There's a bulletin board at my local bagel shop, on it is an advertisement for ABACUS LESSONS and every single phone number slip has been taken.

@davidsuculum @j2kun
I learned to use a cheap plastic abacus when I was young; it was fun.

I've forgotten everything but the rough idea by now.

@internic @davidsuculum @j2kun
Those of us who are old mastered slide rules before calculators became available.

It helps to give a tactile feel for common operations, and to solidly ground the idea of approximation.

But yeah, today fun would seem to be by far the primary point.

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@dougmerritt @davidsuculum @j2kun I had never seen one in real life until Thinkgeek made some years ago and I got one. I knew it was somehow based on logarithms but it took me a little while to puzzle out how to use it. I showed it to some younger engineers I work with, and they were utterly baffled.

I assume there's a bit of an art to organizing larger calculations so that you lose the least precision.

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