There's a lot of stuff we learned in school that we don't ever have a chance to use anymore. When I come across an instance where I can use the knowledge, and it actually works, it feels like magic or something.
Do you ever find yourself kind of impressed by the neat things you learned in school that are laying dormant in your long term memory?
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I was trying to figure out whether this arcade cabinet would fit through my doorway, but wasn't sure (I didn't want to wait until the thing was in front of me to know). I knew the monitor was 29", that there wasn't more than two inches of cabinet frame outside of the monitor's borders, and that the monitor area was the widest part of the cabinet.
However, that 29" size is the diagonal width of the monitor - so, how to figure out what the width of the monitor is? Well, it's 4:3 aspect ratio, I think, so, if x is width, y is height and 29 is the diagonal, then:
x^2 + y^2 = (29)^2
3x=4y
y=4/3x
and eventually I come up with a horizontal width of 23.2 inches and a vertical width of 17.4 inches. Add a few inches to that horizontal width, and you get 27, which is small enough to fit through my doorway.
Neat stuff. I was an English major, and I didn't take any real math classes at school, so this is knowledge I haven't really had to use in years. It's fun to know that it's still around.
