Today nobody needs a pocket calculator anymore. You can do calculations with your cell phone, your laptop, or your desktop pc. These modern devices are much faster and more flexible than any old style pocket calculator. Using a pocket calculator is like listening to vinyl records instead of CD's or MP3's.
But that makes the difference. A vinyl record sounds better, warm, more natural. And it's the same with the results calculated by a pocket calculator. The numbers are simply better.
So I decided to buy a brand new Casio fx-991ES PLUS, a nice scientific calculator.
And now let 'em do some heavy work by entering the following formula:
Pressing the [=] key starts the calculations, and it's time for a cup of coffee now. But before we drink the coffee we just do the same calculations using the statistics software R on a standard desktop pc.
Here we go:
%
% R --quiet
> options (digits=10)
> R=0; for (X in 1:5000) {R=R+sin(X*pi/180)};R
[1] 13.08293192
> q()
Save workspace image? [y/n/c]: n
%
These steps took a few seconds on the desktop pc, and our result is 13.08293192. After waiting for 13 more minutes, drinking our coffee, finally the fx-991ES PLUS shows it's result too:
Yes, it's the same, it's 13.08293192, but the number is better, because it was calculated by a real pocket calculator. I am very excited.