Who needs high school when you have Google?

So a guy at work is planning an addition to his house and wanted to buy some nice windows off Craigslist for the addition.  The windows go in the gables of the house and he needed to know the angle of the windows to see if they ere the same as the angle of the roofline.  We knew the dimensions of the windows, but not the angles.  Sounds like a textbook trigonometry example from high school to me.  Ya know, the kind that your math teacher claims you’ll need in the real world after somone complains “why do we have to learn this crap?!”

So, here we are.  Three intelligent, reasonably educated IT professionals, a white board, and plenty of computing power.  After some head scratching we were able to remember “SOHCAHTOA” and what it stood for (Sin = Opposite/Hypotenuse, Cosine = Adjacent/Hypotenuse, Tangent = Opposite/Adjacent), but that was about it…

Next, came the power of Google!  A simple search for “tangent triangle” and a click on the second result labeled “right triangles” and we had our answer about two paragraphs down!

The result?  5 minutes of head scratching followed by less than 2 of skimming a Google search result and we had our answer.

So tell me, why did I take 4 years of highs school math (including a year of trigonometry) and then a bunch of classes in college as well?  Yea, I know we remembered that we needed tangent, but I’m sure Google would have given us the answer even if we didn’t know what we needed.  Just kind of shows how times have changed in the 25 years I’ve been alive (almost 26 as Patti would point out).