I like math :) Its mysterious and fascinating and constantly surprising, like seeing the source code of the universe. Closest shit we have to actual magic.
Building anything requires trigonometry, unless you just say “fuck it” and hope the thing doesn’t fall apart, which is a pretty stupid way to live life.
Chicken coops have a ramp for the entrance, so when building it, you need to know the length of the ramp required for the desired angle, as well as making the"rungs" (I don’t know what they are actually called) on said ramp flush with the ground.
Fair enough, but did they use it? I always felt like focusing on statistics instead of random trig stuff for non stem people people would be more useful
Agreed, I use highschool level stats knowledge on a nearly daily basis, whereas the last time I did any trig was to follow along with a math video I was watching on YouTube. Trig/calc were mandatory, stats was not.
And stats really should be a mainline math class in high school. It comes up in so many places, and is far too often simplified away into a binary black & white choice.
Any time something happens that was predicted to be less than 50% likely, people lose their shit. For instance, when it unexpectedly rains or the wrong person wins an election.
But it’s not even being able to run the numbers or understanding statistical significance. It’s much more basic, just understanding that probabilities and uncertainty exist and are everywhere. My favorite example is when going to the doctor. They explain that whatever you have is probably X or Y, with a small chance of Z, but Y has been going around a lot and is easy to treat, so let’s try medication A for it. Then when that gets reported to friends and family afterwards, it’s “she said I have Y and I need A to fix it.”
Many modern compression schemes are more about signal processing than statistics , especially the lossy ones . IIRC 3blue1brown has a video on image compression if you want to learn about it in a visual way
Sticking with image compression, see Quite Okay Images. It treats each pixel as three numbers and expects mostly small changes. Recent pixels get hashed and can be referenced in a few bits. This is enough to compete with PNG filesizes, an order of magnitude faster, while handling each pixel exactly once.
though note than lossy formats , like JPEG which was used here , do use Fourier transforms , which are very intense trigonometry . IIRC PNG doesn’t use trigonometry either , though I’m not entirely sure yup PNG uses DEFLATE after some filtering , so no sine there I believe
Yeah, I agree. They messed up the scheme we had going. It was a good thing, and electrical engineers had to come and be all different, confusing everyone else along the way.
From my point of view the mathematicians are evil. I can’t stand them using i in my math classes, messing my whole scheme up. Respect for my physics prof in my first semester for switching to use the correct letter j
There is hope for you after the asylum. My daughter has an EE degree. While in school, she would call me every October and tell me how terrible it was and that she wanted to drop out. I would talk her off the ledge, and she got through.
Now she’s working, making more money than I do in her early twenties, and she loves loves loves her job.
Luckily I have 6 years of Electronics manufacturing experience, so the math and theory are the things I’ll need to learn most of. Unfortunately, those things are the hardest part…
Nah, I hired an electrician to handle all that for me. Now if I want electricity all I have to do is stick a plug in a socket, or flip a switch. It’s way more convenient.
My understanding is that if electrical demand starts outstripping supply the sinewave can start getting badly mishapen.
From watching videos about synthesizers and playing with VCV Rack I’ve learned far more about waveforms than I ever did from any electrical education or research
Not exactly. There’s a ratio of RPMs of the drive motor to the specific input of the alternator that generates the correct frequency. It depends on the way the alternator is designed (ie number of poles) that will yield the correct frequency, almost like a gear ratio, that is optimized for efficiency, and power plants have to constantly make slight adjustments to the drive motor speed the keep the frequency exact (usually done automatically within the drive control system).
I’ve never seen frequency be an issue in a residential system, but in theory it could happen.
I don’t know how it’s in 60Hz regions, but here the generators are in 3 phases, 120 degrees apart. The voltage gets transformed to up to 400kV, still in 3 phases, and then down to 400V when it’s distributed to peoples’ homes. Then you can pull 400V 3-phase or 230V 1-phase from your wall.
It’s the same here, though we have varying degrees of transmission and distribution voltages via transformers and regulators. In my area, power comes into our valley from the 500kv lines through the open desert, into the valley at 33kv, and stepped down to 5kv for neighborhood distribution that the single phase 240/120v transformers tap off for the EOL.
More of what I was getting at was that generation is more or less the same across regions. Some external fuel source (whether it’s diesel, natural gas, nuclear, steam, etc) does its thing to drive a rotor that’s connected into an alternator which is essentially an electric motor but instead of the electric motor doing the driving, it’s being driven which generates power, and the RPMs of whatever given fueled drive mechanism are not necessarily 1:1 with the alternator speed.
It used to be common for clocks to be driven directly off the electrical frequency. The US Navel Observatory would call up generator plants and tell them to slow down or speed up a little to make a correction to all the clocks. I’m not sure if that still happens, though.
I’ve heard that trope before, same reason clocks in US schools/govt institutions were always plugged into a wall, hence these. Nowadays, NTP has rendered that obsolete.
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