Hi there, gang.

I was in my local video rental store a couple days ago and picked out
the DVD titled: The Dish. It stars Sam Neill and is about the
personnel who manned the radio telescope dish in Parks, Australia
during the Apollo 11 mission.

There are a couple of scenes where one of the engineers is working
with, and then just holding, a slide rule. It looks to me to be a
Polyphase, though, I could not make out the manufacturer.

The first reference to the slide rule comes when, showing his girl
friend around the operations room, the engineer responds to her query
as to how they can find such a small target in space. He points to an
old computer with a reel to reel tape drive and says something to the
effect that it can calculate in 20 seconds what used to take him five
hours on a slide rule >:( Oh, well...there is some vindication later
in the program.

As it turns out, prior to the moon landing, there is a power drop out
and the uninterrupted power supply fails because the guy responsible
forgets to prime the fuel lines on the back up generator's fuel pump
after routine maintenance. Data in the computer is wiped, Apollo 11
is lost to them and our erstwhile scientific heroes appear screwed.

Enter the blackboard and slide rule to save the day. In a blizzard of
brainstorming and calculating, the team strives to come up with a
method to reacquire the spacecraft before anyone in NASA is the wiser.

I'll leave it to you to rent the movie and find out what happens.
It's not a bad way to kill a couple hours.

Happy New Year!

Johnny