\n———-
\nFirst: compare our professsions. Orac is a cancer surgeon: a person whose professional life is dedicated to *saving peoples lives*. There are people living today who would be dead but for the efforts of Orac. It is an honorable profession, deserving of nothing but respect.
\nIn contrast, I am a software engineering researcher; aka a professional computer geek. I spend my life designing and writing software (most of which will never be used) for other people to use to write software.
\n———–
\nBack in high school, I spent most of a year saving up money to buy a super-cool pocket calculator that was programmable in Basic. Then after I got it and used it for a while, I decided to switch. To a slide-rule.
\nBecause it’s *faster*.
\nI still own a [K&E log-log duplex decitrig slide rule.][sliderule] (And know how to use *all* of the scales.) It’s a beauty. I look forward to teaching my children to use it. (Using a slide-rule gives you a tactile sense of how a lot of things fit together in simple math.) Here’s a pic I found of the same model that I have:
\n
![\"0098-ke4181-3-01-front-left.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/scientopia.org\/img-archive\/goodmath\/img_42.jpg?resize=618%2C173\")
\nMine’s a lot more beaten up than this one; it’s thoroughly yellowed up the full length; the view slide is a bit scraped up and missing the top-left screw. But it’s still in great working condition.
\n————–
\nLet us, for a moment, consider my name. Mark Chu-Carroll. Where do you suppose “Chu-Carroll” came from?
\nObviously, it’s a combination of the last names of me and my wife before we got married. But why “Chu-Carroll” rather than “Carroll-Chu”? Is it for aesthetics? No. The real reason is *far* geekier than anything like mere aesthetics.
\nNo. The real reason why we chose “Chu-Carroll” is… Bibliographies.
\nWhen we were married, my wife had more publications than I did. And so we decided to use “Chu-Carroll” so that people doing literature searches for *her* name would be more likely to find her papers, because “Jennifer Chu-Carroll” would appear immediately after “Jennifer Chu” in any bibliographic listing likely to contain her work; whereas “Jennifer Carroll-Chu” would be separated by some distance, and would be more likely to be missed.
\nSo my last name was chosen based on how it would be alphabetized in bibliographies.
\n————————
\nLet’s take a look at genetics for a moment. My parents recently went on vacation, and brought back gifts for my children. One of the gifts was a set of pens with their names on them. Give a new pen and a stack of paper to a three year old boy, and what do you *think* that he would do?
\n*My* three-year-old son took the pen apart. He’d never seen a “click” pen before, and he wanted to know how it worked.
\n[sliderule]: http:\/\/sliderule.ozmanor.com\/rules\/sr-0098-ke4181-3-01.html<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"