Oh, that makes sense.
I would just picture the triangle in the unit circle in my head. And remember that tan(π/2) was undefined, so cos(π/2) had to be zero. So then sin was the vertical one and cos the horizontal one.
And I wonder, what possible catastrophe came crashing down from heaven and brought this dashing stranger to tears?
Drusilla ,'Conversations with Dead People'
Spike's Bitches 38: Well, This Is Just...Neat.
[NAFDA] Spike-centric discussion. Lusty, lewd (only occasionally crude), risqué (and frisqué), bawdy (Oh, lawdy!), flirty ('cuz we're purty), raunchy talk inside. Caveat lector.
tommyrot - Nov 18, 2007 3:14:45 pm PST #4647 of 10002
Sir, it's not an offence to let your cat eat your bacon. Okay? And we don't arrest cats, I'm very sorry.
meara - Nov 18, 2007 3:16:18 pm PST #4648 of 10002
Yeah, whereas I'm going "OK, but...I don't remember WHY you would need the sine or tangent of anything..."
tommyrot - Nov 18, 2007 3:17:34 pm PST #4649 of 10002
Sir, it's not an offence to let your cat eat your bacon. Okay? And we don't arrest cats, I'm very sorry.
'Cuz trigonometry kicks ass!!
Emily - Nov 18, 2007 3:20:54 pm PST #4650 of 10002
"In the equation E = mc⬧, c⬧ is a pretty big honking number." - Scola
I would just picture the triangle in the unit circle in my head. And remember that tan(π/2) was undefined, so cos(π/2) had to be zero. So then sin was the vertical one and cos the horizontal one.
And that's easier? Wow.
Mind you, since I never took trigonometry, I have to kind of laboriously construct the whole unit-circle thing in my head, and figure out where the right angle goes and all that, and it certainly doesn't come naturally.
meara, if you know a couple things about a right triangle and need to find something else, basically. In this case, we knew what one of the angles was, and we knew what the length of the hypotenuse was supposed to be, but the program would only let us set the length of one of the other sides, so we had to figure out what that should be in order for the hypotenuse to be the right length. If I could draw a picture, you'd totally know what I meant.
tommyrot - Nov 18, 2007 3:24:37 pm PST #4651 of 10002
Sir, it's not an offence to let your cat eat your bacon. Okay? And we don't arrest cats, I'm very sorry.
And that's easier? Wow.
I would always forget which was which for sin and cos. I knew tan was the ratio of sin/cos, and I thought undefined results were cool (at some point we had to graph tan x for x=0 to 2π or something)....
Zenkitty - Nov 18, 2007 3:31:45 pm PST #4652 of 10002
Every now and then, I think I might actually be a little odd.
Yeah, when those trig questions come up for me, I just... oh, wait. That never happens.
Tonight I'm gonna have that nightmare where I'm in geometry class and I don't know any of the answers.
vw bug - Nov 18, 2007 3:33:36 pm PST #4653 of 10002
Mostly lurking...
Emily! Did you get the Internet to work at home? I mean, you must have, but...
NoiseDesign - Nov 18, 2007 3:36:05 pm PST #4654 of 10002
Our wings are not tired
Laga hang in there. My holidays are routinely a source of a lot of pain due to my family.
tommyrot - Nov 18, 2007 3:36:54 pm PST #4655 of 10002
Sir, it's not an offence to let your cat eat your bacon. Okay? And we don't arrest cats, I'm very sorry.
Tonight I'm gonna have that nightmare where I'm in geometry class and I don't know any of the answers.
The other night I had that nightmare were I was running for Congress but forgot to campaign.
OK, not really a nightmare. But I ended up losing. To my brother.
Hil R. - Nov 18, 2007 3:43:33 pm PST #4656 of 10002
Sometimes I think I might just move up to Vermont, open a bookstore or a vegan restaurant. Adam Schlesinger, z''l
Which leads to the question: is it really so important that EVERY student learn to factor ALL factorable quadratic equations?
If they are ever planning to take any college-level math classes, yes. Or at least learn that, if they can't factor something, the next step is the quadratic formula.
(The homework I was grading today has a problem where the had to find the roots of x^2 - 2x -4. A significant number of them wrote x^2 - 2x = 4, so x(x-2)=4, and so either x=4 or x-2=4. Most of the rest used the quadratic formula. A few graphed it on a graphing calculator and found the approximate roots. One completed the square.)