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math for adults
Monday, September 28 2009
I continued work on the outhouse project, cutting off the tops of the corner pillars at an appropriate height and then notching them and installing parallel two by four lintel to support the rafters of the roof. I usually build a shed roof when I'm constructing a building, just because the geometry is easy and also easier to plan for roof runoff and where snow ends up. But my idea for the outhouse is to crown it with the huge Purple Martin house that has been languishing in our driveway for a couple years, and that would need to sit atop some sort of roof ridge. So I'll be building a nice gabled roof for the outhouse and then hoisting it to rest on those lintels.
This evening I found myself doing a little planning for the design of that roof, whose slope I want to keep relatively shallow. So I decided on a slope of 20% and then ran some trigonometric calculations to determine how long the sloped halves of the roof would be and what I'd need to do to keep the door from smacking into the gutter. This was one of the very few times since my adulthood that I've had any use for post-9th-grade mathematics. I program computers for a living, yet most of the math I find myself doing on a regular basis is both simple and purely discretionary. Here's the kind of calculation I find myself doing in a typical day: if a particle of extra solar dust is arriving from Beta Pictoris at 25 km/s and that star is 63.4 lightyears away, how long has that dust been traveling? Answer: about 760 thousand years. (That kind of math isn't really even as advanced as algebra.) The only other math I encounter frequently is tip calculation, which, while less discretionary, doesn't have to be all that precise. And I usually outsource that calculation to Gretchen.
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