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Trigonometry (thelemmy.club)
submitted 1 day ago by DakRalter to c/youdontsurf@lemmy.world

[Harold leaning back in his chair: Day 1209 of not using sin, cos or tan.]

I've been clean since 2002.

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[-] grue@lemmy.world 29 points 1 day ago

People in this thread don't DIY and it shows.

[-] blarghly@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Idk, based on conversations I've had with friends who are carpenters, I don't think they are bringing their graphing calculators to the jobsite. Instead they have a bunch of wiley tricks they use to get the right angle/cut without having to do math, since, even if they remember high school trig, it is faster and more accurate to just flip their square over or whatever

[-] SippyCup@lemmy.world 2 points 20 hours ago

Carpenters won't be using it, because the tolerances for what they're doing are large enough not to matter, and they'll usually sneak up on a fit rather than spend time doing math.

As it happens it's not as important as it used to be, but knowing trig was at once point a necessary skill in skilled manufacturing roles.

This sort of thing:

Which today would be done with CNC, back in the day that guy needed to know how to calculate where each of those holes was going to be.

That particular image is a space shuttle part on a horizontal mill in the 1970s. I toured a shop at my local power utility doing very similar work on similar machines today. But they're not hiring kids out of school for that jobs, because fucking nobody knows trig anymore.

this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2026
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