The calculator is dead; long live the calculator.

 

James Vincent, Oct 5, 2023, LRB: 

"...In 1970, when the men aboard Apollo 13, barrelling through space at thousands of miles per hour, gave their laconic report to ground control, ‘Houston, we’ve had a problem,’ Nasa summoned engineers with analogue slide rules, not digital computers, to guide the crew safely back to Earth. And the astronauts themselves were equipped with the same tool, a five-inch metal slide rule, so consistent in its design over the centuries that a mathematician from the 1600s would have been able to use it without much trouble...."

 

“You are not always going to have a calculator in your pocket!”

- lying 90s teachers

courtesy; on X, World of Engineering @engineers_feed

·

When I entered engineering in 1977, calculators had burst on the scene. They were CASIO make LED calculators powered by pen cells, made in Taiwan/ ASEAN country, and smuggled...But since they were not allowed in any written examination, most of us had also bought slide rule at a princely price of Rs. 100+. Needless to say I never learned to use slide-rule in my life...I decided to sacrifice some marks by deciding to use log tables, if calculator was not permitted. 

 

Soon rules started changing and as is the case in India slowly and weirdly...calculators were allowed but of certain specifications, that is - not very complex models were permitted. Not all examinations allowed use of them etc. That was 1978-79.

 

It interesting to see how socialist "garibi-hatao" India was struggling, refusing to use calculators full scale, calculators were NOT manufactured in India, larger economy was crawling, inflation was raging with no good jobs in the system....

 

Capitalist India would be making millions of calculators for the world, creating thousands of jobs. Alas we were proud to be poor and afraid of CIA!

 

In 1980-81, computer programming was introduced as a non-credit subject and we were taught Fortran language without a single programmable calculator on the campus, let alone a computer, on table top, by a teacher who always thought he was the smartest teacher on the block and spoke English without fully opening his mouth to give an impression that he came from England.

These thoughts came to my mind when I saw publication of "Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator" by Keith Houston in 2023.

 

Belinda Lanks writes in WSJ on August 21 2023: 

"...In a book that’s long on technical details and short on compelling anecdotes, Mr. Houston’s profile of Herzstark is a notable highlight. As a salesman for his family’s factory manufacturing unwieldy calculators, Herzstark heard his customers’ calls for a truly portable machine. Not long after Herzstark hatched the idea for one, however, German troops annexed Austria. As the son of a Jewish father and Christian mother, Herzstark was sent to Buchenwald. There he supervised a factory of inmates fabricating rocket parts and repairing looted calculating machines. As Herzstark later recounted, his manager urged him to pursue his Curta side project, promising: “If it is really worth something, then we will give it to the Fuhrer as a present after we win the war. Then, surely, you will be made an Aryan.” When Buchenwald was liberated in April 1945, Herzstark took his blueprints with him and eventually produced the Curta. It was a palm-size engineering marvel but a commercial failure...

 

...The pocket calculator’s heyday would be brief compared with that of the slide rule it replaced. Even scientific calculators grew cheaper and profit margins waned. HP, despite Mr. Wozniak’s pleas to build a personal computer, refused to take the risk, only to see calculators absorbed into PCs, palmtops and, finally, smartphones. The pocket calculator sublimed, becoming “everywhere and nowhere at once,” Mr. Houston writes. “The calculator is dead; long live the calculator.” " 

 

 

मिरजेला असताना (१९६१-१९८१) माझ्या खिशात... Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

Hua Hsu, “What’s in Your Pockets? : For the past five hundred years, their evolution has reflected attitudes about privacy and decorum, gender and power, and what it means to be cool.”, The New Yorker, Sept 18 2023: "...Maybe what you’re hiding is your own anxiety. “Pockets give you something to do with your hands,” Carlson writes, and “that can be a boon when you find yourself at some gathering and realize that your hands are likely to betray your nervousness.” Symbolically, many of us aspire after pockets that are fat, not flat. Yet a bulging pocket quickly tips toward the unsightly—the outline of an iPhone in a pair of skinny jeans—or even the concupiscent. “Is that a gun in your pocket,” Mae West asked in “Sextette,” “or are you just happy to see me?”..."

 POCKETS: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close, by Hannah Carlson हे पुस्तक सप्टेंबर २०२३ मध्ये प्रसिद्ध झाले. 

मिरजेला असताना (१९६१-१९८१) माझ्या खिशात केंव्हा ना केंव्हा सापडल्या असत्या त्या गोष्टी:

 

सुटे पैसे, सायकलची किल्ली, शेंगदाणे, गूळ, बिस्किटे, चॉकलेट, रुमाल, आईने डब्यात दिलेले घावन, भडंग, पातळ पोह्याचा चिवडा, कणकेच्या/ गुळपीठ वड्या, भुईमुगाच्या शेंगा, फुटाणे , क्रिकेटचा बॉल, योयो , गारी गोट्या, विट्टी , फाउंटन पेन, बॉल पेन, पोस्टाची तिकिटे, कागद, खडू, टिकटिक (दोन बोटात धरून वाजवायचे पत्र्याचे खेळणे), फुटाणे, चुरमुरे, सिनेमाचे/ सर्कस चे तिकीट, बसचे तिकीट, पावत्या, नोटा, calculator... किंवा भोक, ज्यातून अनेक गोष्टी आणि वेळ निघून गेला...

 

(मिरजेचे वसंत व्याख्यान मालेचे आधारस्तंभ आणि आमचे एक-दोन वर्षांचे शाळेतील शिक्षक वसंतराव आगाशे हे एम ए च्या परीक्षेच्या आधी स्वच्छतागृहात गेले असताना , खाली बसताना, त्यांच्या खिशातील कागदाला एकत्र ठेवणारी टाचणी मांडीत घुसून त्यांचे ऑपरेशन करायला लागले, ते आयुष्यात कधीही एम ए झाले नाहीत!)

 

 

artist : Kenneth Mahood

Artist: Sharon Levy, 2020

भर्तृहरी यांचे नीतीशतक आणि ओपेनहायमर यांची ट्रिनिटी स्फोटा आधीची मनोवस्था...Did Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin Confuse Bhartṛhari's Śatakatraya with Gita?

आपण ऐकत आलो आहोत आणि आता गाजलेल्या सिनेमात (सेक्सच्या नंतर असो वा चाचणी स्फोट पाहिल्यावर असो) पहिले सुद्धा असेल की ओपेनहायमर यांच्यावर गीतेचा प्रभाव किती होता ते, पण त्यांच्यावर अनेक संस्कृत पुस्तकांचा प्रभाव होता. 

Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin त्यांच्या 'American Prometheus: The Triumph & Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer', २००५ पुस्तकात म्हणतात;

"... With his facility for languages, it wasn’t long before Robert was reading the Bhagavad-Gita. “It is very easy and quite marvelous,” he wrote Frank. He told friends that this ancient Hindu text—“The Lord’s Song”—was “the most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue.” Ryder gave him a pink-covered copy of the book which found its way onto the bookshelf closest to his desk. Oppie took to passing out copies of the Gita as gifts to his friends...

One of his favorite Sanskrit texts was the Meghaduta, a poem that discusses the geography of love from the laps of naked women to the soaring mountains of the Himalayas. “The Meghaduta I read with Ryder,” he wrote Frank, “with delight, some ease, and great enchantment. . . .”

Bird & Sherwin पुस्तकात पुढे म्हणतात;

"... That evening, in an effort to relieve the tension, Oppie recited for Bush a stanza from the Gita that he had translated from the Sanskrit:

 In battle, in forest, at the precipice in the mountains

On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows,

In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame,

The good deeds a man has done before defend him..."

हे गीतेतील नसून  भर्तृहरी यांच्या नीतीशतकातले आहे!

 विकिपीडिया म्हणते:
"... Two days before the Trinity test, Oppenheimer expressed his hopes and fears in a quotation from Bhartṛhari's Śatakatraya:

    In battle, in the forest, at the precipice in the mountains,

    On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows,

    In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame,

    The good deeds a man has done before defend him."

वने रणे शत्रुजलाग्निमध्ये । महार्णवे पर्वतमस्तके वा।।

 

सुप्तं प्रमत्तं विषमस्थितं वा । रक्षन्ति पुण्यानि पुराकृतानि।।९७।। 

 

( भर्तृहरी यांचे सार्थ नीतीशतक, पृष्ठ ४७)

कलाकार: वसंत सहस्रबुद्धे , वरदा प्रकाशन, १९९४-२०१०

 

It is very clear from following passage that Oppenheimer never confused Bhagavad Gita with Bhartrihari’s Three hundred poems.

In 1960s, "...Oppenheimer received a letter dated 1 February from The Christian Century, a non-denominational magazine, asking him to ‘jot down – almost on impulse’ a list of up to ten books ‘that most shaped your attitudes in your vocation and philosophy of life’. The list he sent them was as follows:

1. Les Fleurs du mal

2. Bhagavad Gita

3. Riemann’s Gesammelte mathematische Werke

4. Theaetetus

5. L’Éducation sentimentale

6. Divina Commedia

7. Bhartrihari’s Three hundred poems

8. ‘The Waste Land’

9. Faraday’s notebooks

10. Hamlet

As an exercise in polymathic showing off, the list is peerless. In just ten titles Oppenheimer has managed to include works of drama, fiction, poetry, mathematics, physics and Hinduism, written in a total of no fewer than six languages: Sanskrit, Greek, Italian, French, German and English..."

(Ray Monk, 'Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer', 2012)