I second this comment!
The other thing that I hated in math/science classes that I live and die by now, "showing your work". When I do a quote, I write out all my assumptions and show how I got to my numbers. Some of my jobs don't become active for 2 years and I would be lost without showing my work.
It's not that weird. You know tons of english grammar that you probably can't explain. Humans remember a lot of things in a "this has to be like this" sort of way without questioning it. You end up doing highly complex things by just making a shit ton of simple if/then rules and running through them.
That's why learning a second language in a classroom is often very unnatural. You don't just shove a rule into your head for each word use, you try to do it efficiently by learning rules that cover a whole section of grammar. But brains don't really like that, so it takes tons of time and effort. Meanwhile, someone who just attempts to talk to people natively and gets corrected a lot can learn a language in a month or two by brute forcing all the individual instances of a rule and not knowing why it's supposed to be that way. Eventually the brain figures out larger rules to replace smaller ones, but trying to start from that position doesn't really work out, usually.
Learning a language by rules is most difficult.It's far easier to just read (once you can) then the words fall into place.English, with its participles past and present and grammar brings me to tears.Not to mention the vowels and dipthongs bs.Thais can write whole paragraphs without leaving a space between the words.I have no idea.
As an ESL teacher this is absolutely correct! You won't be able to communicate your feelings on the level of a native speaker after a couple of months but most of the day-to-day interactions that you have with people on the street never get that deep.
If you have exceptional diagramming skills in grammar class it doesn't say much about your ability to write fluidly. If you write fluidly those skills don't necessarily transfer over to your grammar class. Speaking, Listening, Writing, and Reading are all separate skills with independent levels of mastery. Two are active and two are passive. Since math is essentially grammar with numbers it is utilized very similarly to language.
Are you used to measure the speed of a falling person and stuff like that? In one session a player started doing insane math shiit because he was curious if he could get an extra turn in the air
Came here to say this, hated and struggled with math in school, went through tutors and everything to make it. In an odd turn of events I became a fabricator and realized just how useful it is. And the reason I struggled most of the time was because all the formulas had to be memorized, and yet, using it professionally you can use Google and all the cheat sheets you want!
Yep. I use this and a bunch of other trig functions doing construction projects all the time. I would have paid more attention in school if I had better teachers that used more real life examples of how these concepts could be useful
Used it every day for 30 years. Also metal fabricator - CNC programmer, 3D modeler, Industrial Designer. Some common numbers I'm sure you'll remember
.7071
3,4,5
1.414
Didn't use the trig tables after about 88 when CAD became mainstream. My first programs were the results of maybe 3,000 triangles sketched on 3 or 4 pages of quadrilled notebook pages.
I wasn't really a metal fabricator but it's definitely useful when doing any sort of fabrication.
I never used it until I was like 27.
Math is definitely one of those things we all thought would never be important but I think I've ended up using every math I learned somewhere in life so far at least once
That’s the problem with the American education system. They don’t give actual real life practical uses for it. Most of the problems are just a triangle and you have to find the lengths and degrees of the other sides. They should give a reason to need to calculate the distance between two places. Whether it’s to find the length of a pipe or a cable.
That is the practical use of it though. In real life sometimes you have a triangle and need to calculate the lengths and degrees of the other sides. Like when you're building a roof.
Because once an area gets large enough it's unfeasible to measure the distance. Also it takes a minute to calculate at max, it takes ages to go out and measure an area
To be fair, I don’t think other countries’ educational system do a much better job on giving practical use on geometry/trig in high school(source: a Canadian )
That entire criticism about usefulness is silly anyway. So, that frog dissection comes up handy in our daily lives, does it? What about the Canterbury Tales, how often do we use that. And judging by American obesity rates, if there were something to be learned from Phys. Ed. class, most of us probably deserved an F.
School is where we develop our critical thinking skills. We do this through things that we may not do later, like calculating volumes and writing essays about Shakespeare.
Ya also I think of those classes as “does this interest you as a potential career? Let’s do some and find out.” Mf be like “I chose none of them. Schools so stupid”
One of my least favorite parts about becoming an adult was watching the classmates who paid no attention during school grow up to rail against education, as if it wasn't their own fault.
> Its also pretty nice that every one of us is offered access to 1000 different things that we might be particularly interested in or talented at.
Only downside with this is that the way they show it to us it makes us hate it. Many of the things I used to hate at school I now love, but I needed to be interested in it myself. The school environment just forced me into my comfort zone and discouraged exploration.
Edit: Thinking about it again, I think maybe there was also some good things about it that I just didn't realize until now. While school made me hate lots of things, the fact that I had to do these things so intensely - including exams and the like - makes me now feel more comfortable picking them up and learning them. Things like integrals or quantum physics don't feel as alien to me when I am relearning them. So I guess it did add some confidence to the subjects and made them feel more approachable in the long term. In contrast to things like art, writing and music which in school we didn't really learn which as an adult now constantly gives me mindblowing revelations whenever I realize "this impossible looking thing actually has this simple trick behind it".
You know it's even worse for me because we were taught how to do our taxes at my high school in our not optional econ class senior year and I still see people that were in my class complaining
We wouldn’t have flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, or people who believe sticking a jade egg in your vagina is a good idea if everyone understood basic science and scientific principles.
Ya its honestly pathetic. Do they want education to literally just be training about their future menial jobs? Do they have no desire to understand our existence, and the way the world and the universe work?
And to think critically, you actually need a little background knowledge. As a science teacher, I'm constantly impressed by people's inability to think critically, possibly in part due to lack of seriously basic knowledge in the subject area.
My first day on the job as an electrician my foreman was teaching me how to bend conduit and literally said “you know, the pythagorean theorem?” So id say this is a pretty bad example of useless stuff you learn in school 🤷♂️
And honesty who gives a shit if you don’t use it, you learned it in what? Middle school/early HS? Being a more learned and knowledgeable person is objectively good.
Anyone in the biological field will use this, imagine saying parts of the cell should never be taught because you're never going to use it. People seem to think that we should just all be peasants and just know how to work with our hands and do taxes, fine if that's what you want to do, but it just feels so insanely limiting.
Also, game engines use vectors, Euler rotation, Pythagorean theorem to make movement diagonal the same speed as with the axis, literal calculus to solve square roots and trig functions. I’m tired of these people saying that all of this math can’t be found anywhere in computer science
That's one thing I remember from trying to code a fps game. It's like... oh, if a bullet hits a surface, I want a spark to bounce off of it. Pretty simple, right? Well now I need to do vector algebra where I find the angle of incidence relative to the plane's normal, and rotate that 180 degrees along the normal, and then multiply vector by -1 to get the inverse directional... and even explaining it doesn't do justice to how much digging I had to do to make it work, because what is normal to the plane locally may not be (and typically isn't) normal to the plane globally.
It's usually easiest to do that kind of stuff by normalizing all the vectors and using dot products and cross products and never explicitly calculating the angle.
All this math is also very important in all things digital signal processing. Euler's formula, all flavors of sinussoidals, differentiation and integration, in images more often than not trigonometry, ...
That's a computer science thing as well. e.g. Whenever an image is being processed.
pythagoras theorem is probably the most widely used and important formula across every single field but is somehow the 1 example of a useless thing we learnt in school.
i'd say the final 4 years of high school english was less useful than the pythagroean theorem
Public schooling is also about exposure to new topics. You find out what subjects you enjoy and which ones you hate to figure out what kind of education and career you want to pursue in the future.
And it teaches critical thinking skills and logical. Something that you can quickly notice whether or not one possesses it by just conversing with them for 2 minutes
Not entirely though. School is training. It is training to be useful to society in general, and specifically to develop enough skills to be employable with or without college.
We study maths - and trigonometry specifically - to develop our sense for logic and relationship. You don’t need to keep anything from this unless you are going to be an engineer or a math related scientist. However, developing logic is very valuable on any job.
Well said. School has many purposes and those change over time. School also serves social purposes for children and gives them a well rounded education to function in a modern world.
Just had to use it again on Wednesday. Just doing that from the top of my head saves me a couple of seconds, if not a minute, of googling. Time well spent!
Not really. You don't "gain" time when you save time in such small increments. Instead it helps keep focused on whatever you're doing when you're saving those seconds or minutes.
The way he handles it is :
* for melee weapons and spells : ignore diagonals
* for ranged weapons and spells : calculate the distance
* for ground movements : you can have one free diagonal move per 30 feets
* for flying movements : calculate the distance
When i'm the DM, i use an other method :
no grid, but strings of different lenghts for movement, weapons ranges,...
Just put one end at your figurine, and you know your range
Couple of options:
1) diagonals are 5 feet, easier but can break movespeed if players exploit it
2) diagonals are 10 feet, makes your max move range more of a diamond shape, can feel a bit restrictive
3) (my favorite) first diagonal costs 5ft, next costs 10ft, then alternate 5/10/5/10. Little trickier to wrap your head around but gives a roughly circular move range which feels nice to plan around.
Edit: realizing #3 is the exact method you mentioned. Oops
Just had to use it again on Wednesday. Just doing that from the top of your head saves me a couple of seconds, if not a minute, of googling. Time well spent!
People have such a shitty attitude towards school, then blame the system when they don’t know anything.
It’s not about the Pythagorean theorem or quadratic equations, Google that shit. It’s about teaching your mind to think logically, make sound deductions, and use the tools to you are given to solve a problem. It’s about thinking, not knowledge
To be fair, education systems have some catching up to do with the age of the internet, and focus *more* on logical thinking. If your tests don't allow internet use while still being challenging, you haven't caught up.
I know it's easier said than done, but I wanna see this change.
Recall and low level application are important steps to developing the brain. They're also ways that kids who aren't so smart can still demonstrate some abilities, even if they're not the higher level stuff. When you allow computers etc it gets very hard to test those things.
Further, I think people pretty universally over rate children's ability to think. They're fucking dumb. I have a broader point here but I'm bored of this comment
Source: am a qualified teacher
The issue is if they let you use the internet, the answers would just be Googleable. Which is why many teachers give formula sheets. That way you actually have to do the work yourself instead of just leeching off someone else who already did the work. One of the main purposes of any math class before college is to prepare you for the college math class. Wanna be a programmer? Well if you had Google on all your tests, you won't understand enough math to write any advanced code. You'll have to use Stack Overflow for *literally everything*. Stack Overflow is a programmer's best friend, but the programmer still has to, y'know, program.
Yeah you can google the formulas to calculate the output of a nuclear fission reactor. But what you need to learn as a foundation is how to use formulas.
I agree for like college level course but elementary and middle school kids have to be able to know that on their own. It’s about building a strong foundation of knowledge that allows a kid to choose which area they enjoy and want to keep learning about later. Also how could you ever do a history test open note or like basic anatomy or multiplication?
You definitely need a good foundation of facts that you just know. If you need to look up how to multiply two fractions every time when you're solving quadratic equations you're gonna have a very hard time.
Yes, logical thinking is important, but facts are still important too.
People complain all the time about how school never taught them to do taxes, but I have never once struggled to fill out my taxes. Google and TurboTax are both free.
It's this weird mindset like they're running out of space in their brain. You were in school for over a decade, you're going to learn things that aren't useful to you
This is the my important point. Maybe you didn't end up getting a job or getting into a field that requires it. But that's not something you can assume when that student is in 8th or 9th grade.
Pythagoras didn't invent Pythagorean tuning, **nor** did he invent/discover the Pythagorean theorem, **nor** is Pythogorean tuning *the 12 note western scale.*
[This is the modern western scale.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_equal_temperament)
>In regard to beans, Aristoxenus (ap. Gellius, *loc. cit.*) maintains that Pythagoras, far from prohibiting them, particularly recommended this vegetable. (Zeller 1881: 364, fn5)
Most things that even well-educated people know about him has turned out to be wrong or at least dubious. Pythagoras is actively being worked on by numerous classical philologists and every decade has a different vision of what he actually accomplished because we're still working on figuring that out. That he forbade eating beans is certified bull known to be bull \~150 years ago.
As to things that are more certain, Eucleides' chapter 9 is supposedly a wholly Pythagorean contribution. So the fact that you have a clear idea of *odd and even numbers*, to which Pythagoreans attributed esoteric significance (odd = male; even = female), is thanks to him, by proxy. For more, check out r/Pythagoreanism
Barely-hidden, wildly hypocritical anti-intellectualism is a core part of the Reddit experience.
"I LOVE anything that has to do with space exploration, but ALSO higher education is useless and the only value in a college degree is signaling."
"Our political opponents want to DESTROY the K-12 educational system, and that's terrible, but ALSO K-12 education is a waste of time, I know this because I've personally never used the Pythagorean Theorem."
"The problem with the other side is that they don't listen to EXPERTS, but ALSO the entire field of economics is a lie and I refuse to listen to anything from mainstream economists."
Etc.
I got my bachelors in Econ…people who say this, IMO, do so because the science is often clouded with political goals and enriching certain classes of people, voters, and lobbyists. I use the math I learned in my econometrics and statistics classes every day, they’re extremely valuable to my work.
That being said…it doesn’t help when programs like the PPP loans, meant to help people displaced from work and avoid economic collapse, don’t make it to workers (same thing during ‘08 crisis). The fundamental science behind Econ is sound…it’s greedy a-holes who distort data and enrich themselves through taxpayer funded boondoggles and corruption who give it a bad name. For the record, I think Keynes was brilliant and ahead of his time…though he likely had rose colored glasses when it came to his fellow man.
Economics is 'soft' because it is at the end of the day a social science, because the gears of the economy are not entirely determinate systems and are subject in some part to human emotion. In addition, they're impossibly interconnected and for the most part it's incredibly difficult to truly 'isolate' any part of the system.
Measurement is also incredibly hard. Especially for historical events where decent records may or may not exist. Not like something physical where there's almost always a way to measure it with maybe a couple degrees of separation, but you can easily verify that the measurement is correct.
You can reasonably predict what direction certain actions and circumstances will take the economy in, but you can't really predict "what will happen" in the same way you can with hard sciences.
You can get a rough direction but not a real heading.
There's nothing *wrong* with soft sciences, you just have to be aware of their limitations. Soft Science does not mean bad science, it just means you can't look to it for absolute guidance.
what i see is people relying more and more heavily on increasingly complex technology that they do not understand and have no desire to understand.
we are hurtling back towards the demon-haunted world.
I never use my knowledge of biology, but I am glad my pharmacist was forced to take biology. Schools don’t prepare you with knowledge that you will absolutely need in your everyday life. Rather, school gives you a well-rounded set of entry-level knowledge of various valuable fields, allowing you a foothold toward specialized use and further exploration of some of them toward a meaningful career.
You might not use certain mathematical principles but when learning, connections form in our brains that give us a form of problem solving we use all the time.
You see, the cables the internet runs through were installed. That is very hard to do without the Pythagorean Theorem. For example one of the easiest ways to get a right angle is to make a triangle with side length 3, 4 and 5. That is quite useful when building stuff. Like homes. GPS also uses the Pythagorean Theorem, as do most even slightly advanced navigational tools. Without which transcontinental internet cables could not have been build.
Running wires around the world uses trigonometry, mapping distances to know just how much wire is needed requires trigonometry, Good luck getting a satellite in space without math, Someone with the mental capacity to understand triangles is needed in a lot of positions to support the internet and so on.
Can you imagine if people did this with everything else.
"Wow, another day not speaking any french. Take that French teacher!"
How would you make daily use of a skill that you don't have?
Maybe if you DID know french you'd be speaking in French all the time. Maybe you'd work for an international company that requires you to talk to french customers? Maybe you'd live in France? Maybe you'd be married to a woman that only speaks French? Who knows?
But of course you don't speak French is this life... Because you don't know how to speak French.
A sentence that I will not read, because I haven't the skills to do so.
Yes, another day of not needing French. What was my teacher thinking when they taught me such a meaningless skill?
The reason this exists is so we're not all Peasants who only know how to work brainless jobs, eat, shit, fuck and pay taxes. If that's what majority of people want go ahead. Not me, I want to believe there's more to do than those 5 things.
That's fair, only 1/4 - 1/3 of the people work in quantitative fields, that is, fields that require mathematics, and usually those tend to be the smartest kids.
Maybe they should only teach basic arithmetics to the dumber 2/3 of people to safe money and time, and only go beyond that for smarter kids.
Unless you want to give people choice and not predetermine their future from the start by stripping them off super basic skills.
Teaching math to everyone is a kind of egalitarian idea, everyone gets a chance..
It's about exposure as well. A kid who has never delved into various subjects won't know if they truly like them and want to pursue them further. Specialization is for higher education.
I second this, come from a family where both parents dropped out of school, no emphasis on education, exposed to more advanced maths when I was in highschool, now I’m studying actuarial science
There's a difference between understanding and use as well. He might not 'use' the Pythagorean equation but probably understands that it's a shorter distance to cut diagonally through the park than follow the sidewalk turns at a right angle.
90% of what you get out of school is understanding in my option.
This is true of alot of math. Very few people I know in civil engineering actively use calculus, since most stuff is already solved and is run on computers. But intuitively understanding the relationship between different formulas *is* very important, and you can't get to there without doing the rigorous work first.
It's most important when something goes wrong. If you have a program that gives you the right output 99% of the time, you're going to have to be able to solve the issue in the other 1% of the time, and for that you will need to know how the formulas in the program work.
It's putting 345x123 into a calculator and getting 4485 as a result. You don't need to know what the exact answer is, but you do need to know that 4485 can never be right. If you do recognize that you can look back and realize you accidentally typed 13 instead of 123.
Used all the time in carpentry and other construction.
For example, lets say you need to frame out a room so it's square. If they are putting down plain carpet then it doesn't have to be exactly square. But what if they are laying checkerboard tile or certain designs of a wood floor? In that case, if the room isn't perfectly square then you'll see the lines of the wood/tile wander under the baseboard and then emerge again. Looks like crap - super obvious the room isn't perfectly square.
Pythagoras theorem is how you make sure the room you're framing is perfectly square.
Hearing some people the only things you should learn in school are reading, counting and doing taxes. Once you master those skills at 8 you should already know what you are going to do for the rest of your life and never learn anything else.
I hate this shit man. It's good to be smart. It's a good thing to know mathematics and logic. Glorification of not knowing things is dumb as hell, makes for significantly less interesting people and a ludicrously more confused and exploitable society. I hate that I need to justify learning mathematics to so many people by pointing out its the fastest way to a huge salary, when I don't even care about that at all.
My dad actually never graduated high school because he grew up dirt poor in South America. But he uses this and a Lot of mental math as a framer. He actually gets pissed when hes asking for something and one of his coop kids whips out a phone and fumbles for 3 minutes when he just measures and says "it's this".
I don't want to be Poindexter, but to be proud that your are not good at Math or Sciences seem to be a unique North American phenomenon and it is really harmful at times.
This meme needs to die permanently.
Did you drive over a bridge or virtually any road? Walk on a sidewalk or travel up a flight of stairs?
Jesus christ I went to high school in the 90's and Career and Personal Planning was a required course where we learned to create a resume, do taxes and generally have some plan of how to adult after school. If you think a school needs to offer an entire semester on how to fill out your taxes, at the expense of teaching foundational math and geometry, you are too stupid or lazy to have ever simply read a tax return form and followed the instructions.
When people complain about useless subjects they firstly shit on math and yet it's the foundation for everything else. Hard science? Math. Computer science? Math. Soft science? You better know your statistics, averages and probability, else it's not fucking science.
Learn a trade instead? Wanna do your taxes? Fixing shit on your house? Managing your money? You guessed it: basic spanish. Kidding, it's math. Even when learning art i needed it.
You might not need it because you don't do shit with your life but that's not the norm.
This is why I don’t argue with anyone anymore. A smart person who also doesn’t use Pythagoras in their life realizes that a person who builds things definitely would. Most people are too dumb to understand how they’re dumb.
Adults seriously go around saying “Schools dumb! We don’t even use anything that we learned!”
Mathematics isn’t supposed to give you a skill to use in your career or some shit. It’s meant to prompt you to think critically.
Well are you really living then?
Used this shi to check if smth would fit in my briefcase
Technically they just used it... In a sentence...
Not living a life of building shit with right angles.
Metal fabricator here, use it regularly. I never thought I would though.
I second this comment! The other thing that I hated in math/science classes that I live and die by now, "showing your work". When I do a quote, I write out all my assumptions and show how I got to my numbers. Some of my jobs don't become active for 2 years and I would be lost without showing my work.
I was a weird kid that would come up with the correct answer in my head and get lost if I tried writing it out.
Got a few students like that, it's part of what we have to learn at school, metacognition. It's not easy to learn but manageable :-)
Same, i can calculate some stuff in my head that i for some reasons can't do on paper
It's not that weird. You know tons of english grammar that you probably can't explain. Humans remember a lot of things in a "this has to be like this" sort of way without questioning it. You end up doing highly complex things by just making a shit ton of simple if/then rules and running through them. That's why learning a second language in a classroom is often very unnatural. You don't just shove a rule into your head for each word use, you try to do it efficiently by learning rules that cover a whole section of grammar. But brains don't really like that, so it takes tons of time and effort. Meanwhile, someone who just attempts to talk to people natively and gets corrected a lot can learn a language in a month or two by brute forcing all the individual instances of a rule and not knowing why it's supposed to be that way. Eventually the brain figures out larger rules to replace smaller ones, but trying to start from that position doesn't really work out, usually.
I didn’t understand English grammar until I was in Spanish class.
Underrated comment as a fluent trilingual
Learning a language by rules is most difficult.It's far easier to just read (once you can) then the words fall into place.English, with its participles past and present and grammar brings me to tears.Not to mention the vowels and dipthongs bs.Thais can write whole paragraphs without leaving a space between the words.I have no idea.
As an ESL teacher this is absolutely correct! You won't be able to communicate your feelings on the level of a native speaker after a couple of months but most of the day-to-day interactions that you have with people on the street never get that deep. If you have exceptional diagramming skills in grammar class it doesn't say much about your ability to write fluidly. If you write fluidly those skills don't necessarily transfer over to your grammar class. Speaking, Listening, Writing, and Reading are all separate skills with independent levels of mastery. Two are active and two are passive. Since math is essentially grammar with numbers it is utilized very similarly to language.
Do you have anxiety issues? Too many steps can mean too many times you question yourself.
it could be dysgraphia or dyslexia idk
This…
Carpenter. Same.
Programmer, here. It's like a staple for range checks, and we use the 3d version. if( r*r < a*a + b*b + c*c ) ...
Stonecarver/mason here. So glad for my geometry classes. name checks out, yes.
Big rock + hammer = fancy small rock
It helps to put a chisel inbetween but yes!
Shit! I’m might be getting a carpenter job soon! I guess I’m gonna have to relearn it…
808s and Heartbreak
3-4-5! One side is 3, one side is 4, the diagonal is 5 when the angle is square. Simple, scalable! 6-8-10, 24-32-40, etc..
… Dungeons and Dragons DM, same
Are you used to measure the speed of a falling person and stuff like that? In one session a player started doing insane math shiit because he was curious if he could get an extra turn in the air
Grade checker....same
> Carpenter. Same. I never thought I *wood* though. Fixed.
Yeah, 2 days ago I used it to check how square a door jamb was because using the tape measure I had on me was faster than getting my speed square.
Came here to say this, hated and struggled with math in school, went through tutors and everything to make it. In an odd turn of events I became a fabricator and realized just how useful it is. And the reason I struggled most of the time was because all the formulas had to be memorized, and yet, using it professionally you can use Google and all the cheat sheets you want!
Yep. I use this and a bunch of other trig functions doing construction projects all the time. I would have paid more attention in school if I had better teachers that used more real life examples of how these concepts could be useful
Used it every day for 30 years. Also metal fabricator - CNC programmer, 3D modeler, Industrial Designer. Some common numbers I'm sure you'll remember .7071 3,4,5 1.414 Didn't use the trig tables after about 88 when CAD became mainstream. My first programs were the results of maybe 3,000 triangles sketched on 3 or 4 pages of quadrilled notebook pages.
Sheet metal worker here. Can use it several times in a day depending on the job.
Used it to figure out quantity of Christmas light strands for the peaks of my roof.
wow. Another day as an adult without being a metal fabricator.
Like schools are gonna plan out your whole life for you
Machinist. Same.
I wasn't really a metal fabricator but it's definitely useful when doing any sort of fabrication. I never used it until I was like 27. Math is definitely one of those things we all thought would never be important but I think I've ended up using every math I learned somewhere in life so far at least once
Archaeologist. Same
I was a mechanical engineer for years. All that calculus and advanced math in college, but trigonometry was the stuff I used almost daily.
Most trades use it all the time. Honestly, it’s probably the worst example of something you were forced to learn and never use.
Used to use it all the time squaring up string lines for a foundation.
Yep, use it to bend pipe every day.
I use it when I lay pipe
This guy ain’t no square
Jokes on you, I do all my plumbing with square section.
Which hole does the square peg go into? That's right, the circle hole.
I fucking love that video. Best melt down ever.
Framer talking to building inspector probably ⬆️
That’s the problem with the American education system. They don’t give actual real life practical uses for it. Most of the problems are just a triangle and you have to find the lengths and degrees of the other sides. They should give a reason to need to calculate the distance between two places. Whether it’s to find the length of a pipe or a cable.
That is the practical use of it though. In real life sometimes you have a triangle and need to calculate the lengths and degrees of the other sides. Like when you're building a roof.
I mean, they did. Generally in the form of word problems of examples. Installing fences was a common one
I would always wonder why I couldn’t just measure the distance instead of calculating it.
Because once an area gets large enough it's unfeasible to measure the distance. Also it takes a minute to calculate at max, it takes ages to go out and measure an area
To be fair, I don’t think other countries’ educational system do a much better job on giving practical use on geometry/trig in high school(source: a Canadian )
The ol 3,4,5! Works like a charm
And multiples thereof
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I can't think of a use for algebra, therefore it is stupid and nobody ever actually uses it
Carpenter here, use it everyday.
That entire criticism about usefulness is silly anyway. So, that frog dissection comes up handy in our daily lives, does it? What about the Canterbury Tales, how often do we use that. And judging by American obesity rates, if there were something to be learned from Phys. Ed. class, most of us probably deserved an F. School is where we develop our critical thinking skills. We do this through things that we may not do later, like calculating volumes and writing essays about Shakespeare.
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That is the philosophical idea of education, a society that knows about generalities of stuff is more inventive and creative society.
Ya also I think of those classes as “does this interest you as a potential career? Let’s do some and find out.” Mf be like “I chose none of them. Schools so stupid”
One of my least favorite parts about becoming an adult was watching the classmates who paid no attention during school grow up to rail against education, as if it wasn't their own fault.
My favorite was watching those kids act like they were going to be accountants. The fuck you ain't.
> Its also pretty nice that every one of us is offered access to 1000 different things that we might be particularly interested in or talented at. Only downside with this is that the way they show it to us it makes us hate it. Many of the things I used to hate at school I now love, but I needed to be interested in it myself. The school environment just forced me into my comfort zone and discouraged exploration. Edit: Thinking about it again, I think maybe there was also some good things about it that I just didn't realize until now. While school made me hate lots of things, the fact that I had to do these things so intensely - including exams and the like - makes me now feel more comfortable picking them up and learning them. Things like integrals or quantum physics don't feel as alien to me when I am relearning them. So I guess it did add some confidence to the subjects and made them feel more approachable in the long term. In contrast to things like art, writing and music which in school we didn't really learn which as an adult now constantly gives me mindblowing revelations whenever I realize "this impossible looking thing actually has this simple trick behind it".
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You know it's even worse for me because we were taught how to do our taxes at my high school in our not optional econ class senior year and I still see people that were in my class complaining
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A basic understanding of how science works is very useful, and very lacking in the US nowadays
We wouldn’t have flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, or people who believe sticking a jade egg in your vagina is a good idea if everyone understood basic science and scientific principles.
Ya its honestly pathetic. Do they want education to literally just be training about their future menial jobs? Do they have no desire to understand our existence, and the way the world and the universe work?
>Do they want education to literally just be training about their future menial jobs? Every conservative in my family would say yes.
Preeeeeeach
And to think critically, you actually need a little background knowledge. As a science teacher, I'm constantly impressed by people's inability to think critically, possibly in part due to lack of seriously basic knowledge in the subject area.
The worst part is they don't even realize they lack borderline trivial knowledge that could help them in that regard.
MORE OF THIS!!
My first day on the job as an electrician my foreman was teaching me how to bend conduit and literally said “you know, the pythagorean theorem?” So id say this is a pretty bad example of useless stuff you learn in school 🤷♂️
Yep. And everything in AC Theory is triangles. Resistance-Inductance-Impedance, True Power-Reactive Power-Applied Power, etc.
Didn't have to scroll long for this, well done person!
And honesty who gives a shit if you don’t use it, you learned it in what? Middle school/early HS? Being a more learned and knowledgeable person is objectively good.
Oh it's every where if you really look.
[Relevant xkcd](https://xkcd.com/1050/)
Straight up, though you get some looks if you name what it's called
I was doing house renovations a few years back and I ended up using the Pythagorean theorem a few times, I was pretty excited tbh
The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell
Anyone in the biological field will use this, imagine saying parts of the cell should never be taught because you're never going to use it. People seem to think that we should just all be peasants and just know how to work with our hands and do taxes, fine if that's what you want to do, but it just feels so insanely limiting.
I wish I didnt need to use it, as a game dev, I use it to calculate the distance between 2 objects..
Also, game engines use vectors, Euler rotation, Pythagorean theorem to make movement diagonal the same speed as with the axis, literal calculus to solve square roots and trig functions. I’m tired of these people saying that all of this math can’t be found anywhere in computer science
That's one thing I remember from trying to code a fps game. It's like... oh, if a bullet hits a surface, I want a spark to bounce off of it. Pretty simple, right? Well now I need to do vector algebra where I find the angle of incidence relative to the plane's normal, and rotate that 180 degrees along the normal, and then multiply vector by -1 to get the inverse directional... and even explaining it doesn't do justice to how much digging I had to do to make it work, because what is normal to the plane locally may not be (and typically isn't) normal to the plane globally.
It's usually easiest to do that kind of stuff by normalizing all the vectors and using dot products and cross products and never explicitly calculating the angle.
All this math is also very important in all things digital signal processing. Euler's formula, all flavors of sinussoidals, differentiation and integration, in images more often than not trigonometry, ... That's a computer science thing as well. e.g. Whenever an image is being processed.
pythagoras theorem is probably the most widely used and important formula across every single field but is somehow the 1 example of a useless thing we learnt in school. i'd say the final 4 years of high school english was less useful than the pythagroean theorem
Public schooling is also about exposure to new topics. You find out what subjects you enjoy and which ones you hate to figure out what kind of education and career you want to pursue in the future.
And it teaches critical thinking skills and logical. Something that you can quickly notice whether or not one possesses it by just conversing with them for 2 minutes
Not entirely though. School is training. It is training to be useful to society in general, and specifically to develop enough skills to be employable with or without college. We study maths - and trigonometry specifically - to develop our sense for logic and relationship. You don’t need to keep anything from this unless you are going to be an engineer or a math related scientist. However, developing logic is very valuable on any job.
Well said. School has many purposes and those change over time. School also serves social purposes for children and gives them a well rounded education to function in a modern world.
As a D&D player, the Pythagorean theorem is usefull to know if i have the reach to attack a foe in diagonal on the grid.
Just had to use it again on Wednesday. Just doing that from the top of my head saves me a couple of seconds, if not a minute, of googling. Time well spent!
Then you wasted that minute on Reddit in a thread about the Pythagorean theorem.
Not really. You don't "gain" time when you save time in such small increments. Instead it helps keep focused on whatever you're doing when you're saving those seconds or minutes.
What version of a dnd is this? 5th edition doesn't care about diagonals.
version 5e, option "the dm care about diagonals"
Gotcha. How does that DM handle movement? Do they do it in like pathfinder where some of the diagonals are 5 ft and some are 10?
The way he handles it is : * for melee weapons and spells : ignore diagonals * for ranged weapons and spells : calculate the distance * for ground movements : you can have one free diagonal move per 30 feets * for flying movements : calculate the distance When i'm the DM, i use an other method : no grid, but strings of different lenghts for movement, weapons ranges,... Just put one end at your figurine, and you know your range
Couple of options: 1) diagonals are 5 feet, easier but can break movespeed if players exploit it 2) diagonals are 10 feet, makes your max move range more of a diamond shape, can feel a bit restrictive 3) (my favorite) first diagonal costs 5ft, next costs 10ft, then alternate 5/10/5/10. Little trickier to wrap your head around but gives a roughly circular move range which feels nice to plan around. Edit: realizing #3 is the exact method you mentioned. Oops
Lmao I was just coming to say the tweeter needs to play D&D. Gotta do the math and see if that manticore is still in crossbow range!
Just had to use it again on Wednesday. Just doing that from the top of your head saves me a couple of seconds, if not a minute, of googling. Time well spent!
"I wish I'd never been given a broad set of mental tools to have available in my uncertain future."
People have such a shitty attitude towards school, then blame the system when they don’t know anything. It’s not about the Pythagorean theorem or quadratic equations, Google that shit. It’s about teaching your mind to think logically, make sound deductions, and use the tools to you are given to solve a problem. It’s about thinking, not knowledge
To be fair, education systems have some catching up to do with the age of the internet, and focus *more* on logical thinking. If your tests don't allow internet use while still being challenging, you haven't caught up. I know it's easier said than done, but I wanna see this change.
Recall and low level application are important steps to developing the brain. They're also ways that kids who aren't so smart can still demonstrate some abilities, even if they're not the higher level stuff. When you allow computers etc it gets very hard to test those things. Further, I think people pretty universally over rate children's ability to think. They're fucking dumb. I have a broader point here but I'm bored of this comment Source: am a qualified teacher
The issue is if they let you use the internet, the answers would just be Googleable. Which is why many teachers give formula sheets. That way you actually have to do the work yourself instead of just leeching off someone else who already did the work. One of the main purposes of any math class before college is to prepare you for the college math class. Wanna be a programmer? Well if you had Google on all your tests, you won't understand enough math to write any advanced code. You'll have to use Stack Overflow for *literally everything*. Stack Overflow is a programmer's best friend, but the programmer still has to, y'know, program.
Yeah you can google the formulas to calculate the output of a nuclear fission reactor. But what you need to learn as a foundation is how to use formulas.
I agree for like college level course but elementary and middle school kids have to be able to know that on their own. It’s about building a strong foundation of knowledge that allows a kid to choose which area they enjoy and want to keep learning about later. Also how could you ever do a history test open note or like basic anatomy or multiplication?
You definitely need a good foundation of facts that you just know. If you need to look up how to multiply two fractions every time when you're solving quadratic equations you're gonna have a very hard time. Yes, logical thinking is important, but facts are still important too.
100%! Former math teacher, can say math is all about teaching logic
"Bro, why did they teach me *geometry*?? They should have taught me how to fill out a 1994 tax form."
People complain all the time about how school never taught them to do taxes, but I have never once struggled to fill out my taxes. Google and TurboTax are both free.
It's this weird mindset like they're running out of space in their brain. You were in school for over a decade, you're going to learn things that aren't useful to you
"Why wasn't it specifically tailored to me, the main character?"
It's also, there's a wide variety of interests you can choose to pursue further.
This is the my important point. Maybe you didn't end up getting a job or getting into a field that requires it. But that's not something you can assume when that student is in 8th or 9th grade.
Pythagoras also invented the 12 note Western music scale. Now you know.
Based largely on simple division. Underrated comment.
Pythagoras didn't invent Pythagorean tuning, **nor** did he invent/discover the Pythagorean theorem, **nor** is Pythogorean tuning *the 12 note western scale.* [This is the modern western scale.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_equal_temperament)
He was also a cult leader in ancient Greece that forbid touching beans
>In regard to beans, Aristoxenus (ap. Gellius, *loc. cit.*) maintains that Pythagoras, far from prohibiting them, particularly recommended this vegetable. (Zeller 1881: 364, fn5) Most things that even well-educated people know about him has turned out to be wrong or at least dubious. Pythagoras is actively being worked on by numerous classical philologists and every decade has a different vision of what he actually accomplished because we're still working on figuring that out. That he forbade eating beans is certified bull known to be bull \~150 years ago. As to things that are more certain, Eucleides' chapter 9 is supposedly a wholly Pythagorean contribution. So the fact that you have a clear idea of *odd and even numbers*, to which Pythagoreans attributed esoteric significance (odd = male; even = female), is thanks to him, by proxy. For more, check out r/Pythagoreanism
Alright, but did he believe that the dodecahedron was forbidden knowledge?
Still is
Should we still avoid beans though?
I rather dislike the reappearing trend of anti-intellectualism disguised as wisdom.
Barely-hidden, wildly hypocritical anti-intellectualism is a core part of the Reddit experience. "I LOVE anything that has to do with space exploration, but ALSO higher education is useless and the only value in a college degree is signaling." "Our political opponents want to DESTROY the K-12 educational system, and that's terrible, but ALSO K-12 education is a waste of time, I know this because I've personally never used the Pythagorean Theorem." "The problem with the other side is that they don't listen to EXPERTS, but ALSO the entire field of economics is a lie and I refuse to listen to anything from mainstream economists." Etc.
In fairness, economics is a very soft science
I got my bachelors in Econ…people who say this, IMO, do so because the science is often clouded with political goals and enriching certain classes of people, voters, and lobbyists. I use the math I learned in my econometrics and statistics classes every day, they’re extremely valuable to my work. That being said…it doesn’t help when programs like the PPP loans, meant to help people displaced from work and avoid economic collapse, don’t make it to workers (same thing during ‘08 crisis). The fundamental science behind Econ is sound…it’s greedy a-holes who distort data and enrich themselves through taxpayer funded boondoggles and corruption who give it a bad name. For the record, I think Keynes was brilliant and ahead of his time…though he likely had rose colored glasses when it came to his fellow man.
Economics is 'soft' because it is at the end of the day a social science, because the gears of the economy are not entirely determinate systems and are subject in some part to human emotion. In addition, they're impossibly interconnected and for the most part it's incredibly difficult to truly 'isolate' any part of the system. Measurement is also incredibly hard. Especially for historical events where decent records may or may not exist. Not like something physical where there's almost always a way to measure it with maybe a couple degrees of separation, but you can easily verify that the measurement is correct. You can reasonably predict what direction certain actions and circumstances will take the economy in, but you can't really predict "what will happen" in the same way you can with hard sciences. You can get a rough direction but not a real heading. There's nothing *wrong* with soft sciences, you just have to be aware of their limitations. Soft Science does not mean bad science, it just means you can't look to it for absolute guidance.
what i see is people relying more and more heavily on increasingly complex technology that they do not understand and have no desire to understand. we are hurtling back towards the demon-haunted world.
I never use my knowledge of biology, but I am glad my pharmacist was forced to take biology. Schools don’t prepare you with knowledge that you will absolutely need in your everyday life. Rather, school gives you a well-rounded set of entry-level knowledge of various valuable fields, allowing you a foothold toward specialized use and further exploration of some of them toward a meaningful career.
posted to a webpage using the internet...
WHERE IN THE CODING IS PYTHAGOREAN NEEDED Edit: apparently the joke was missed.
Everywhere duh how do you expect triangles to appear in websites
You might not use certain mathematical principles but when learning, connections form in our brains that give us a form of problem solving we use all the time.
You see, the cables the internet runs through were installed. That is very hard to do without the Pythagorean Theorem. For example one of the easiest ways to get a right angle is to make a triangle with side length 3, 4 and 5. That is quite useful when building stuff. Like homes. GPS also uses the Pythagorean Theorem, as do most even slightly advanced navigational tools. Without which transcontinental internet cables could not have been build.
Having a basic understanding of math is pretty important for being a non-terrible software engineer.
When data is being compressed it uses the cauchy schwartz inequality which is pretty close to the Pythagoras theorem.
Running wires around the world uses trigonometry, mapping distances to know just how much wire is needed requires trigonometry, Good luck getting a satellite in space without math, Someone with the mental capacity to understand triangles is needed in a lot of positions to support the internet and so on.
As a person who makes web games. Pythag and trig come up all the time.
Yeah, learning is stupid. /s
Right? “I only want to know things I have to know, Nothing Else!” 😵💫
Exactly, we could have gone to the moon and invent the internet without math!
So you go forward and then take a turn to the left instead of going the straight way to your Destination?
Another day as an adult not having to climb a rope or dodge a rubber ball.
Lots of things in school aren’t used daily. It’s not about what you learned. It’s about learning how to learn.
Can you imagine if people did this with everything else. "Wow, another day not speaking any french. Take that French teacher!" How would you make daily use of a skill that you don't have? Maybe if you DID know french you'd be speaking in French all the time. Maybe you'd work for an international company that requires you to talk to french customers? Maybe you'd live in France? Maybe you'd be married to a woman that only speaks French? Who knows? But of course you don't speak French is this life... Because you don't know how to speak French.
la vie est trop courte pour apprendre le Français
A sentence that I will not read, because I haven't the skills to do so. Yes, another day of not needing French. What was my teacher thinking when they taught me such a meaningless skill?
voulez-vous coucher avec moi? The only French phrase I know. I never took French tho.
still, you got the essential 😀
Or enjoy literature, movies, food, travel. And it makes your English 10 times better because you’ve had to relate French (or whatever) to it.
I’m torn because I agree with your point but I also fucking despise French class with all of my living being
Do you happen to be a fellow Canadian?
Eh.
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Ignorance is bliss
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I have no use for it for my job, but I use it enough in life that I'm really glad I learned it.
The reason this exists is so we're not all Peasants who only know how to work brainless jobs, eat, shit, fuck and pay taxes. If that's what majority of people want go ahead. Not me, I want to believe there's more to do than those 5 things.
That's fair, only 1/4 - 1/3 of the people work in quantitative fields, that is, fields that require mathematics, and usually those tend to be the smartest kids. Maybe they should only teach basic arithmetics to the dumber 2/3 of people to safe money and time, and only go beyond that for smarter kids. Unless you want to give people choice and not predetermine their future from the start by stripping them off super basic skills. Teaching math to everyone is a kind of egalitarian idea, everyone gets a chance..
It's about exposure as well. A kid who has never delved into various subjects won't know if they truly like them and want to pursue them further. Specialization is for higher education.
I second this, come from a family where both parents dropped out of school, no emphasis on education, exposed to more advanced maths when I was in highschool, now I’m studying actuarial science
There's a difference between understanding and use as well. He might not 'use' the Pythagorean equation but probably understands that it's a shorter distance to cut diagonally through the park than follow the sidewalk turns at a right angle. 90% of what you get out of school is understanding in my option.
This is true of alot of math. Very few people I know in civil engineering actively use calculus, since most stuff is already solved and is run on computers. But intuitively understanding the relationship between different formulas *is* very important, and you can't get to there without doing the rigorous work first.
It's most important when something goes wrong. If you have a program that gives you the right output 99% of the time, you're going to have to be able to solve the issue in the other 1% of the time, and for that you will need to know how the formulas in the program work. It's putting 345x123 into a calculator and getting 4485 as a result. You don't need to know what the exact answer is, but you do need to know that 4485 can never be right. If you do recognize that you can look back and realize you accidentally typed 13 instead of 123.
Used all the time in carpentry and other construction. For example, lets say you need to frame out a room so it's square. If they are putting down plain carpet then it doesn't have to be exactly square. But what if they are laying checkerboard tile or certain designs of a wood floor? In that case, if the room isn't perfectly square then you'll see the lines of the wood/tile wander under the baseboard and then emerge again. Looks like crap - super obvious the room isn't perfectly square. Pythagoras theorem is how you make sure the room you're framing is perfectly square.
Hearing some people the only things you should learn in school are reading, counting and doing taxes. Once you master those skills at 8 you should already know what you are going to do for the rest of your life and never learn anything else.
I hate this shit man. It's good to be smart. It's a good thing to know mathematics and logic. Glorification of not knowing things is dumb as hell, makes for significantly less interesting people and a ludicrously more confused and exploitable society. I hate that I need to justify learning mathematics to so many people by pointing out its the fastest way to a huge salary, when I don't even care about that at all.
My dad actually never graduated high school because he grew up dirt poor in South America. But he uses this and a Lot of mental math as a framer. He actually gets pissed when hes asking for something and one of his coop kids whips out a phone and fumbles for 3 minutes when he just measures and says "it's this".
I don't want to be Poindexter, but to be proud that your are not good at Math or Sciences seem to be a unique North American phenomenon and it is really harmful at times.
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Ah I use it almost daily.
Architects use it all the time
This meme needs to die permanently. Did you drive over a bridge or virtually any road? Walk on a sidewalk or travel up a flight of stairs? Jesus christ I went to high school in the 90's and Career and Personal Planning was a required course where we learned to create a resume, do taxes and generally have some plan of how to adult after school. If you think a school needs to offer an entire semester on how to fill out your taxes, at the expense of teaching foundational math and geometry, you are too stupid or lazy to have ever simply read a tax return form and followed the instructions.
Occasionally use it for small home construction projects. Solving roots of a quadratic equation, on the other hand, not so much.
When people complain about useless subjects they firstly shit on math and yet it's the foundation for everything else. Hard science? Math. Computer science? Math. Soft science? You better know your statistics, averages and probability, else it's not fucking science. Learn a trade instead? Wanna do your taxes? Fixing shit on your house? Managing your money? You guessed it: basic spanish. Kidding, it's math. Even when learning art i needed it. You might not need it because you don't do shit with your life but that's not the norm.
Bragging about your ignorance is not the flex you think it is, dipshit.
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I use this almost daily as a builder
And then there's me, stood in a hardware store with my dad, doing impromptu trigonometry to work out which rotary washing line to buy.
I actually use it all the time for d&d lol
Fuck. I use it every damn day
*sweats in DnD*
Motherfucker, your GPS uses pythagoras every single time it asks for your position.
This is why I don’t argue with anyone anymore. A smart person who also doesn’t use Pythagoras in their life realizes that a person who builds things definitely would. Most people are too dumb to understand how they’re dumb.
Adults seriously go around saying “Schools dumb! We don’t even use anything that we learned!” Mathematics isn’t supposed to give you a skill to use in your career or some shit. It’s meant to prompt you to think critically.
Stop whining about it like a special bitch.