and
> "geeks." (The deconstructive, postmodern theory is presumably that they are
> "reclaiming" the term, as with dykes and niggers reclaiming those hateful
> terms. I still reject this as crap.)

What's there to reject in "Yeah, I'm happy with what I want, so fuck
you?" (Which is essentially what this reclaming stuff is). Of course,
I see nothing wrong with rejecting postmodernist intellectuals :-) but
they have stolen some good ideas.

<comments re: tables snipped>
> (Precomputation of values, aka "tabling," is of course still a modern
> topic. Some of the newer names come out of AI, compiler research, etc. For
> example, speculative execution. Not exactly a book of precomputed logs, but
> similar.)

Let's not forget memoizing, either. Kinda space ineficient, but with a
decent virtual memory system you can cache perviously-used solutions
and go real fast. Hmmm, like, say you were for some reason trying to
factor a multitude of large composites. Precomputing everything would
probably be rather inefficient, but once you've factords something,
why throw it away? (I knew there would be some crypto relevance in
here :-)

Jer

"standing on top of the world/ never knew how you never could/ never knew
 why you never could live/ innocent life that everyone did" -Wormhole

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