Memes @lemmy.ml

1y ago

Trig

166 comments

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!
  
  How do you run your appliances?
- 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.

Basic trigonometry is super useful and not that hard to understand or memorize.

I sin everyday.
- cos i have to
  
  tan I go to bed

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 ~~human~~ language
  
  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.
  
  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?
- Honestly. If you've ever played a videogame, it will inevitably require trig.

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.
  
  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.
  
  JPEG uses a lossy form of compression based on the discrete cosine transform (DCT).
  Wikipedia - JPEG
  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.
  
  Yeah and I'll bet you use Tau instead of Pi, don't you, you human scum.
  
  Sin(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.
  
  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.

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 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

[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

Me working on graphics and audio programming all day.

I see you have never built a chicken coop.
- I must be missing something in this comment.
  Can someone tell me how chicken coops are related to that ?
  
  One common application of trig is figuring out lengths and angles of triangles. Planning on building anything usually involves triangles.
  
  Building anything requires trigonometry, unless you just say "fuck it" and hope the thing doesn't fall apart, which is a pretty stupid way to live life.
  
  Chicken coops have a ramp for the entrance, so when building it, you need to know the length of the ramp required for the desired angle, as well as making the"rungs" (I don't know what they are actually called) on said ramp flush with the ground.

When you're in school you think calculus is the fucking shit, but in the real world you actually use trig way more often.

Oh I am sinning like a motherfucker

Meanwhile, pretty much every object in the room that had to be manufactured with any precision uses trig.

Weird, I use them almost every day doing procedural animation and modeling.

did you know 1209 is a prime number? or maybe not, I'm just a cat :3
- TIL cats are really bad at math.
  
  credit: usedsoil on instagram

Use them all the time as a mechanical engineer

I use trig every few years when buying a tv. Tv specs always list diagonal but rarely horizontal and vertical which is needed for knowing how a TV will fit in a space.
- I'm trying to figure out how you need trig for that. Just the Pythagorean theorem and ratios seem sufficient to me.
  
  Ratios can be used in trig -- if it's 1.5 times as long as it is tall, tan(\theta) = \frac{2}{3}, which then allows you to find the lengths of the other two sides easily so long as you have a calculator.
  
  I am trying to figure out why you'd even need that.
  The measurements of the product is usually written in the tech spec.
- I mean unless you're able to do it in your head in less than a minute, bringing a tape measure would probably be faster and easier.
  
  Or just check the spec on the box/website.

That is just cause you are unemployed.

Your phone relies on trigonometry.

No such luck as a physics prof :/

Having coded a 3D engine: sin and cos are cool. Tan can fuck right off. Atan doubly so.
And radians are the devil's work.
- fuck you radians are cool and atan is actually incredibly useful , so much they made atan2
  tan is also ok ig
- Anything that is "degrees" is the devils work. Radians are so neat and IIRC it makes a lot of trigonometry math easier. Yes, they're a bit weird to get into once one has been indoctrinated to degrees, but (pi/2) radians is just so nice.
  
  Yeah I fuckin' love dealing with transcendental constants and fractions just to describe a right angle. A quarter-circle being one-half just makes so much sense! It's awesome seeing all these mantissa-only numbers, because you can totally tell apart sane results and srand() without doing floating-point math in your head!

SOH-CAH-TOA , mothafucka'!
- just remember it with this simple mnemonic:
  Some Oranges Have
  Curly and Heavy
  Toes On Apples

But his arms are making a triangle.
With angles that need to be found...

I use all three every single day as a machinist xD
- I misread machinist as masochist at first honestly , though wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't far of

Damn, I've been trying but I keep relapsing

I use almost daily

I.e. day 1209 of not doing anything useful or being a poet. Are you a poet?

Not me. I went years without until last week I realised I needed them for a script that points an object at a target in Maya. Turns out trig is really fucking universal.

This guy.
He's known for a different meme, but he's used in this one and manages to look like he's posing at gunpoint after being told "look casual and not afraid. Now, smile."

The fuck you mean? I sin almost every day

In HS trig class I asked the teacher what was the actual logic behind the tan function, and she said "well it's just programmed into your calculator" and I said I realized that but how did it work, she told me to go ask the AP calc teacher.
- CORDIC algorithm

So no one makes little games as a hobby anymore?
- I used to, but I don't often find the time these days. Trig for days. Especially given most game input is in (x,y) format from analog sticks or WASD. Gotta turn that into angles! (Not that you need much trig to turn WASD into angles.)

Just don't play Warframe or Path of Exile and you can continue that streak

I use lerp() and d3.js so I don't have to use any of this shit.
- d3.v7.js uses sin cos and tan in total 410 times, thus you are indirectly using trig when using d3.js
- Try making something move in a circle

I don't think I've ever used them.

166 comments