Klaus, Hey! I'm pleased to find out that someone else out there knows how to go back to the basics and use the 'right triangle' approach! When I was without network access, without my reference books, and had to figure out the lumber needed to build an extension on my mother's house, it was done by using right triangles! Of course I had to learn how to do square roots 'by hand' again, but it was possible!
Over in SurvPC we're talking "surviving" and how low-end computers can be run on solar/wind/battery conditions, etc. None of us are "Survivalists" but a number of us have been poor, had rough times, and learned how to cope. We also had the decent educations they were handing out in elementary & high school in the 40s and 50s. We had to learn to "think on our feet," something that isn't taught in schools any longer. I wonder just how many engineers or contractors could sit down with a ruler, pencil, paper, and log tables, and do the computations. I wish I knew where my log tables were, because then I wouldn't need to know how to do a square root. <G> Before I forget it, yes, please, forward me a copy of that nice little program you've made! OK, now that I've said that, I have a project I just envisioned. I'll wager that most of the people reading here have "tricks" they have learned to do things that youngesters just grab their 'notebook' for. Wouldn't it be totally k00l <G> to get a website going [and later maybe print a book] with all those tricks there for anyone to find. Wanna bet that another simple thing my Grandpa knew isn't taught today? How about laying the foundation for a building using twine and the 3,4,5 method to get a right triange? l.d. ==== On Thu, 1 Nov 2001 07:07:26 -0500 (EST), Klaus Hameyer wrote: > L.D.Best wrote: >> Another nice thing would be if I provide a number of distances, it could >> do the trig or whatever to compute the unknown distance/angle. >> ... >> I don't have my fancy calculator that did trig functions any longer, I >> would have to look in Encyclopaedia Britannica to find the trig >> equations and then probably wouldn't remember which one to use, and > Quite some time ago, I wrote a little program in Pascal to figure > out the angle from the sides, and the sides from the angle of a > right triangle. It's very basic, but it saves a lot of time looking > up sin, cos, tan in tables. If you (or anyone else) want a copy, > send me an e-mail. > Klaus Hameyer > Burlington, VT (USA) -- Arachne V1.70;rev.3, NON-COMMERCIAL copy, http://arachne.cz/
