sznio comments on The lengths we have to go to

[–] sznio@lemmy.world 47 points 2 years ago (6 children)

I've heard of people printing out charts, then cutting out the part they wanted to calculate an integral of, then weighing the paper.

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[–] siipale@sopuli.xyz 26 points 2 years ago (1 child)

I've heard of it too. You would need an analytical balance to get accurate measurements weighing a piece of paper. Just cut out the part you want to take an integral of, then cut out a piece of paper with known size (or cut several pieces with different sizes to get more accurate results) and weigh each of them. I guess this used to be cheaper and faster than using computers when computers were big and expensive.

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[–] jadero@programming.dev 6 points 2 years ago

Or maybe just a powder balance. When I was a kid in the 1960s, Dad did a lot of reloading his own ammunition. We kids had fun doing things like weighing our names (weigh a small piece of paper to get the tare, weigh again to get the loaded weight, subtract) and other miniscule things. As I recall, it was accurate to less than a grain (0.065 gram).

One of the things we did was weigh different shapes of paper to calculate area. Start with a sample of a unit area. Cut out a funky shape and weigh it, then do the math.

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[–] SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 points 2 years ago

Nono that's genius

..ignoring the part that it's just a discrete approximation of an integral a la a Riemann sum.

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[–] w2qw@aussie.zone 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)