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The log (log) slide...rules!
By Joe Pivetti

Prologue: Log (log) slide rules got Apollo to the moon (and me through Fr. year at Cal), then TI equaled it, and, eventually, IT obsoleted it. A hewn trunk from a managed forest is not a natural log. When you balance the books of multiple timber companies it's on a log log scale. When you remove bark with broken rhytidome layers from a felled spruce or pine you accumulate a log scale. Carboniferous termites didn't log scale trees because they weren't very woody. "It is more blessed to give than to receive", and, "judge not, lest ye too be judged" are both logions (which Jesus did not deliver at a lightning tree). Log scales are used to measure earthquakes, loudness and pH...and sometimes the weight of timbered trees. The neper is a log unit for ratios of physical field quantities (but never to say there's twice as many trees in that field than this one). Oughtred conceptually invented the log-log slide rule but the MLB later logged in a slide rule requiring one to be outrightly bona fide. Apparent magnitude is a reverse log measure of the brightness of a star and some cruise into a very high score on the scale. Log transformation is used for image enhancement via expanded dark pixels or via chainsaw when carving out a bear from the wood. To condense logs, we use log rules: the product rule (for pencils), the division rule (for toothpicks), the power rule (for tinder), the change of base rule (for decamping to the open), and the base switch rule (for turning off a fake fire). F-stops are logs for photographers, which when publicized, mitigate swearing on the next club outing. Logs are used for needle and wire gauges (especially if timbering dry pines near some live ones). The Krumbein phi scale for particle size (which helps weigh a cake after its been squashed) is a log2.   That's all well and good and very logical, but I have some questions: If Anne Frank had been born in Spain, would she have written an analog? If foresters argue over the name of a tree species, do they set fire to it with a logomach? When you carve a smiley into a tree that your BFF always walks past, is it a logogram? When the record of the height at a dam gets damaged, is it waterlogged? If you get stuck with writing too many jelly recipes, is it a logjam? If you give up on writing about amateur athletes, have you begun a prolog? If you record three dimensional representations of trees, is it an isolog? If you have a discussion about changing the color of a tree, is it a dialog? When checking attendance at a forestry school contest, do you call out a logroll? Are the number of trucks on the highway recorded in a semilog? When you record felines born in the woods, do you make a catalog? When you get tired of carrying timber, is it due to a backlog? When researching which cabbies to fire, does one consult a hacklog? Epilogue: The last US slide rule was made the week after the bicentennial and, currently, the US Sr. Softball Assoc. enforces a no slide rule at home.