Practical trigonometry.

Here’s hoping that you took your middle school math teacher seriously when hei told you “listen, kids, trigonometry matters” and “mark my words you WILL use trig in real life someday” in the face of the some of the more willfully ignorant kids in class, like chuckling Chuckie and his churlishly spear-chucking chums.

Of course, Mr. Lemieux was right : if you want to design your own customii furniture, such as approximately-trapezoidal-but-ultimately-pentagonal glass table tops for your new office, you’d better know your way around a triangle. Exempli gratia : 

glass table - 1

 

The above was the first draft, which was all well and good in theory, except in theory there’s no difference between theory and practice ; but in practice there is. So it was that right before we made the cut, we rather sensibly measured twice, checked our assumptions regarding the size of the petite room as well as the squareness and flatness of the walls, all of which revealed that we didn’t quite have 300cm along the east wall after all. And as much as I wanted certain lines to line up certain ways, there was no practicable way to wedge this ideal layer between the glass cutters and my office’s physical constraints, at least not if I was to maintain a respect for Euclidian space and my equally important desired table depth.

glass table - 2

Next came the grid paper for scaled analysis.

glass table - 3

Before the final drawings were submitted to the glass cutters.

glass table - 4

Et la piece de resistance : le produit final!

glass table - 5

The only question remaining is : do you see an “L” or a “V” ?

___ ___ ___

  1. “He ?! What is this, Pete, 1875 or something ? God, you’re so intolerant sometimes.” Heh, God indeed ; there’s no intolerance quite like that of the null set
  2. Because built-to-order MCM reproductions are soooo last month, n’est pas ? Hon hon hon

One thought on “Practical trigonometry.

  1. […] and toys, and the entertainment room. The upstairs is where the living room, kitchen, bedrooms, and my study are located, so there’s plenty of functionality crammed into this little 1`100 sft […]

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