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Aug 08Sticking to the Method
by in Feature Articles on 2008-09-30
Long before the √-button on calculators, and the now-antique slide rules and logarithm tables, people actually had to calculate square roots by hand. Like so many other pre-Computer Age tasks, square root calculation isn’t really complicated, it’s just tedious. The simplest – and, as it happens, the oldest – technique for this the Babylonian method: guess the square root of a number and then continually refine the result by taking the arithmetic mean of the result and the quotient of the number and the result, until you’re satisfied with the precision. In other words:
<script type="text/JavaScript">
var numbr = 5, guess = 2;
do { guess = 0.5 * (guess + numbr/guess); }
while (confirm('Refine Further? ' + guess));
</script>
If Ben E. was given three words to describe his job, he’d use bureaucracy, bureaucracy, and after filling out Form 811B-AW (Request to Use More Than Three Words Form), serious fricken bureaucracy. But alas, when one works for The State, things like serious fricken bureaucracy, 
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After spending a few years working at a large, faceless corporation, John W. decided that it was time to move on to a smaller, friendlier company where he could actually make a difference. He eventually settled on "Primatech," a software services company with a dozen or so developers. What really sold him was how receptive they were to change. Each month, they had a "Greatest Improvement Idea Contest" in their dev meeting, where the developer with the best idea for improvement would win a $100 bill. Surely, John figured, a company like that would be rife with best practices.