Yeah, this is a big one. My wife is a high school math teacher and part of her curriculum is teaching the students how to use the physical calculator that they’ll be allowed to use on the AP exam. I can’t imagine that in any serious testing situation the kids would be allowed to use their phones.
Oh, yeah, those dodecahedrons. I’m sure the older dopers remember how we used to use them all the time, but kids these days don’t even know what they’re used for.
I happen to collect slide rules. They went out of production before I was even born and I only learned about them when one of my high school math texts mentioned them in the sidebar with one of those little Did you know… blurbs. When I first saw those logarithmic scales, it was love at first sight.
Most of my cohort don’t know what slide rules are and upon first glance think them to be some kind of ruler. I got my degree in civil engineering and they were mentioned enough that most students were aware of them, but still wouldn’t know how to use them. I’ve also noticed that younger people today who do know about them have not learned much about their place in history. In one of my physics classes, for example, another student thought they were used by the Romans.
Both are used in auto maintenance.
The first is a spout that’s shoved into the top of a can of motor oil (notice the pointy bit) when servicing your car.
The second is a weight for balancing the wheels of your car (clamps onto the rim).
I’m quite sure these are still around, my last car, a 2009 Skoda Fabia still had them, on steel rims. My current car has aluminum rims, and I don’t know (and never looked) if they have these little weights too.
Tabco got it:
I certainly remember making them, not because they were useful for anything, but strictly out of idleness.
Well, that’s true for now, and the nature of having a constant stream of new students guarantees a sustaining market, but in the near future we’re going to be dealing with implantable cellular devices/personal assistant where that prohibition will no longer work. In any case, even though I have and use a calculator in meetings (mostly so it doesn’t appear that I’m just screwing around on my phone), at my desk I almost always have a JupyterLab session running and just throw my calcs in there, or use a search engine to do unit conversions that I don’t have memorized.
Stranger
Phones, probably not. But there are already some “serious testing situations” (the Ohio graduation-requirement algebra test, for instance) where students can use Desmos (an online graphing app). It’s built right into the test (which is, itself, online). I suspect that that will soon be true of the APs, SAT, and ACT as well (though it isn’t yet, so we still need to teach the students to use those Texas Instruments pieces of trash).
I’m too young to know slide rules, but I use them anyway. I also do a lesson on them with my high school students, when we’re studying logarithms. So far, they all seem to have found them cool.
There’s a web page out there with a bunch of useful simulations of various real slide rules, that also includes a bogus history of them involving ancient Egyptians, the Knights Templar, etc. Hard to blame the kids for getting this one wrong.
(and I knew what the rim-balancing weight was, but I had no clue about the oil-can spout)
I guess oil cans have been pretty much completely replaced by plastic screw-top bottles, but aren’t rim-balancing weights used just as much as they’ve always been? Or is there some new rim-balancing technology that I haven’t heard about?
I did the same until I saved up and replaced the whole thing with a Pioneer AM/FM/CD player
‘Little man in a boat.’
Aren’t wheel weights still used? If not, how is a wheel balanced after a tire is installed?
You’re all going to have to take it up with @Thudlow_Boink, as he’s the one who posted these items. I recognize them but don’t know much about them.
I think they’re talking about the things @beowulff posted in Post #18. I didn’t recognize them either.
As one of my first GF’s mom informed me, he ain’t necessarily a little man. 
Yup…
Come to think of it, lost wheel-balancing weights used to be an ubiquitous sight in road gutters, and they seem to be much rarer nowadays (and I bike, so I’m very familiar with what’s found in road gutters). Maybe there is some new technology that removes the need for them…
Ubiquitous? Was there any time in history when a majority of people would have known what these things are?
Man, the motor oil can opener/spout was a callback… but yeah, wheel balancing weights still are in use, heck in YouTube channels about car repairs every now and then you get a clip about someone using them wrong. However with a larger proportion of the younger generation not owning/driving, I could understand many being unfamiliar.
Heh, I have one of those in my desk at the office… (but usually just plug in a headset or if there’s no one else around use the speaker)
Heck, I knew of these things from reading about them but never got to see/handle one in person and I would not have recognized the hand boiler. And I am of the late wave of Boomers.
Works under the same principle as the “drinking bird” toy, and I used to see that all the time, along with radiometers. Mind you, I never owned either (or an oil-can spout), but they used to be common sights in gift shops, sometimes in public places, workplaces and people’s homes. I’m 60 years old.