We love RPN

I just read Kenneth R. Foster’s review of the HP 35s [“Blast from the Past,” Resources, October]. Most reviews of the calculator give it a “why bother” rating, and technically they are right. The reason the calculator is the way it is—missing some obvious features and bloated with seemingly unneeded ones—is that it is really targeted to those taking professional exams and even, increasingly, to those taking college exams. Modern practice is to outlaw advanced calculators from these tests: there is a concern that the advanced units can potentially be used to store information from the test for others to use. The HP 35s is designed to be acceptable for these tests, as was the HP 33S. Prior to those calculators there was an incredible demand for older HP calculators (but not historic classics) on eBay, because the advanced ones were no longer allowed in class. People were paying over $120 for an early 1990s vintage plain HP 32SII—more than twice its original list price—because it used Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) and was accepted on the tests.

I own a number of HP calculators, from the HP 35 original to the HP 41. They all still work! For a combination of the nostalgia and needing a thin HP calculator (to fit in my stuffed attaché case) for use in electrical engineering classes I teach, I bought an HP 35s. I use it only in RPN mode. It is a good, basic calculator that I recommend for my students. The one negative aspect about it is that the STO key is a shifted function rather than a direct one as on all my older HP calculators. I wish they had not done that.

Kenneth A. Kuhn

Birmingham, Ala.

I feel compelled to tell you that I keep two HP calculators on my desk at all times. I use both daily: an HP 16C Computer Science model, which I guard carefully. The company doesn’t make them anymore and the calculator never, ever leaves my office. My other calculator is an HP 32S. I couldn’t imagine doing my day-to-day work without either of these. Calculators on a computer screen simply don’t work for me; I don’t like them. Also, thanks to your article, I learned about the new/retro HP 35. I’m going to buy one.

I agree that most calculators have features that go unused. As for the HP 16C, however, I use each and every feature on it (it has far fewer features than other units), and if this one ever fails, I’ll be looking for a replacement on eBay.

Thanks for writing the article! I enjoyed reading it.

Mike Jablonski

River Heights, Utah

I just read your review of the HP 35s, in which you question the usefulness of the calculator’s integration function. Over the years I have used HP calculators for one reason: the integration function. Most of what people do with calculators, I do in my head. I’m a senior staff optical engineer at an aerospace company, and I spend a few hours every day trying to do system optimizations in meetings. Many of these systems are infrared, and it always comes down to integrating the Planck function over constantly changing spectral intervals at different temperatures, to determine how the optical coatings, detectors, and so on, will perform.

Yes, I have that routine on my computer, but it is never where I really need it—in meetings. If HP had not maintained this function over the years, I really would not need a pocket calculator. Please don’t discourage HP from doing the right things.

Lanny Sterritt

IEEE Life Member

Palo Alto, Calif.

I enjoyed your article on the reissued HP 35s calculator. I still have (and use) my HP 5C, which I purchased in about 1976 for $160. Thirty-one years and many battery packs later—now I’m cobbling together my own packs—it’s still working just fine. The best thing about the HP calculators is the touch of the keys. They are engineered to give the user a positive feel that the key has in fact been depressed and contact made. Well-written manual, too.

Peter A. Goodwin

IEEE Member

Rockport, Mass.

Of Moguls and Marathas

Although Forum is not a proper place for a discussion of history of India, a gross error needs to be corrected. In “Bureaucracy Blues” [October], Vittal P Pyati states that “India would probably be an Islamic country today had not the British stepped in.” The Moguls’ power in India was coming to an end as Marathas, Rajputs, Sikhs, and Peshwas defeated them, causing the rapid decline of the Mogul Empire. The Marathas were defeated by the British in the Third Anglo-Maratha War of 1817–1818. (See A.K. Walden’s Introduction to Indian Historiography, Popular Prakashan, 1972; and Grant Duff’s History of Marathas, Oxford University Press, 1921.)

In June 1818, Maratha power was finally crushed, and the leader Baji Rao was pensioned off and shipped north of Bithur, a place near Uttar Pradesh province, which would become one of the centers of the 1857 mutiny, the first war against the British. (See Stanley Wolpert’s A New History of India, 7th ed., Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 203.)

Nirode Mohanty

IEEE Fellow

Huntington Beach, Calif.

Green Turns Brown?

Don’t you think that it is extremelycavalier of a reputable engineering magazine to talk of the greening [“The Greening of Google,” October] brought about by solar photovoltaic panels, without so much as even once mentioning the pollution footprint during their fabrication, transportation, and eventual disposal (after their 15-year life span)? Or are we preparing for another media circus 15 years from now, when Earth’s temperature has risen another degree and Americans are being chastised for dumping PV panels wholesale in some poor country?

Anant Kumar

IEEE Member

Margate, Fla.

I enjoyed reading the story, and it is good to see big companies getting slightly green. I wonder though if the author was taken in by the PR people at Google.

If the installation has a 1.6-megawatt peak power, then the average for 24 hours would be 400 kilowatts. Northern California is between 5 and 6 kilowatt-hours–per–day insolation. This is a quarter of the 1-kW insolation value at a plate normal to the sun at noon (see http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/old_data/nsrdb/redbook/atlas/serve.cgi). The average U.S. home uses a little over 1 kW on average. So we are talking about fewer than 400 homes and not 1000.

For Google, the electrical energy consumption at its headquarters is a small fraction of the electrical energy consumed by its servers. It would have been interesting if the author had asked how much electricity Google uses in the United States, to put the 400 kW in perspective.

The net winter capacity in the United States of all the generating plants in 2005 was over 1 million MW (see http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat2p2.html). Since these plants theoretically can operate over 24 hours, the 400 kW at Google is a drop in the bucket. A lot more serious thinking and actions are needed before we celebrate the coming of age of solar power.

Keep these articles coming, but be sure that the authors know the difference between watts and watt-hours.

Linos Jacovides

IEEE Fellow

Grosse Pointe Farms, Mich.

Sexist Stereotype

If you really are committed to welcoming more women into engineering, then the executive editor’s response to Judith Soukup’s letter [“Invisible Women,” Forum, September] is the wrong approach. I appreciate that you printed her letter, and I agree with you that the sentence she quotes is harmless enough. Unfortunately, your response is not so harmless.

You spend eight words apologizing. The remaining 40-plus words defend your publication in a tone that, frankly, strikes me as patronizing. It certainly does not convince me that you took Soukup’s complaint seriously.

You argue that it’s not just the male sex that would get a kick out of X-ray specs. But I’m afraid you’re missing the point, even if it was not clearly stated by Soukup. One could argue that, while the sentence in itself is gender-free, well-known cultural stereotypes cause the reader to picture the teenager, by default, as male. This is partly why many respected publications avoid using “he” and “him” as gender-neutral pronouns: technically they are not biased, but psychologically they are.

You also point out that one of the article’s authors is female. Therefore the article cannot possibly be sexist? I disagree. Just like men, women are brought up in a culture infested with stereotypes about women and men. Letters like Soukup’s should not inspire a war between the sexes, but rather a joint effort of men and women to examine how we communicate as a field and whether that communication style is likely to attract the best minds to engineering, regardless of their sex, nationality, economic status, and so on.

What I find missing in your response, between the apology and the defense, is the effort to examine how IEEE Spectrum either reflects or departs from sexist stereotypes about engineering and engineers. In the future, when a reader charges your publication with bias, I hope your response will be to open and encourage dialogue, rather than to shut it down immediately as you did this time.

Jaymie Strecker

IEEE Student Member

College Park, Md.