Comment on The lengths we have to go to

• siipale@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  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 ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ 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 ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ 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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• Quereller@lemmy.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I was reading an old book about chromatography in laboratory and they exactly describe this method to determine the amount of substance.

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• w2qw@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  How thick is your paper?

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  • jcg@halubilo.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    How inaccurate is your scale?

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    • JonEFive@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      How precise are your scissors?

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      • WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        How funky is your chicken?

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• Liz@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  That was a common way to do it before computers were common.

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• PixxlMan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  That’s pretty clever!

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