the new ones

It's been an exciting summer at the old hp calculator company. With 2 new hp scientific calculators, kcrazorback can barely contain his excitement. The 10s appears to be a serviceable basic calculator for under $15.

But, what is really ramping up this bloggers bp is the $60 35s. It's getting mixed reviews on the forums. I haven't bought mine yet, but expect to in the next week or so. It appears to have all the features of my favorite calculator, but its the styling that really is cool. Its a throwback to the very first hp pocket scientific, the 35, named for its 35 buttons.

I'll be getting mine soon and I'll let you know if its function is as cool as its form and if its form is as cool as I expect.

Do you have a 35s? What do you think about it? Do you have a 35?

museum for geeks like me

If you're into hp calculators, you probably already know about the hp museum. If not familiar with it, check it out.

The museum has a great summary of all of the hp calculators without getting bogged down in too much detail. Its forum serves as a good place for hp fans to communicate with each other. I especially like its history section.

If you already know all about Pioneers and Coconuts and know how to program RPL, I guess that you probably will enjoy the site anyway. If you only know Hewlett Packard for its inkjet printers, well, here is a good place for some interesting education for you.

good idea, lukasiewicz

Once you get hooked on Reverse Polish Notation (RPN), there's no going back. Postfix notation is a little confusing for the first few minutes, but then it becomes like second nature very quickly. OK, so I don't say to my wife "I you love," but I really want to.

If you use hp calculators, you probably are already familiar with RPN. If you don't or aren't I encourage you to check out RPN. I use handheld RPN calculators. Even my calculator accessory on my computer is RPN. A couple of introductions to RPN follow: hp's introduction and the hpmuseum introduction (more about hpmuseum in a later post) are good places to start. But the best thing to do is just try it.

Do you use RPN? exclusively? Do you switch between algebraic notation and RPN?

For reading my post, I you thank.

hp calculators and spaghetti sandwiches

Hello blogoshpere. This is the first post of my first blog. I hope you like it and that it reflects my crazy personality.

Up front: I love my Lord and I love my wife. I love my daughter, my mother, family and friends.

But this is hp calculators and spaghetti sandwiches. This post will focus on my first hp calculator--the 21S Stat/Math calculator. OK, it's really high on that list, but I wouldn't really say I 'love' my 21S. Wait, I do love my 21S. It came into my life at just the perfect time--I was a newlywed half way through grad school in statistics with a serious deficit in handheld computing power. This particular calculator was a blessing from on high (literally) purchased with gift certificates won from a radio station's back to school promotion back in 1989. I used my 21S through the remainder of grad school and three jobs before it began to fail.

Its most useful feature was its four built-in statistical distributions--z, t, F and Chi-squared. Given a test statistic (and the appropriate degrees of freedom, etc.) the calculator returned upper tail probability and vice-versa. Its biggest drawback was its algebraic data entry which was a break from hp's well-developed RPN. This keystroke-programmable was an outstanding calculator for this poor statistics grad student.

Do you or did you use an hp 21S? What do you think was its most useful feature?

Stay tuned. Spaghetti sandwiches and lots of other topics will come in the future.