Quote of the Day...

Ilan Samson, talking about why he's in San Diego:

We are here to stay, because this is the place where people do things. They're enthusiastic, as opposed to Europe where they cleverly talk about things.

Taken from this article in Voice of San Diego. Samson is an Israeli who has lived in Europe for years, and recently moved here to pursue the development of a new kind of calculator.

What initially piqued my interest in this interview was the calculator (called “Qama”). What makes it different than an ordinary calculator is that it won't provide the answer until you give it a reasonable estimate of what the answer should be. This is exactly the aspect of using a slide rule for calculating that pushed me into becoming proficient with arithmetic and algebra (especially), along with some other specific areas of mathematics. With a slide rule, you get the digits of the answer, but not the magnitude. For example, you might get the result ‘535’ – but you don't know whether that's 5.35, 53500, or 0.000535. To get the complete answer, you must estimate the correct answer (within an order of magnitude), and then use the slide rule to give you the digits. By using the magnitude from your estimate and the digits from the slide rule, you get the right answer – and only by doing that.

Which sounds exactly like what Qama is doing. I think Samson is onto something here...