• sznio@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I’ve heard of people printing out charts, then cutting out the part they wanted to calculate an integral of, then weighing the paper.

    • siipale@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      I’ve heard of it too. You would need an analytical balance to get accurate measurements weighing a piece of paper. Just cut out the part you want to take an integral of, then cut out a piece of paper with known size (or cut several pieces with different sizes to get more accurate results) and weigh each of them. I guess this used to be cheaper and faster than using computers when computers were big and expensive.

      • jadero@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        Or maybe just a powder balance. When I was a kid in the 1960s, Dad did a lot of reloading his own ammunition. We kids had fun doing things like weighing our names (weigh a small piece of paper to get the tare, weigh again to get the loaded weight, subtract) and other miniscule things. As I recall, it was accurate to less than a grain (0.065 gram).

        One of the things we did was weigh different shapes of paper to calculate area. Start with a sample of a unit area. Cut out a funky shape and weigh it, then do the math.

    • Quereller@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      I was reading an old book about chromatography in laboratory and they exactly describe this method to determine the amount of substance.