How to Entertain with Your Pocket Calculator (1975) | Hacker News Reader

How to Entertain with Your Pocket Calculator (1975)

archive.org

this mental floss lists the classic (upside down) SHELL.OIL which was a good punchline during the oil embargo, you make people type in a calculation about gas prices, and then say "who wins?" and have them flip the calculator over

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/12512/calculator-words

i myself invented blinking I.DIG BIG.BOOBS by 1975 at least with my HP-25, if nobody has an earlier citation.

the wayback machine archive of the calculator words website that article references

http://web.archive.org/web/20070622095250/http://www.langmak...

     ShELL.OIL

is how it looks (modulo the HN font). Capitalization is meaningful here.

The calculation I was introduced to had some narrative that resulted in the display showing: SELL.ShELLOIL. Stock advice was somewhat lost on 8-year-old me, but I was amused nevertheless, as the fluorescent green segment display pulsed.

I also learned the other one, referenced downthread, but for me it was "BOOBLESS".

My father's calculator was one of the coolest bits of kit that he actually let me touch and use fairly often. I can't remember if it was a TI or what brand, but it definitely had that really legible blue-green display, and removable batteries, I guess AAs or a 9V, and it had a soft black carrying case where we carefully and reverently returned it whenever we were finished calculating. Of course it was hardly scientific and only had the four basic functions. I don't remember, pun not intended, whether it had a memory function or not.

I haven't read the book but based on the title I can confirm that you can entertain with a pocket calculator.

On our first date with my now wife I showed her my Casio FX-991ESPLUS Scientific Calculator and we spent at least 30 min playing with it.

Hmm, I guess I need to adapt my dating strategy…

Just a few years later - Kraftwerk https://youtu.be/eSBybJGZoCU

This book contains tricks that break down seemingly complicated operations, such as the equation ABCD*9999 = ABC(D—1)(9—A)(9—B)(9—C)(10—D). Although it's valuable to understand the logic behind these tricks, they could also help students who struggle with math in school.

123 * 456 * 789 + 28830302 = heleboel (dutch for a lot)

Not a mention of 0.7734 or 5318008 anywhere.

How does namespacing work on IA? "archive.org/details/htewypc" is a pretty conspicuous URL.

Conspicuous maybe, but not common. It’s probably just first come first serve which works reasonably well. How many other books or pieces of media can you name with those initials? If you come up with a collision that’s easy to deal with you can just append _poopaids1 or similar.

Still for sale on Amazon (new) and eBay:

https://www.amazon.com/How-Entertain-Your-Pocket-Calculator/...

80085

7734

8008135

We had a telephone system installed at work, the default password from the company who did all the installs in our area was the upside down version of Boobies

Can you explain?

an 8 in a 7-segment LCD display looks like a capital B if you squint a little, I'm sure you can figure out what letters 0, 1, and 5 look like.

I think TedDoesntTalk got confused because the OP reversed the order if the digits. “80085” turned upside down reads “SBOOB”, which doesn’t make sense to me and, I guess, to them.

All of the numbers ("letters") concerned are symmetric wrt 180 degree rotation, so there's no need to turn the calculator upside down.

But still, it may have confused TedDoesntTalk because, in the general case, have to flip over the calculator. It certainly took me longer to recognize this than when they had written 58008.

31337

Pulled down the PDF (because I love these vintage books) and it behaves very oddly with Apple's Preview. Many of the pages do not draw at all — perhaps only 15% or so render. Weirdly, Adobe Reader didn't like it either....

I am not sure what is unusual about this PDF. If I were to guess I would say there is something unusual about the geometry of the various "boxes" for each page (cropbox, artbox, etc.). (I no longer work on Preview or PDF's though since retirement — someone else's problem now.)

I have a 3rd party app called PDF Squeezer. On a lark I ran it through that app. The resulting PDF document displays fine. Odd.

IA uses some custom tools for their pdf OCR and compression, but their pdfs should should be PDF/A compliant. It might have to do with the vulnerabilities behind JBIG2 compression.

https://github.com/internetarchive/archive-pdf-tools

I run into this frequently with PDFs from archive.org.

I've never found a common thread. Seems very random.

Interesting. I can confirm my MacOS (12.6.3) Preview app (11.0) is having problems with that PDF -- for instance, pages 2-12 are blank in MacOS Preview, where pages 3, 5 and 7 show in the in-browser HTML/JS viewer. (pages 4, 6, and 8 are actually blank I think!).

If I view the PDF using the Chrome browser -- it's PDF rendering engine has no apparent problems, it seems to be showing the same pages as the in-browser HTML/JS viewer.

I've been investigating PDF generation from digitized historical materials myself, lately, so I happen to know that the Internet Archive PDFs use some sophisticated compression techniques to try to make PDFs substantially smaller than they would be including relatively high-res raster JPGs. They use both JPEG2K raster images, and JBIG2 bitmaps, in a sophisticated manner that uses a bitmask to try to apply higher-quality compression to the text, and lower-quality (more compressed, smaller bytesize) compression to the background pages.

This is known as "Mixed Raster Content (MRC)" approach [1] -- several commercial/proprietary packages also claim to implement it, I think mostly in the "document management" space. I think Internet Archive's open source python is the only open source implementation. [2]. (They have been using their home-built open source tool for 2-3 years, before that they were using a toolchain involving a proprietary tool for the MRC-style compression; I don't know if some PDF downloads on the live site may still be cached from previous tool chain or not).

It's a pretty neat technique. Here's a video where Merlijn Wajer from Internet Archive talks about their project. [3]. Here's one proprietary software vendors explanation of the MRC technique. [4]

While everything used in this approach ought to be in-spec for PDF rendering, I wonder if some PDF renderers (such as MacOS Preview) are having trouble with either some of the image formats (JPEG2000 or JBIG2, although both are spec'd by PDF standard), or the overall technique.

The alternative is pretty enormous PDFs for digitized materials at full-resolution though.

Since I've been investigating PDF generation for digitized historical content, though, I am curious what is going on here, and how to avoid it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_raster_content

[2] https://archive-pdf-tools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[3] https://youtu.be/DqA1YPfDlhg?t=972

[4] https://www.gdpicture.com/blog/advanced-mrc-compression/

(author of the PDF generation sw here, thanks to jrochkind1 for pointing me in this direction) Would you mind filing a bug here with your findings, so that we can figure out what is going on? https://github.com/internetarchive/archive-pdf-tools

We (archive.org) tested the software extensively with the various readers, and we haven't found problems with the PDFs on Apple Preview.

Just did.

My instant thought was: 707 + 707 = hihi

in French you can write SOLEIL (sun)

You can also write CA155EDE24 (a 24 pack)

351483773 was also fairly popular for reasons I wont disclose here...

you had 9 digits?

Cos(0MC) :P

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