Hi Dennis,
I just read the story of slide rules, I never had one (forestry ’80) but the early calculators were expensive compared to now. On a slow day during finals week in the library at Mount Marty College we got to talking about snow and well what was winter like where you lived sort of thing… Of course Dakotas snow blows all over the place several times. Anyway I got to wondering what about Biltmore sticks (I found mine several years ago after cleaning out my parents’ house), and I still have it and use the yardstick part, but have no clue how the other scales work anymore.

How do they measure trees in the woods these days? And what about surveying now too does, anyone still use transits and rods and chains and compass and pacing, and all that stuff Hammer and Roswell tried to teach us, or is it all fancy GPS electronic gadgets nowdays. I still prefer paper map to GPS thing anyday. Even in the library and archives we still have punchcards and large 12 inch square floppies along with the old card catalog and science citation indexes we show on 5th graders kids tours sometimes, with modern computers and laptops they are more convenient but as much as networks run slow or go down, I don’t know as we save anymore time nor do I really know how we did all that calculating in our heads either.

I do remember in Library graduate school at Univ. of Missouri in 1992 the internet, we still had gophers and archie, just getting going and we would do our FTP transfers and downloading overnight still, hyperlinks on a Mac was big innovation. And if you looked up on the online catalog some time like Missouri history and the word book you could crash the lion when it was payroll time or end of semester grades and registration since there was only so much room and processing ability at the same time.

I know a forester to librarian, yeah well still books are made out of paper, paper comes from trees, trees grow in the woods, the woods are managed by foresters…go figure.

Have a great Christmas.
Sr. Lynn Osika OSB forestry 1980

Well, Twigs (and whatever new foresters are called), how do you do fieldwork?