Many of my friends practice ancient crafts such as combing, dye-ing, and spinning wool, weaving and knitting homespun fibers produced by animals they keep for their cast-off fluff. Others less familiar to me chip flint into points and blades, etch bone, or carve stones, just as people did in prehistoric times. I am fascinated, but at the same time perplexed as to why people want to do these Stone Age crafts, when all the items that were originally produced this way are available to us cheaply, in abundance, with updated, efficient modern designs, and even with good quality.

I am even more bemused by the fact that these same wool spinners, flintknappers, carvers, and weavers are constantly e-mailing each other over the Internet and surfing to websites about their crafts, as well as taking full advantage of all the other modern conveniences which are everywhere around them. They use everything from laptops to DVD players to dishwashers, not to mention driving real automobiles, rather than oxcarts.

When I ask them why they do these crafts, the response is that they enjoy them and love to work with their hands in a mechanized society where handcraft is no longer economically or industrially important. They love the texture and feel of real wool and linen and wood and leather and stone, rather than plastic, polyester, or aluminum. They can make beautiful things and be creative, too. It's kind of romantic. And if civilization ever goes down the tubes, these folks will have the advantage, because they know how to get along without the Machine and Global Exploitation.

Here in my 1958 book it's not the stone age, but it is the 1950s, which are almost as ancient. I continue to interpolate between the entries in the common-logarithm tables to find the logarithms of numbers with four or more significant digits. I am sometimes misled by the eye-straining columns vertical and horizontal, especially since the first numbers of the 4-digit mantissas are not cited except in the very first column to the left, and you have to add them in. They've marked where the first number changes with asterisks, but they never bothered to tell me that, until I wondered what those asterisks were for. There are also tables of "proportional parts" which are there to help you add in just the extra number you need on your mantissa. (How about using the calculator?)

Once I've figured out enough of these, the next chapters get into what logarithms were originally devised for, that is using them in computation. You can add or subtract the logs of the numbers, then look up the anti-log of the answer to get your computation. Presumably this uses less time than sitting there and multiplying or dividing it out by long, long division. (Y'know, I could use my calculator for this, and it would take less than a second.)

There are plenty of problem sets, of course, to make sure that I get familiar with the process and learn my way through the tables. There are no negative numbers in the tables, which is why negative logarithms in this era are expressed by the difference of two positive numbers. (My calculator simply shows the negative number, without any of that subtractive fooling around.)

In the historical spirit of learning logarithms in virtual 1958, I use the table in the back of the book to do these problems. It is somewhat analogous to my friends who spin wool on prehistoric-design drop spindles or who carve wood and bone into little animal figures. Ancient crafts are worth doing. I am also going on the notion that if it's tedious, hard, painstaking work, it's good for you. It will make me a better mathematician if I do lots of logarithm problems this way. (But my calculator's right there on the desk. Should I pretend the battery is dead?)

How many logarithm problems will I do in the next week? With apologies to the mathematical deities of thoroughness, I probably will not do every last one in the book. (Can't use my calculator? How much time do I have? Hide the calculator.) I'll pick the ones that have odd numbers. Or the ones that look juicy, or have lots of zeros. Or the ones which look "colorful" according to my math synesthesia. Unlike my fiber-fondling friends, I can't say that this will either be pleasant to the touch, or warm, or produce a useful item like a sweater, or even be creative. It's not romantic or heroic. It is number-crunching, pure and simple. And all right, I'll use the calculator, but just for checking my answers.

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