{"id":1437,"date":"2007-05-23T09:34:59","date_gmt":"2007-05-23T09:34:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2007\/05\/23\/dorky-poll-useful-antiques\/"},"modified":"2007-05-23T09:34:59","modified_gmt":"2007-05-23T09:34:59","slug":"dorky-poll-useful-antiques","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2007\/05\/23\/dorky-poll-useful-antiques\/","title":{"rendered":"Dorky Poll: Useful Antiques"},"content":{"rendered":"

As sort of a counterpoint to the previous entry, here’s a more positive poll question:<\/p>\n

\n

What’s the most useful antiquated tool you keep around?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That is, what dusty old relic do you keep around because there’s no modern alternative that works as well for what it does?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In one of the pictures in the previous post, you can just make out the edge of a chart recorder. That’s there for a reason– it isn’t often that I want to use a chart recorder, but when you need one, there’s nothing else that will do the job. When it comes to long-term monitoring of electronic signals over periods of hours, nothing else quite does the trick.<\/p>\n

Sure, you can rig a computer running LabView or the like to do chart-recorder-like data acquisition, but it chews up memory like nobody’s business, and usually isn’t worth the bother. A chart recorder is useful when you’re trying to look at slow drifts in the error signals from feedback circuits, or to monitor the long-term stability of some parameter that doesn’t vary all that quickly. And when you’re doing that sort of thing, a simple marker trace on a spool of paper is really all you need– you don’t want 100K worth of data points that need to be fed into SigmaPlot to make them useful.<\/p>\n

So what old-school tool do you keep around because nothing newer does the job as well?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As sort of a counterpoint to the previous entry, here’s a more positive poll question: What’s the most useful antiquated tool you keep around? That is, what dusty old relic do you keep around because there’s no modern alternative that works as well for what it does?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-my_lab","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1437"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1437\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}