Well its day 0 now since you technically used them in this meme even if it was only the words
Smartass!
So you’re saying the real reason we learn about trigonometry is so we can talk about how pointless and shit it was to learn
So when I type the word “sink” I’ve used the sin() function?
Yeah you are. You can’t use electricity without it.
This is a DC only household
Shut up Thomas, Nikola won!
From the first sentence:
[…] uses direct current (DC) for electric power transmission, in contrast with the more common alternating current (AC) transmission systems.
So, actually actually. ;)
How do you run your appliances?
I don’t, I’m actually Amish. I’m writing to you from a steam powered thinking machine
TIL I’m an HTML developer because I’m surfing on the internet
The meme said they didn’t use it not that they didn’t apply it.
You use HTML but don’t develop in html when surfing web
Nah, I hired an electrician to handle all that for me. Now if I want electricity all I have to do is stick a plug in a socket, or flip a switch. It’s way more convenient.
If the power into your house is off from 60Hz (or 50 depending on your region), an electrician isn’t going to do diddly.
Neither am I cause I don’t know what that means.
How could it be off frequecy at house level? Aren’t the generators at the powerplants being spun at 50 or 60 times a second?
Not exactly. There’s a ratio of RPMs of the drive motor to the specific input of the alternator that generates the correct frequency. It depends on the way the alternator is designed (ie number of poles) that will yield the correct frequency, almost like a gear ratio, that is optimized for efficiency, and power plants have to constantly make slight adjustments to the drive motor speed the keep the frequency exact (usually done automatically within the drive control system).
I’ve never seen frequency be an issue in a residential system, but in theory it could happen.
It used to be common for clocks to be driven directly off the electrical frequency. The US Navel Observatory would call up generator plants and tell them to slow down or speed up a little to make a correction to all the clocks. I’m not sure if that still happens, though.
I don’t know how it’s in 60Hz regions, but here the generators are in 3 phases, 120 degrees apart. The voltage gets transformed to up to 400kV, still in 3 phases, and then down to 400V when it’s distributed to peoples’ homes. Then you can pull 400V 3-phase or 230V 1-phase from your wall.
It’s the same here, though we have varying degrees of transmission and distribution voltages via transformers and regulators. In my area, power comes into our valley from the 500kv lines through the open desert, into the valley at 33kv, and stepped down to 5kv for neighborhood distribution that the single phase 240/120v transformers tap off for the EOL.
More of what I was getting at was that generation is more or less the same across regions. Some external fuel source (whether it’s diesel, natural gas, nuclear, steam, etc) does its thing to drive a rotor that’s connected into an alternator which is essentially an electric motor but instead of the electric motor doing the driving, it’s being driven which generates power, and the RPMs of whatever given fueled drive mechanism are not necessarily 1:1 with the alternator speed.
My understanding is that if electrical demand starts outstripping supply the sinewave can start getting badly mishapen.
From watching videos about synthesizers and playing with VCV Rack I’ve learned far more about waveforms than I ever did from any electrical education or research
Basic trigonometry is super useful and not that hard to understand or memorize.
It’s because trigonometry is used to teach people geometry and nothing in real life application. You want basic trigonometry in real life we should use physics as a basis for why trigonometry is useful in real life. You can’t expect theory to be used in practicality when nobody has any experience.
I don’t understand, out of all of the things that we teach students in schools, out of all of the things that people don’t demand justification for learning, why Maths gets all of the flak. It’s the foundation on which the universe exists. If people don’t understand that they’re not just learning trigonometry “just cuz” then they probably don’t have much of a career in STEM planned for themselves. Which is fine, but western society’s blindspot for STEM is 100% attributed to the intentional undermining and dumbing-down of the education system.
We regularly don’t give students justification for why they learn grammar, biology, chemistry, physics, visual art, and music. But as soon as you show someone a standard polynomial, they lose their fucking minds.
For me, my “education” with math was "when you see this: 5/73¥π7^t then you use 5-8(25&6)_9gh8/6 not 5&6(9!4_89) ok memorize it for the test.
Oh you want to know why or what it does or what it even is? No that’s college work. You’re in highschool, memorize it because reasons.
Yeah… That’s not how my brain works no matter how badly I wish I did. I need to UNDERSTAND not memorize! I can’t memorize seemingly arbitrary bullshit that has no explained meaning. My brain instantly tosses it as irrelevant information.
Same but “you’re in middle school, that’s high school stuff”
I find that the best way for me to learn is to learn the use of something first , then find that something . Exploring a problem and finding the solution is way more engaging than repeating a basic task over and over again . And unfortunately schools , at least in western countries don’t have space for those things . Its all cramming cramming cramming , which sucks , both for the students who are weaker in a subject and those who are better at it .
Students often reach for tools to bypass problems , not realising how useful that tool would be at understanding the problem . Learning becomes a chore , not something that one does for self improvement .
In the US this is enforced even more by imperial units , which put one more roadblock when students try to use what they learned in a way which has any connection to the real world .
It hurts , both being a student which has large voids in knowledge that is expected , being a student which is ahead of material by a large margin and seeing other students struggle with tasks , to me , simple . It hurts knowing how complex of a problem this is , especially as one notes its connections to the wider world , both how failures of the education system hurt our society and how society is not able to help our schools .
I dunno, I see people complain about “why do we have to read books that are hundreds of years old?” too pretty frequently. Some people are just hostile to education. Honestly, cost aside, I’m a little disappointed in the number of people who complain about college as if the only thing you get out of college is a piece of paper.
It’s a valid complaint. Why is Shakespeare more legitimate than, say, Stephen King for high school classes? Reading is reading, and asking students to read boring books because “they are classics” is the best way to discourage them.
In high school, I had to read Phèdre, a story told in verses about some incestuous rednecks from Greek mythology or whatever, written in the 1600’s. It was painful.
For that matter, why do we read Shakespeare? They’re plays. Watch them as plays or movies. If kids first exposure to Star Wars was by reading the script, they’d hate that, too, and they should.
I had to read Shakespeare, then read another book about how witty and clever it was to the people of the time, then write a report about how witty and clever it was, once I understood the historical context. My conclusion that having to explain jokes is the death of humor got me a C-.
I think there’s something to be said about shared cultural experiences, and so reading some older books is probably a good thing.
To clarify what I mean though: that means that we should be reading stuff that was written/popular when our grandparents were our age. Going back 200+ years should be saved for a history class cause that’s the real value in reading that material. In my opinion, Great Gatsby should be about the oldest book kids need to be reading for a literature class these days, and even that’s pushing it.
There are a lot more authors who took inspiration from shakespeare than Steven King. Shakespeare is just objectively more influential, tropes he invented are used all the time in many places and there is value to understanding where the source comes from.
It’s the exposure that undermines it. Their isn’t enough exposure to real life application and examples. How many people never realise that velocity is a derivative of position over time or acceleration is a derivative of velocity over time. Or that the speed of light is a horizontal asymptote for matter.
I feel like similar issues are also present in humanities , but they are less visible .
I enjoy doing recreational linguistics , writhing poems , stories and argumentative texts , yet I always sucked at humanities at school . I learned a lot of what school tried to teach me on my own , often after failing to fully grasp it at school . On the flip side , a lot of time was spent learning about things I still do not know the use of , that I , with some difficulty , crammed for tests and forgotten .
Even with maths which I am quite good at , I often entered new topics with some knowledge of them from doing maths recreationally , which was not that great for me , both as I did not have enough resources to find the gaps in my knowledge and as I spent time not building on the knowledge I already had .
I think this is an issue of how little we focus on individuals in our schools , though this is not something I blame teachers for , to be clear , they have no option to do so , especially as being a teacher not rewarded enough , ignoring both the extra workload outside of school and with generally shitty pay .
I often find that the best way for me to learn is via exploration , trying to do something and researching ways how to do things needed to reach the goal . This is unfortunately something school doesn’t have space for and I suspect it is one of the factors behind this misunderstanding .
The reason I feel like maths gets more heat for not having a use is because its harder to convey meaning of abstract equations , as someone else in this thread put better then I can , many students , I feel like , miss a deeper understanding , being left with only what is needed to pass the test , forgetting even that soon after …
Ah yes, because plumbers, electricians, and brick layers never have to deal with geometry. That being said, none of my geometry education was taught with a practical motivation. But that being said, I was in the advanced track classes, so none of us were becoming professional carpenters. I’m actually probably one of the most “hands-on” people from that class, both in my job and in my life. I build scientific instruments and enjoy fixing things around the house.
I sin everyday.
cos i have to
tan I go to bed
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Trig is honestly the math I’ve used the most since finishing school. But to be fair, that is mostly because it’s useful as hell when doing game development as a hobby.
Or building some stairs or really a ton of shit. Basic trig is such a useful thing that it tells me people who complain about it have never built anything, virtual or physical.
as I’ve said in a different comment , it sucks how little space school gives to recreational usage of the skills we learn . I deeply enjoy recreational linguistics , writing , yet school seldom gave me the tools I find useful , having to find them on my own , despite being thought them previously .
if you were a more interesting person you could make up a use for them
Best take right here. Trig shows up a lot when you actually do stuff. Woodworking, programming, physics, art, music, philosophy. Math shit is universal human language.
Math shit is universal
humanlanguageMath shit is universal
humanlanguage. True.But the language part of it is pretty human.
I like doing stuff but my adhd literally won’t let me learn trig 🤣 my brain will just shut down and start daydreaming of literally anything else.
Don’t tell yourself that, unless you’re just not that interested. It takes more work and catering some creative solutions, but it is worth it. I got an engineering degree before I was ever even diagnosed or medicated.
I’m totally not interested in math stuff, like at all. If I need it for what I’m trying to do, or if it greatly helps me with it, I still end up learning it anyways though :) People often say that learning in practice is the best way and I feel like that is even much more true for me personally. I’m goal oriented af, and I make all those goals myself based on what I want to do. If I really really really want to do something, there’s nothing that will stand in my way, I’ll find a way. I’m the type of person to get frustrated and say “fuck this I give up”, only to be back at it after 30 mins because giving up isn’t actually something that exists in my head haha.
So no need to worry about me telling myself that. I guess I was thinking from the perspective of just studying it because of studying it, which yeah is basically impossible for me unless it’s just something I’m really interested in and I’m stuck browsing Wikipedia at 3AM. Thanks for the encouragement though, nice stranger! I really do appreciate it.
The other fields I get (trig is insanely useful), but how the bloody hell does one use trig functions in philosophy? Are we gonna be triangulating the border of science to solve the demarcation problem?
Math is philosophy, and trig does a very good job of describing the world we experience. The unit circle, right angles, pythagorean theorem, sinusoidal damping, etc, are all pretty philosophical concepts. What else could the be.
Honestly. If you’ve ever played a videogame, it will inevitably require trig.
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I’m might be splitting hairs, but I would argue by virtue of using a machine that uses trig, an individual is using trig, though abstractly. I’m sure you’re brother is dumb, yes.
You may have used them indirectly in the compression of your image
Fair enough, but did they use it? I always felt like focusing on statistics instead of random trig stuff for non stem people people would be more useful
Sticking with image compression, see Quite Okay Images. It treats each pixel as three numbers and expects mostly small changes. Recent pixels get hashed and can be referenced in a few bits. This is enough to compete with PNG filesizes, an order of magnitude faster, while handling each pixel exactly once.
though note than lossy formats , like JPEG which was used here , do use Fourier transforms , which are very intense trigonometry . IIRC PNG doesn’t use trigonometry either ,
though I’m not entirely sureyup PNG uses DEFLATE after some filtering , so no sine there I believe
Agreed, I use highschool level stats knowledge on a nearly daily basis, whereas the last time I did any trig was to follow along with a math video I was watching on YouTube. Trig/calc were mandatory, stats was not.
And stats really should be a mainline math class in high school. It comes up in so many places, and is far too often simplified away into a binary black & white choice.
Any time something happens that was predicted to be less than 50% likely, people lose their shit. For instance, when it unexpectedly rains or the wrong person wins an election.
But it’s not even being able to run the numbers or understanding statistical significance. It’s much more basic, just understanding that probabilities and uncertainty exist and are everywhere. My favorite example is when going to the doctor. They explain that whatever you have is probably X or Y, with a small chance of Z, but Y has been going around a lot and is easy to treat, so let’s try medication A for it. Then when that gets reported to friends and family afterwards, it’s “she said I have Y and I need A to fix it.”
Plus, if someone needs calculus for their major, they’ll just make them take it again in college. Why build high school math around it?
JPEG uses a lossy form of compression based on the discrete cosine transform (DCT).
Many modern compression schemes are more about signal processing than statistics , especially the lossy ones . IIRC 3blue1brown has a video on image compression if you want to learn about it in a visual way
The only function is sine, the rest are just remixes and ratios
Or cos if your weird
Or some say Kosm.
man I was talking about bloodborne today at work and I miss that game, might be time for a replay. Sucks that its 30fps tho
Yeah and I’ll bet you use Tau instead of Pi, don’t you, you human scum.
Sin(x+π/2)
cos(x-π/2)
It’s true.
Cos(x) is just the derivative of sin(x)
Alternatively, you could be this guy.
I aspire to be this man when I am that old.
Woah. I was really expecting the “will we ever use this in life”/“you won’t but some of the smarter kids might” strip, which is also SMBC.
I like math :) Its mysterious and fascinating and constantly surprising, like seeing the source code of the universe. Closest shit we have to actual magic.
Do I like math? Yes
Do I understand a tiny bit of it? Absolutely not
Me, whose going to start studying EE: 😭
HAHAHAHA GOOD LUCK! I’m in my final year of my EE study and I cannot wait to escape this mental asylum
Electrical Engineers are the psychos for using j instead of i. Absolutely bonkers.
Yeah, I agree. They messed up the scheme we had going. It was a good thing, and electrical engineers had to come and be all different, confusing everyone else along the way.
From my point of view the mathematicians are evil. I can’t stand them using i in my math classes, messing my whole scheme up. Respect for my physics prof in my first semester for switching to use the correct letter j
From my point of view the mathematicians are evil.
Well, then you are lost!
That’s a bit much dude, mathematicians gave us complex numbers. You can’t hate too much on the ones who invented our jobs 🤣
imagine using i instead of e1^e2
There is hope for you after the asylum. My daughter has an EE degree. While in school, she would call me every October and tell me how terrible it was and that she wanted to drop out. I would talk her off the ledge, and she got through.
Now she’s working, making more money than I do in her early twenties, and she loves loves loves her job.
Keep going!
Luckily I have 6 years of Electronics manufacturing experience, so the math and theory are the things I’ll need to learn most of. Unfortunately, those things are the hardest part…
Don’t worry.
Trig is not hard ☺️
Compared to what you’re also gonna learn 🤣
Signed, An EE graduate from 2016, who now works in embedded fixed point signal processing 😵
I use it all the time. I’m an engineer though so it doesn’t really counteract what you’re saying.
Contradict.
Counteract is also valid.
This is a counteraction.
Counteract means to oppose something to reduce its effect. Contradict means to say or do something opposite or inconsistent with something else.
Note how they are not mutually exclusive
Perfect, I can now use any word thats not mutually exclusive completely dependently (interchangeably) and be appreciated (understood)
No, you definitely still have to match the meaning to the context. That’s pretty fundamental to communication.
This attempted contradiction doesn’t seem to counteract the above comment.
One day, while working on a website, I was wondering how to calculate a specific point in a graph. After googling, the answer was by using sine and cosine. Mind blew away, I had always thought I’d never use them.
And guess what? You found it out without having to memorize the process until you knew it by heart.
Apparently, they didn’t know it by heart. If they had, they wouldn’t have had to spend all that time searching.
The point being that memorizing complex math is pointless unless you’re using it for some sort of day to day.
Complex? It’s just Sohcahtoa my friend
I thought this was early high-school level stuff.
Since becoming an adult it has become increasingly obvious to me that early high-school level stuff is impossibly complex for a significant chunk of the population.
It’s unfortunate that you are correct. However, when it comes to memorization, trig seems pretty tame. That one mnemonic just about covers it all. Even multiplication tables seem like a larger memorization effort to me.
Instructions unclear. Toe is still dry, dick stuck in super soaker.
Not really. The point of getting really good at it in your teenage years is so that when it shows up 30 years later you have a vauge idea of what you’re looking at and can figure it out again. If you had only a surface level understanding to begin with, it’ll all be totally gone by the time you need it again, and very few people have the gumption to teach themselves a subject from scratch.
The reason they drill it in to the extent that they do is so that you have a foundational understanding of the underlying math on which to build new knowledge. If you show up in calc 1 in college without remembering even the basic concepts you were previously taught in things like trig…that can really bite you in the ass. My teacher LOVED pulling out classic substitutions for Secant, Cosecant, and cotangent (No, i didnt outright remember them from Trig, but I had seen them, and that made refreshing much easier). Also these concepts then form the basis of many other fields such as physics (electricity/magnetism, kinetic motion, optics, etc.), chemistry (quantum, MO theory, and things relating to the physics side of why chemistry occurs), and many of the graphing concepts used in engineering/stem only make sense if you have the foundational understanding of what integration/derivation are. Those stem from understanding how to graph complex functions by hand (like we did in trig) so that when you are doing it later with assistance, you still GRASP what is going on.
Yes its not perfect, and yes for people who never need that later in life it can suck. However, I would make the argument it is better to have more of your population educated to a higher standard than what is needed in daily life, than to only give that to those who are aware enough at a young age to actively seek said education
Personally once you got to the Cos Sin Tan and Log part of math in grade 11 and 12 no amount of practice ever improved my understanding of the underlying principles. Once most of the work gets done in the calculator or computer I just lost sense of what was happening in the background. It’s just turned into put number in calculator and get answer. But that’s probably just a failing of the local school systems methods or the individual teachers maybe.
That’s where math starts getting spicy though!
You gain a new appreciation for logarithms when you do statistics.
There will be those that do and dont get the “nitty gritty” of the theory side of the math. Those people sometimes become math majors. Normal people (joking, dont be mad math majors), need more than simply the theory side of the math and actually need to see/perform the application side of things. I never once “understood” the lesson in math class when we go over the equations with variables only. I only truly began to learn the material and be able to use it once we got to the example problems. We would do multiple in class and then I would understand how to literally go through the problem and perform the math that was expected of me on the homework, and subsequently the test. There is tons of stuff i know how to use in math, but by no means understand WHY it came to be, or HOW its works for the realm of mathematics. I wanna know how this math can help me solve real life problems, problems I will face in industry, or even just a cool way to apply math in the real world. Not how it will be used in research to find new types of math we wont be able to apply for 70 years.
It was pretty funny being in calculus in college. I was in a class with mostly engineers who were also taking the exact same weed out courses, and nearly every day after the professor would finish showing us the theory side of the lesson, hands would shoot up and the question of, “What application does this have in real life or engineering? Like, how will I actually use this?” always got asked. So not “loving” the theory is by no means uncommon (we all wished for an application focused version of the class to exist, for people like stem students who are not into the math theory lol), but I still see the value in having it presented so that you can have a more foundational understanding instead simply going through the motions
[TRIGONOMETRY WARNING]
Trigonometry is extremely useful when constructing things. Need to know the length of wood needed to go from corner to corner. That’s trig my friend.
Go on…
A^2 + B^2 = C^2 is known as the Pythagorean theorem. This theorem explains the proportionality of the 3 sides of a right triangle (a triangle with 1 corner angle = 90 degrees). If you know the length of 2 sides (in his example, the wall beams) you can find out the length of the third (in his example, this would be the supporting strut spanning the beams that meet at a 90 degree angle). If their example is explaining a beam that spans the room from 1 corner to the other, you still use this formula as a rectangle is 2 right triangles that meet along their hypotenuse (the longest leg of a right triangle, or the length you are solving for in this problem). The 2 known sides are the length/width of the room, and you solve for the 3rd side, your diagonal beam
Did Pythagoras even know about sin, cos and tan? I am reluctant to call A^2 +B^2 =C^2 trigonometry.
Hipparchus, the alleged founder of trigonometry, was alive 350 years after Pythagoras (500BC to 150BC).
Completely fair point, that I do not think I have the knowledge to speak on. On the Trigonometry Wikipedia page, he pops up a few times, and many trig identities are known as pythagorean identities. Perhaps its not fully trig, but was used as a basis to help discover trig? Without having the understanding pythagorus gave mathematicians regarding triangles, I would think it would be pretty hard to begin developing deeper math regarding said triangles
Squaring using 3+4=5 is one of the oldest relationships used by masons. don’t need a ruler, just a piece of string or straight edge. Pythagoras described the relationship on paper
