On 08/11/2020 04:33 AM, Cindy Hamilton wrote:
On Monday, August 10, 2020 at 8:57:06 PM UTC-4, %% wrote:

I like those who have enough of a clue to work
out whether the last couple of years of high
school will be any use to them and who choose
to leave school as soon they can legally, or even
before that and get on with their useful lives.

Isn't the last couple of years of high school the time when
they teach American Government (if they still teach that)?

That could go a long way to explain why people do so poorly
when asked difficult questions like "How many branches of
government are there?"

Cindy Hamilton


I thought that's when they got into bowdlerized world history, but it's
been a long time. Trig was in the junior year and spherical trig in the
senior. I took calculus rather than spherical. i can't remember the last
time I used calculus but spherical trig is handy if you're doing GIS.

One of our clients projected the data into WGS84, the common
geographical coordinate system used by web maps, GPS's and so forth.
Most use the State Plane coordinate system which gives a flat grid. The
distance from point A to point B is a simple hypotenuse and the map
scale is in feet or meter. For a geographical system you need at least
the haversine formula although the Vincenty formulae are more accurate
for oblate spheroids.

The good news is the Datum of 2022 ain't happening in 2022. When you
start using GPS data you notice all those nice terrestrial benchmarks
are drifting around. Maybe your doghouse hasn't moved with reference to
the tectonic plate it's sitting on but the whole mess is moving.