• deranger@sh.itjust.works
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    3 days ago

    All of these people who don’t apply the things they learn in school just don’t really think that much in my opinion.

    When I was in the military in a leadership class, we had to use a protractor to calculate angles and distances on the map given a bunch of coordinates. I realized these were all right triangles, said fuck the protractor, and used trigonometry to get exact answers. I earned distinguished honor graduate, ie top of the class, despite my lab nerd POG ass being mixed in with a ton of infantry and ranger battalion guys.

    I use dimensional analysis on a near daily basis because it’s just so damn handy. You can convert anything to nearly anything else as long as you have some numbers with the appropriate units in between.

    • reptar@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Dimensional analysis needs to be taught way sooner (referring to USA education here). I’m sure I had some sense of it earlier, but it wasn’t explicitly spelled out to me until college engineering courses. That’s despite taking a significant number of AP and community college math and science courses in highschool. It seems like it should be part of middle school.