Stars 'n' bars

My favorite pre-computer office machine was the Friden calculator. It was a big noisy mechanical thing that did arithmetic to twelve or thirteen significant figures, gears and wheels chugging along.

I used one when I was "working" as a statistician's assistant in the summers after 11th and 12th grade, in the Public Health Service in downtown Washington. I fancied myself a jazz musician at the time, and one of the guys working with me actually was a pretty good jazz drummer, so when we had th...