President's Report Robert De Cesaris, Granite Bay, California Our OS East Coast Meeting, held November 10 in Westbrook CT, was another unqualified success, with the usual impressive member displays of rare and esoteric items from the last three centuries and with several exceptional and unexpected items for sale at our auction. Highlights on display included a desk-sized version of a Boucher calculator, a beautifully engraved brass and nickel circular rule from the mid-19th century, and numerous unusual (and some unique) Fowler pocket-watch type calculators. Also displayed were an impressive collection of educational rules for use with an overhead projector, early and different boxwood ullaging rules from the 18th century, a beautifully preserved 20” Tavernier-Gravet with brass cursor and hinged box, and numerous other unusual and interesting items. Items for sale included a Thacher Model 4013 complete with magnifier, a later version of the K&E Cox Duplex, numerous early 20th century Keuffel and Esser catalogs and early Pickworth books, and several very calculating and rule-related books dating back to the 1850’s. After the meeting, we reconvened a few miles away at Leighton Lee’s Museum of Early Engineering, housed in a nicely maintained building which dates from the 1680’s--- the first time in my experience in which the building predated every early item housed in the room! Leighton’s museum collection includes an outstanding calculating device and slide rule collection as well as representative hardware and equipment from the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and later space programs as well as important items from the building of America’s first submarine. Calculating items that quickly caught everyone’s attention included a Hannyngton grid slide rule, examples of early Fuller and Thacher calculators, advanced rules for time and frequency domain analysis, and many additional specialized rules for artillery and other military applications. On behalf of the Oughtred Society, I would once again like to thank Leighton for providing us with a most interesting venue and also for his unexpected assistance in helping to subsidize part of the cost of the meeting. All preparations have been made for our First OS Winter Meeting to be held February 23, 2008 at the Atomic Testing Museum on the campus of University of Nevada at Las Vegas. The organizers of this meeting have confirmed at least one dealer who will be bringing some wonderful items for sale! Of course, Las Vegas also provides a good opportunity for a family winter vacation on the side. Be certain to mark your calendars and plan to attend this important event! Since our last Bulletin, the Oughtred Society Awards Committee, consisting of Bob Otnes, Colin Barnes, Klaus Kühn, Otto van Poelje and Ted Hume, announced that the OS Award for 2007 was presented to Rodney Lovett, of Addlestone in Surrey, England for the creation, maintenance and extension of a number of powerful and user-friendly online databases and search engines, which have greatly assisted the global community in research and cataloguing of information. These information services have made our accumulated knowledge widely available to every collector, anytime and anywhere. The Award was presented to Rod during a UKSRC meeting in England. Let us all congratulate Rod on his accomplishments. The OS will continue to support and increase our presence in the use of these tools. As mentioned in my last note to all of you, currently we do depend very heavily on a handful of key people for most of our activities and publications. I would request that each of us try to find some time to volunteer, even if for only a few dedicated hours a month, to support the Oughtred Society. This could be as simple as a one- or two-page article for the Journal; also, several areas have been identified for future activity as noted in the last Bulletin. Find that area that best resonates with your interests, whether it be writing, research, education…..my key message here is that there are many ways in which you can become involved and greatly enjoy the experience! Thank you, Bob From the Vice President Kate Matthews, Sonora, California For those who don’t know, our excellent Journal is a collaborative effort between the Society and our authors. The actual production work is done by Bob Otnes and Don Black, who heroically each issue edit and lay-out each one of our 64 pages, plus the front and back covers. They literally pour untold hours of their time into each issue. In the real world, the cost of making a publication like ours is astronomical. The magazine Antiques, for example, has a circulation of 60,000 and runs more than 100 full page color advertisements to support their 64 pages of well researched, documented and photographed articles. Antiques doesn’t publish their advertising rates, but Smithsonian and the New Yorker each charge around $100,000 for a full page ad (I leave it to you to do the math). The Antiques editorial staff consists of 5 editors, 2 editorial assistants, an art director, 3 production people and that’s just the folks who make the masthead. We just have Bob and Don quietly, faithfully, performing miracles every issue. How can we help them? For one thing, it would be nice to appreciate them a bit. If you see something you really enjoy or are particularly impressed with, it’s OK to drop them a note or an e-mail. If you have a complaint, it might be better to send it to one of the officers, or maybe even just to let the matter drop. The Board continues to try to find ways to support Bob and Don. They currently use software called PCTEX to do the actual lay-out. TEX is widely used in Academia because it handles equations and mathematical formulas beautifully. This is also why Bob and Don prefer to use it.. The concept of changing to a different software, much bandied at one point by the Board, has been considered and rejected for now because after 16 years, both are comfortable with TEX and both are skilled users. They could each use a reliable editorial assistant to help with pre-production work, but those obviously are tough slots to fill as quite frankly, the hours are long and the wages lousy. Nevertheless, anyone interested in helping with the JOS who thinks they might have the credentials (basic editing skills, flexibility and a willingness to learn at least a little TEX) should let either me or Don or Bob know. I can be reached by e-mail at katematthews@sbcglobal.net. Membership Report for the Oughtred Society Clark McCoy, Membership Secretary, Roseville, California Membership through Nov. 15, 2007       456 Membership for 2006                                     463 2007 New Members                                           52 2006 Members not renewed yet                   63 World wide distribution of membership for 2007: US                 292     64% Europe       128       28% Canada         15         3% Australia     13         3% All other       8           2% We are about on pace with membership at this time last year. From experience we can expect about one new member per week which would put the total for 2007 almost the same as last year. The non-renewal rate is also about the same as in the past. Please note that the Oughtred Society has a new address: The Oughtred Society 9 Stephens Ct. Roseville, CA 95678 The Oughtred Society Award: Winner Otto van Poelje, Chairman, The Netherlands The Oughtred Society Award Committee has decided unanimously to present this year's Award to Rodney Lovett in England. The consideration for the choice of Rod was: "for creating in 2004, maintaining and extending a number of powerful and user-friendly online databases and search engines, to look for many facets of slide rule information: Literature Search and Retrieval, eBay Search, ISRG and Forum Archive, and more recently Herman's Archive. These information services have made the accumulated slide rule knowledge widely available to every collector, anytime and anywhere" The previous weekend, during a regular UKSRC meeting in England, Colin Barnes presented the Award, with its framed certificate and golden Oughtred Society pin, to Rod in person. Let us all congratulate Rod Lovett with his Award, and hope that he will continue to maintain and even expand his data bases and search engines, to the benefit of all slide rule enthusiasts. More details on The Oughtred Society Award, with a picture of the 2007 Award presentation, can be found on the Society's website: www.oughtred.org Webmaster's Report Mike Konshak, Louisville, Colorado Since the end of October 2007, the Oughtred Society’s website (www.oughtred.org) has been hosted by a new service, http://Aplus.net. We have their Solo XR plan which is on a Unix server. The switch not only provided a cost savings, but greatly expanded the capacity and potential capabilities for growth in providing information to members and visitors alike. We have at our disposal 170 Giga Bytes (GB= 10e9 Bytes) of disk space with a monthly transfer limit of 2000 GB, that is a tremendous amount of storage and bandwidth and we will be hard pressed to ever need more. For example, the website as it is, only uses 0.7% of the available disk space so there is ample room to store a significant amount of images and files. For example, a typical slide rule image, at 150 dpi resolution and its corresponding thumbnail takes up on average 300KB (KB=10e3 Bytes). We could easily provide over 500,000 images to our users, or at least archive them for historical preservation, and other relevant files for later dissemination. Putting a lot of photos on line is a lot of work, and Aplus.net makes it easy to update the website and to upload files through their control panel at http://cp.aplus.net. As a volunteer webmaster, I find this service very convenient, in that I can go on-line with any computer, anywhere, at anytime and make changes or updates to the OS website fairly rapidly. Most of us get very busy in our day-to-day activities, so anything that can make life easier is a good thing. If anyone has a large amount of files to contribute, it is easiest to FTP the data directly to the site, rather than sending them through emails. Part of taking on the OS website has involved cleaning up unnecessary files, re-arranging the folder structure and making each page have the same look-and-feel as the other pages. I've had to learn a few new HTML coding techniques, particularly in the use of SHTML and style sheets, but the excellent work that Jim Cerny did in documenting the pages has helped me tremendously in understanding the files. Hopefully, as I make changes I won't introduce a bug or a broken link. The goal of course is to make the site easy to navigate for users as well as easy to maintain for the future. I also have modified the primary navigation menu to allow expansion of link items and to insure that the menu will display on a laptop computer without scrolling. I've submitted the OS site to 30 search engines which will automatically be re-submitted every two weeks by Aplus.net. This should help our ratings. A concern of mine is the many excellent non-profit slide rule websites that individuals have created and built, and then, for many reasons, such as disinterest, financial, or age related issues, these websites have disappeared or have become unavailable. I would propose that we offer to archive (sub-host) any such websites, for the continued preservation of the data for posterity. I have done this for several individuals at sliderulemuseum.com but I think that oughtred.org would be a better repository for mirrored sites, and we have plenty of storage space. I believe this to be an appropriate function of the OS if our creed is in fact, “dedicated to the preservation and history of slide rules and other calculating instruments”.