Following the Rules -- the Web Site

Comments on its features and content

As many readers are likely aware of by now, this Substack publication grew out of my original web site of the same name — Following the Rules. In this post I want to describe what’s on that site and some of my own thoughts and tips on how to most effectively use it. It’s a bit of a diversion from our other topics, but it’s nice for me to download my thoughts and get your feedback on the subject.

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A Little History

The web site followingtherules.info was a natural step in my progress toward becoming a slide rule collector. When I started out I was a slide rule owner. I had my three plastic slide rules from high school (early 1970s), and then 35 years or so later I bought a K&E 4081-3 in an antique store. Soon I found myself in the gatherer stage, where I would just buy something interesting I saw in an antique store and then try to learn about it. It took awhile before I had enough slide rules gathered (maybe 10-15) to require making a list of what I had so that I could compare a new rule I had found in a store with those that I had already found.

But like many gatherers before me, I soon became a collector. This is the stage where you don’t simply pick up things because you found them — you pick up things because you need them. You need a K&E 4092-5 because you found a K&E 4092-3. So, you go about searching for it. This is when you find yourself needing a spreadsheet. And before long, that spreadsheet needs to be available to you while shopping. So, you need something viewable from your phone, like a web storage app or, perhaps, … a web site. My first try was to add a subpage to a Google Site that I have, where I put a pdf of my spreadsheet and a few pictures.

When the COVID pandemic hit, and as I was about to retire, I had acquired many dozens of slide rules. This was when I started to think about a full-blown web site.

I had learned to program using the R language (among others), though I would never claim to be a programmer. For me programming has just been a skill used for doing math and producing answers to physics and engineering questions. But in learning R I also learned to create Rmarkdown documents, and used this knowledge to teach graduate students to program, create graphics, write articles, and so on. And the R environment has a “bookdown” package that could be used to create online books. I used it to make pages for my students for homework, supplemental text, coding examples, and so on. So with this knowledge of the “markdown” environment I was able to read-in the contents of my spreadsheet (saved to .csv format) to form a “data frame” in R and then easily create lists, tables, plots, and analyses of my collection. This led to the generation of pages of information which could be produced in the form of an online book. And so that’s how the site got formed.

Which brings us to my current stage — that of chronicler. Students and others began to ask me about the rules and how to use them; and about logarithms; and about collecting. So during COVID and into retirement I wrote sections for the web site about logarithms, about how to use the slide rules, and finally began writing individual stories, or vignettes, about all of the above — a natural step for one who attempted to teach others about science and math over the past half-century.

This latest stage of chronicler has brought about the Substack page you are currently reading. Having the “.info” web site is great; there is a lot I can do with that which is hard to do any other way. But Substack provides other features — it provides a chance for feedback, as readers can leave comments, ask questions, and so on. There is a chance for “chats” and for “videos”, options that we might be able to get more into at some point. And as readers can subscribe to the publication, they will get notified of new posts. I think these are the features the web page was lacking that brought me to this new environment.

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Web Site Overiew

As I mentioned, the “FtR” web site is actually an online book. It has a main “landing page” which is full of links and pictures. But it also has a side bar where the names of Chapters can be viewed and clicked. If one wants, the site actually can be read as a book by clicking on the right/left arrows (“>“, “<”) found in the right/left margins, or by using the right/left arrows on your keyboard.

https://followingtherules.info

Organization

The preamble of the book consists of a few pages that describe the slide rule in a general way, give a few examples, and discuss a few features of the site to help the viewing experience. These pages are not labeled as “chapters”, and are meant to simply introduce the subject and the site.

Review

In this part we review the concepts that lead up to an understanding of how a slide rule works and how to use it. So in Chapter 1 of the book we talk about logarithms, their properties, log tables, and examples of how to perform calculations using logarithms. I also felt the site needed to show how the logarithm of a number could be computed. Not, say, how Napier computed them, but how they could be computed today, without just invoking a function on a computer or calculator. Thus Chapter 2 provides a discussion primarily of the natural logarithm, which lends itself to analysis using calculus, and from that how to get a common logarithm. While many readers may not be well versed (if versed at all) in calculus, it’s the final equations that I felt were most important. I thought it might someday be useful to a reader to be able to quickly find a description of how to calculate the logarithm in any base of any number they wish. The more formal derivations leading up to these results are provided to make the discussion more complete.

And finally, in Chapter 3, the various standard logarithmic scales found on the most common slide rules are described, as well as basic procedures for using them in performing calculations. I plan to add into this chapter our recent Substack post on how to construct such scales using a computer or a table of logarithms.

All of the chapters in this review part actually read like a book, while our next part is more geared toward pictures and tables.

The Collection

Here is where we finally get into the slide rule collection itself. The major question I struggled with at first was, how should I show the collection? Text? Pictures? Summary Table(s)? Sorted by Maker? by Year? by Type? Size? Scales?

How About ALL OF THE ABOVE?

I soon found that with R, making summary tables was easy, sorting a table by maker was easy, even showing images in a table was easy. The placement of a (hidden) statement in the document along the lines of

kable( Aristo[ order(Year, Model) ], 
           format = c("Model","Year","Serial","Image")

easily creates a table of of all the Aristo slide rules in the collection, ordered by year and then model number, for instance. If I acquire and add an Aristo slide rule to the database in the future, the table on the web site just gets updated automatically.

In recent months I have added the feature of being able to change the sorting of most of the tables, in case someone wants to sort by model number, for instance, rather than by year.

One of the nicest ways I’ve found to look at the entire collection is by year, where one can really see the development of style and scale content over the decades. So this is the purpose of Chapter 4. But collectors need a Chapter 5 that presents the entire collection organized by major slide rule maker or groups of related makers. My criterion here is that a new section in Chapter 5 would be created once I had three or more samples from a maker or a group of related makers. Otherwise the item is found in the “Others” category. Then Chapter 6 contains a set of specially sorted tables of slide rules, or Special Groupings, like the 25 oldest rules, a list of all of the “pocket” slide rules, and so on. Now that most tables are sortable, some of these tables, like oldest and youngest, have become rather redundant. Sections like Specialty Slide Rules and Vector Hyperbolic Rules are perhaps the most valuable in this chapter.

Along with all the slide rules I have also collected a number of historical books, manuals, and slide charts that also have become part of the collection, and so they are presented in Chapter 7. I admit this is more for my own personal use, as I don’t have many images of the books or their content to show on the web.

Finally, in Chapter 8, a series of blog-like vignettes can be found. At the moment there are over 40 stories in this chapter, many of which have had updated versions posted on Substack. The vignettes are not displayed in the order in which they were written, but rather in an order that I hope can be read straight through. But at the top of the page (and on the main landing page) there is a list of the most recent stories and updates.

Appendices

The site ends with a set of Appendices with additional information such as a brief time-line of slide rule history, a listing of common slide rule scales, and lists of the scale sets found on all of the rules in the collection. Once I found tools that would allow me to easily have sortable tables, I created a new appendix with a searchable table of the entire collection. Sometimes you just want to make a special sort when trying to find connections, compare differences, and so on.

I also found that sometimes I just wanted a single sheet of information for a particular rule. So, I put together a small snippet of code to produce a data sheet for each of the slide rules. These have the images plus additional information, including references, for each individual slide rule. Note that if you go to the beginning of the Collection Data Sheets chapter there is a large pane with a full scrollable table that contains all of the slide rules. Since the text of that scrollable table is “on the page”, then the browser’s search function can find any text within that table — nice for doing a quick search for a particular rule or maker.

About

Besides having information about the site and its author, at the end of this portion there is a relatively extensive set of references. The top of the list provides some important introductory materials. The idea here was to have links to articles, sites, or other information that I discovered while learning about the rules I collected. I am thinking of moving this upward to a more prominent position on the site, as it has become fairly substantive. I also found over time quite a number of very interesting historical books on the slide rule online, for instance at Google Books. These are listed in a sortable table in this references section from which pdfs of the online books can be directly downloaded.

Other Features and Comments

• Things For Sale — Following the Rules is not a business, but I do have a few “extra” slide rules — mostly Picketts — that I have acquired and that need good homes. If anyone would like to make a donation to help keep the web site alive, … (pricing is certainly negotiable!)

• The R bookdown package comes with a site search function, which can be enabled at any time while perusing the site by pressing the “f” key. (Press the escape key to exit this function.) It is fairly powerful and quickly can find all pages on the site with the entered text.

• Also, when on the site, pressing the “s” key will hide the sidebar, giving more room to the main content on the screen. Pressing “s” again will bring it back.

• When I first started taking photos of my slide rules I often only shot one side and not both. This obviously changed at some point and so I plan to go back and update the older images. This is work (haphazardly) in progress…

• I mentioned inconsistencies in the labeling of scales. I am working on a new system to try to make this better. This would be useful since we now are able to create tables and sort/search them. It would be very convenient to find all rules with a certain scale, or with certain combinations of scales, and so on. But while certain standards did emerge, there are many slide rules with non-standard labels or with no labels at all. It would help if every 3-decade log scale was labeled K in the database, for example. I struggle with whether to list scales “as labeled” on the slide rules, or to give them all consistent labels. Comments, anyone? Again, work in progress…

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Upkeep and the Future

A web site like the .info site takes a fair bit of effort to maintain, and I am constantly looking it over in search of typos, inconsistencies, photo improvements, ideas for new material, and so on. Sometimes I have felt the need to re-order the material, but it has actually been fairly constant for a while now. I am always looking for feedback and suggestions, so please contact me with your ideas, criticisms, and suggestions for making it more useful!

And the interaction of the web site with Substack is interesting. I like many of the features of Substack, but of course there is less control over things. For instance, when writing in Rmarkdown, I can have in-line equations, code-generated graphics and tables, and so on, which have to be re-done and coerced into working in the Substack editor's environment. But truthfully it has been less of a hassle than I thought it might be.

A goal is to add any relevant Substack-only stories onto the web site, and to update any cross-listed stories that appear on both sites. Older stories from the web site that have been re-told on Substack have been tweaked and updated, and feedback from the readers through their comments and correspondence need to be incorporated back into the web site information. The ultimate goal is to have one location with a consistent story about the collection and the subject matter.

So, what would you as a visitor to FollowingTheRules.info like to see at the web site? What questions or comments do you have about its organization and content? Please share your impressions and requests in the Comments section below. And thanks for reading, and for your support!

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