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Three Generations
of Service
Picture of PHPaul
posted February 26, 2021 11:28 AMHide Post
quote:
Originally posted by trapper189:
The worst thing about trig used to be looking up the factors in the tables I’m the back of the book. They all use calculators now.


And when the time comes, I likely will too, for just that reason. But I need to understand what I'm doing first.




Be careful when following the masses. Sometimes the M is silent.
 
Posts: 15663 | Location: Downeast Maine | Registered: March 10, 2010Reply With QuoteReport This Post
7.62mm Crusader
posted February 26, 2021 11:33 AMHide Post
quote:
Originally posted by PHPaul:
quote:
Originally posted by TigerDore:
My son doubted my math abilities but brought this problem to me when having some trouble. I solved it quickly; it left him speechless.




If you need any help. Let me know.



.


The one math course I really enjoyed and understood thoroughly in High School was Plane Geometry. That's a 3-4-5 right triangle. Or, from our Greek friend Pythagoras, A-squared plus B-squared equals C-squared.

Or, phrased as a Dad Joke:

There was an Indian Chief, and he had three squaws. And kept them in three tee-pees. When he would come home late from hunting, he would not know which tee-pee contained which squaw.. being dark and all. He went hunting one day, and killed a hippopotamus, a bear, and a buffalo. He put the a hide from each animal into a different tee-pee, so that when he came home late.. he could feel inside the tee-pee and he would know which squaw was inside.

Well after about a year, all three squaws had children. The squaw on the bear had a baby boy, the squaw on the buffalo hide had a baby girl. But the squaw on the hippopotamus had a girl and a boy. So what is the moral of the story?

The Squaw on the hippopotamus is equal to the sum of the squaws of the other two hides.
I honestly could not, did not learn to solve trig problems on paper. Straight to the scientific calculator. I learned it as a Indian name, sorta...Soa Cah Toa. Used depending on division or multiplication. Interesting that how we were taught, any trig problem can be solved. As a high school class was being taught across the hall, our teacher would say they are never going to use what they were learning. Trig is good stuff Paul. You can learn this.
 
Posts: 18044 | Location: The Bluegrass State! | Registered: December 23, 2008Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Member
posted February 26, 2021 12:17 PMHide Post
The best thing I learned was about trigonometry was an Indian named "Soh Cah Toa". That, along with the 3,4,5 triangle example.

This might not be politically correct now, but it sure helped me a lot.


--Tom
The right of self preservation, in turn, was understood as the right to defend oneself against attacks by lawless individuals, or, if absolutely necessary, to resist and throw off a tyrannical government.
 
Posts: 1648 | Location: Lehigh County,PA-USA | Registered: February 20, 2005Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Dances With
Tornados
posted February 26, 2021 12:33 PMHide Post
Here's a helpful hint... If the angle of your dangle is not...well yanno, go see the doc for some of those little pills. And set the timer for 4 hours.
 
Posts: 12078 | Location: Near Hooker Oklahoma, closer to Slapout Oklahoma | Registered: October 26, 2009Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Experienced Slacker
posted February 26, 2021 12:46 PMHide Post
https://www.udemy.com/course/trig-by-krista-king/

If you prefer a soothing female voice to learn from. I know that's always my preference.
 
Posts: 7553 | Registered: May 12, 2004Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Savor the limelight
posted February 26, 2021 12:54 PMHide Post
quote:
Originally posted by PHPaul:
quote:
Originally posted by trapper189:
The worst thing about trig used to be looking up the factors in the tables I’m the back of the book. They all use calculators now.


And when the time comes, I likely will too, for just that reason. But I need to understand what I'm doing first.

Looking up numbers in the tables instead of using a calculator won’t help you learn trig. I would say trig is the one part of high school math where the calculator will help you learn. Most high school and earlier math, the process is the most important aspect of mastering the math. It might be fun to go through a Taylor series to approximate the sine of an angle once, you aren’t going to want to do it every time, hence the reason for the tables or just use a calculator.

In other words, how you calculate sin() isn’t an important aspect of what you do with sin() to master trig.
 
Posts: 12145 | Location: SWFL | Registered: October 10, 2007Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Freethinker
Picture of sigfreund
posted February 26, 2021 01:15 PMHide Post
The one absolute, positive way to ensure we never use mathematics like trigonometry is to never learn it. I use trig and algebra and geometry fairly regularly; not often, but when I need one, I have it.

As an aside, a^2 + b^2 = c^2 is usually considered to be plane geometry, not trigonometry.




6.4/93.6

“ Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one’s own mind without another’s guidance.”
— Immanuel Kant
 
Posts: 48025 | Location: 10,150 Feet Above Sea Level in Colorado | Registered: April 04, 2002Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Live Slow,
Die Whenever
Picture of medic451
posted February 26, 2021 02:08 PMHide Post
I told my dad I needed help with my math homework once. He studied the problem for a couple of minutes, looked up and said “When the fuck did they start adding letters?”.



"I won't be wronged, I won't be insulted, and I won't be laid a hand on. I don't do these things to other people and I require the same from them."
- John Wayne in "The Shootist"
 
Posts: 3528 | Location: California | Registered: May 31, 2004Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Not really from Vienna
Picture of arfmel
posted February 26, 2021 02:27 PMHide Post
Oscar had a heap of apples
Sine, cosine, tangent
 
Posts: 27302 | Location: SW of Hovey, Texas | Registered: January 30, 2007Reply With QuoteReport This Post
His Royal Hiney
Picture of Rey HRH
posted February 26, 2021 02:36 PMHide Post
quote:
Originally posted by PHPaul:


I was an Electronics Tech. Nothing much beyond a little basic Algebra.

The idea behind learning some Trig is twofold:

1) There have been times recently when being able to "do the math" myself would have saved some time and

2) The brain is a muscle and needs exercise, especially as we age.


Completely understand. I bought Rosetta Lifetime language learning for that reason and am also writing a reference book myself.

Where you were stationed at (and I'm just imagining with no actual knowledge), I figured listening on communications also included tracking where those ships were and where they were headed. So I could be completely wrong.



"It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life – daily and hourly. Our answer must consist not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual." Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, 1946.
 
Posts: 20314 | Location: The Free State of Arizona - Ditat Deus | Registered: March 24, 2011Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Three Generations
of Service
Picture of PHPaul
posted February 26, 2021 02:50 PMHide Post
quote:
Originally posted by Rey HRH:

Where you were stationed at (and I'm just imagining with no actual knowledge), I figured listening on communications also included tracking where those ships were and where they were headed. So I could be completely wrong.


For the first half of my career, that was indeed the business I was in. However, my job was to keep the electronics that did that working, not do the actual tracking.

To give you an idea of the level of technology I worked with, there was a computer called the OPU, or Outstation Processing Unit. It was a Bunker-Ramo (I can't for the life of me remember the designation) about the size of a refrigerator and was comprised of lebendy-seven individual circuit cards, each of which had a couple of dozen discrete transistors. The memory was a magnetic core unit and (IIRC) held a whopping 64Kcorrection, 8K of data. It was programmed via mylar tape.

It's entire purpose was to route incoming communications to the proper workstation and collect outgoing communications and send them to the comm center.

It was a freaking nightmare to troubleshoot. Thank goodness I never went to that school. Keeping the antique crypto units running was bad enough.

EDIT: Found it - the AN/UYK-3




Be careful when following the masses. Sometimes the M is silent.
 
Posts: 15663 | Location: Downeast Maine | Registered: March 10, 2010Reply With QuoteReport This Post
7.62mm Crusader
posted February 26, 2021 03:40 PMHide Post
Maybe your local WalMart. Casio is pretty much the most affordable scientific calculater. Pick one up.
 
Posts: 18044 | Location: The Bluegrass State! | Registered: December 23, 2008Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Member
posted February 26, 2021 03:46 PMHide Post
If you are looking at books on the subject, you may want to consider what the emphasis is of the book. Orienteering and surveying both use aspects of trigonometry which doesn't really need more than the fundamentals. Descriptive geometry, statics (trusses and such), and other types of "layout" applications apply the fundamentals of trig in a slightly different way.

If you want to get into advanced mathematics like calculus, differential equations, and their applications like vibration, modal analysis, impact, and other oscillating phenomena then you're going to want to get into the true mathematical aspects of sine , cosine, and their approximations (Taylor series). (everything interesting can be unitized and modeled between -1 and 1).

Ken
 
Posts: 1052 | Location: Oklahoma | Registered: December 28, 2010Reply With QuoteReport This Post
I Deal In Lead
Picture of Flash-LB
posted February 26, 2021 03:48 PMHide Post
quote:
Originally posted by PHPaul:
I was an Electronics Tech. Nothing much beyond a little basic Algebra.

The idea behind learning some Trig is twofold:

1) There have been times recently when being able to "do the math" myself would have saved some time and

2) The brain is a muscle and needs exercise, especially as we age.


I'm a retired Electronic Engineer. Never used anything beyond algebra in my whole career.

Did use it once helping a friend figure out 3 sets of guy wires for his 50 foot tower, though.
 
Posts: 10626 | Location: Gilbert Arizona | Registered: March 21, 2013Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Member
posted February 26, 2021 04:10 PMHide Post
Breezed through Plane Geometry, Algebra was tougher, but made it through, Trig was a different story, many of us didn't get it and I think it was mainly the teacher.

Got through the year by cheating somewhat, knew I would never get through Finals! Finals came and Praise the Lord, it was the year in NY when the tests were cancelled due to someone stealing the answers or something. We all skated through with our yearly average Big Grin


_________________________________________________

"Once abolish the God, and the Government becomes the God." --- G.K. Chesterton
 
Posts: 3856 | Location: WNY | Registered: April 11, 2009Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Banned for
showing his ass
posted February 26, 2021 04:26 PMHide Post
I went as far as Diff Eq in math. Most of my math really did not do much for me in life with the exception of Trig (subset of Geometry) ... specifically, squaring up building a deck or something of that size: a^2+b^2=c^2 (Pythagorean Theorem). Probably the most helpful equation I ever used.
 
Posts: 3190 | Location: PNW | Registered: November 16, 2012Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Member
Picture of TigerDore
posted February 26, 2021 06:28 PMHide Post
I went through Algebra II and Trig in high school, then had to do a year of calculus in college because of my major(Plus the math equations in chemistry). I hated it, but managed. I have never used calculus a day of my life in business and I wouldn't have the slightest idea about how to solve a calculus problem now.

I cannot imagine how it helped me, except to force me to buckle down, study hard and stay with something even though I hated what I was doing.



.
 
Posts: 9161 | Registered: September 26, 2013Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Banned for
showing his ass
posted February 26, 2021 07:39 PMHide Post
quote:
Originally posted by TigerDore:
I went through Algebra II and Trig in high school, then had to do a year of calculus in college because of my major(Plus the math equations in chemistry). I hated it, but managed. I have never used calculus a day of my life in business and I wouldn't have the slightest idea about how to solve a calculus problem now.

I cannot imagine how it helped me, except to force me to buckle down, study hard and stay with something even though I hated what I was doing.



.


Totally agree with all you said ... and the same with taking Ochem, which I barely passed, though did give me an understanding about Thermite later in life.

PHPaul ... what is your end game in learning Trig ? Something needed as a job requirement or something to learn for daily use ?

There are parts of Physics (Conservation of Linear Momentum) this is easy to learn and understand especially with driving a car or with firing a bullet out of a gun. Other useful math is auto mechanics, time management, financial ... stuff like that.

Wish I could add more ideas, but my glasses are sliding down my nose and I need to put another bandaid on the bridge.
 
Posts: 3190 | Location: PNW | Registered: November 16, 2012Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Drug Dealer
Picture of Jim Shugart
posted February 27, 2021 02:27 AMHide Post
I was a math minor in college and have been watching a bunch of YouTube math vids during the Covid-19 confinement. If you're really trying to learn trig, I have two suggestions:

1 - Get a good textbook. It's not like reading history. With a book you can scan over things that you understand and go back and puzzle over things that are less clear. It's not easy to do this while watching a video.

2 - It's imperative that you solve a lot of problems yourself. It sucks and it takes time and mental effort but it's absolutely necessary, so make sure your textbook contains a lot of problems, both solved and unsolved. (No pain: No gain.)

Schaum's Outline series has a number of trig books available on Amazon. I've not used any of them, but have used several in other mathematical fields. They aren't very expensive (unlike most college level textbooks). Do make sure that you get the paper book, not an electronic edition.



When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth. - George Bernard Shaw
 
Posts: 15529 | Location: Virginia | Registered: July 03, 2007Reply With QuoteReport This Post
7.62mm Crusader
posted February 27, 2021 05:23 AMHide Post
It might suck Jim but its also very rewarding when he begins to understand solving problems. Good stuff all around. I believe I have multiple copies of something I got in Trade School. Lemme look Paul as this would be very helpful to start.
 
Posts: 18044 | Location: The Bluegrass State! | Registered: December 23, 2008Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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