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remembering the existence of trigonometry
Tuesday, September 13 2005
I continued the cleanup jihad until the laboratory nearly sparkled. It still contained plenty of entropy, but most of this had been stuffed into the low parts where the halves of the cathedral ceiling meet the floor. Next I installed a couple of four by four rectangular white oak beams to carry the point loads of the southmost pillars of the solar deck down to a floor joist beneath the laboratory floor. Finding where exactly to position these pillars was a difficult job plagued by contradictory measurements inside the laboratory and out on the roof. I did a fairly convincing job of resolving these things with the help of basic trigonometry. I'd forgotten all the trig I used to know, but I'd remembered enough to know that some of the questions I had could be answered with sine and cosine functions; I only needed a web reference to know how to apply them. The details learned in education aren't as important as learning what types of questions can be answered by which types of analysis. After that, it's all about Google-provided cheat sheets.
By the way, for all you kids cramming for tomorrow's trig pop quiz, this was my first real-world application of sine and cosine since taking trigonometry in 11th grade. My only other uses of those functions were purely decorative — generating fancy curves, for example, in the computer display of my "Fratboy Machine."
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