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I respect, appreciate and use technology when it resolves our problems and allows us to make things, otherwise, impossible or very long to make. For ex., the PC programs allows us to avoid so many calculations that neither our whole life would be enough to complete them correctly.
This is particularly true in the scientific field, where an enormous number of data, factors and parameters must be evaluated.

Moreover, computers memory capacity is enormous, so that a single normal hard-disk can store the content of a great library, or avoid us to fill many rooms with paper documents, registers and books. A computer is not easy to use and our endeavours to make it work well and use its programs are surely stimulating for our mind like, on the more reason, the work for creating new programs.

Instead, a certain use of technology can impoverish our mind when it makes useless certain basic mental abilities we had previously used before adopting that technology. I refer, above all, to our calculation and analysis ability in mathematics and in all the scientific disciplines based on it.

When we use too much a calculator also for simple operations and during very long periods of time, in fact, it happens we become less and less able to reckon mentally or to write calculations like the simple 4 algebraic operations, learnt at school during our childhood. This is not pleasant, when we become too dependent from our pocket calculator and we have to sum or subtract quickly various prices, to calculate a percentage, the approximate value of a money sum in a foreign currency and we discover of having forgotten at home our pocket calculator and our PC is not available.

We can lose part of this mental ability if we had it or we never achieve it when we are still teens or children and we are used to calculators at home or even at school. The meaning and the properties of the various mathematic operations, the use of decimals and fractions, of logarithms, of angles and trigonometric functions must be deeply understood in all their particulars without calculators that make all the work.

For example, if we must calculate 16 x 7, we can easily reckon it mentally with two very simple calculations: (10 x 7) + (6 x 7) = 70 + 42 = 112 within few seconds; instead, if we always use the calculator, it's much more difficult for us to obtain this result mentally without making mistakes or taking too much time.

The same principle is valid for the functions study and drawing that many pocket scientific

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