In response to this post by Robert Scoble, there are at least two wikis on obsolete skills. One is obsoleteskills.com run by Brad Kellett, and the other is this wiki on wikispot.org. Talk about quick response, Scoble’s post went up on February 16, 2008, which is a little over a month ago!
One obsolete skill that I mentioned the other day in my Speech Processing course is using log tables to speed up multiplication by hand. Now, the wiki entry says this skill went obsolete in the 1960s, but I learned it in elementary school in the late 1970s or early 1980s, so the entry must be wrong 😉 In fact, I even learned how to use the slide rule, another obsolete skill, which in turn uses logarithmic operations. Here’s a nice slide rule from Wikipedia:
Anyway, the reason this skill came up was our discussion of the complex cepstrum and its use of the log operator to transform the multiplication of transfer functions into the addition of these transfer functions.
Andrew Kun
1 comment
oszkar
March 24, 2008 at 10:51 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
My Dad used a slide rule when he attended college back in the seventies. He even taught me how to use it once as an ‘ancient’ craft. Nice to see the device again on this post.