From Slide Rules to Quantization

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In an effort to fight off atrophy from using AI too much, I’ve started playing with slide rules - basically, calculators before calculators (after abacuses). They are quite hard to buy in this day and age, but there are some paper ones you can print out. And if you are good at PCBs maybe you can help me try to make one?

The way slide rules work is: if you mark a ruler with logarithmic spacing, multiplication becomes addition. This is a pretty cool maths trick in that you are adding exponents, and then you can pow() them back to reality. I think of it as “working in Log10 space” which would probably make an actual mathemagician cringe. But basically, you slide one scale along another, read off the answer, and keep track of the decimal point in your head. It’s absolutely amazing engineers built bridges and got to the moon with this.

Code on Times New Rohan

From Slide Rules to Quantization