HP 33S constants

[E Samuel Levy]

There is a list of physical constants that are accessed by the
cursors, selecting one by underlining and pressing enter. I found that if I keyed the number 1 through 6 counting from the left, it entered that constant into X immediately.

[bill platt]

Cool discovery!

I tried it with 7, 8, etc and that doesn't work (obvioulsy you did the same).

Di you accidentally do this? I'm curious *how* you made this discovery.

Edited: 21 Feb 2007, 7:48 p.m.

[Norris]

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I found that if I keyed the number 1 through 6 counting from the left, it entered that constant into X immediately.

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Interesting. This trick also works in the SUMS menu, if there is data entered into the statistics registers.

Of course, it works in the MODES, DISPLAY, MEM, CLEAR, X?Y, X?0, BASE, and FLAGS menus as well, but you would expect it to work in those cases, because in these cases the menu items are explicitly numbered. The menu items *aren't* numbered in the SUMS or CONST menus, yet the numbers work anyway.

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I tried it with 7, 8, etc and that doesn't work (obvioulsy you did the same).

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The CONST key actually brings up a series of eight different menus, which you can scroll through using UP-ARROW, DOWN-ARROW, [right-shift] CONST, or [left-shift] CONST. The number 1-6 trick seems to work on each separate menu.

So you can't get constant #7 (i.e., the first constant in the second CONST menu) with [right-shift] CONST 7. But you apparently can get it by holding down [right-shift], pressing CONST twice while [right-shift] is down (which scrolls to the second CONST menu), and then 1.

This procedure works for the two SUMS menus too.

Edited: 21 Feb 2007, 9:06 p.m.

[Karl Schneider]

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There is a list of physical constants that are accessed by the cursors, selecting one by underlining and pressing enter. I found that if I keyed the number 1 through 6 counting from the left, it entered that constant into X immediately.

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Nice shortcut. This essentially makes the "point-and-click" menus work like the ones with numbers, but the user must manually advance from one screen to the next.

I also found that many of the physical constants in the HP-33S (released in 2004) don't match those in the HP-49G, which was designed in the late 1990's. It turns out that further scientific research has produced revisions to many values. Here are several links to Constant Data (CODATA) of internationally recommended values, from the US National Institute of Science and Technology.

NIST CODATA 1998: http://www.physlink.com/Reference/PhysicalConstants.cfm

NIST CODATA 2002:
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/pdf/chart1.pdf

A slight error in the HP-33S: The magnetic permeability of a vacuum (mu_o) is exactly 4*pi x 10^-7 H/m, but the constant's value is missing the "4" in the last significant digit.

-- KS

Edited: 23 Feb 2007, 2:14 a.m.