I've heard of it too. You would need an analytical balance to get accurate measurements weighing a piece of paper. Just cut out the part you want to take an integral of, then cut out a piece of paper with known size (or cut several pieces with different sizes to get more accurate results) and weigh each of them. I guess this used to be cheaper and faster than using computers when computers were big and expensive.

[–] jadero@programming.dev 6 points 1 year ago

Or maybe just a powder balance. When I was a kid in the 1960s, Dad did a lot of reloading his own ammunition. We kids had fun doing things like weighing our names (weigh a small piece of paper to get the tare, weigh again to get the loaded weight, subtract) and other miniscule things. As I recall, it was accurate to less than a grain (0.065 gram).

One of the things we did was weigh different shapes of paper to calculate area. Start with a sample of a unit area. Cut out a funky shape and weigh it, then do the math.

[–] SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 points 1 year ago

Nono that's genius

..ignoring the part that it's just a discrete approximation of an integral a la a Riemann sum.

[–] w2qw@aussie.zone 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How thick is your paper?

[–] jcg@halubilo.social 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How inaccurate is your scale?

[–] JonEFive@midwest.social 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How precise are your scissors?

[–] WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

How funky is your chicken?

[–] Quereller@lemmy.one 5 points 1 year ago

I was reading an old book about chromatography in laboratory and they exactly describe this method to determine the amount of substance.

[–] Liz@midwest.social 1 points 1 year ago

That was a common way to do it before computers were common.

[–] PixxlMan@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

That's pretty clever!