Trigonometric survey

In my friends’ Discord chat today one of them posed this:

Survey question. You’re doing a trigonometry question. It says you’re standing on a cliff 250m high looking at a rock that’s 450m away. Is 450m the hypotenuse or the base of the resulting triangle?

Just to be silly, I quickly drew this:

Trig drawing 1

But then another friend one-upped me with this:

Trig drawing 2

Incidentally, the original friend asked “Survey question” because he was surveying us to find out what we thought of this poorly framed high school maths question. A coworker had asked him for advice on what to advise his child while doing homework, and my friend decided to canvas for opinions. But at least two of us thought he’d said “Survey question” as a prelude to a question about surveying. English is funny sometimes.

This evening I had a Zoom meeting for ISO photography standards. This is an ad-hoc group meeting for one particular standard: ISO 15739 Visual Noise, held between the regular week-long digital photography meetings. The group of experts working on this particular standard have ongoing experimental work to discuss, so the project leaders organised this interim meeting to go through some technical details. We met for 90 minutes, and there was a lot of very interesting discussion. We agreed on the plan for further experimentation, which will be done hopefully it time for the next meeting in October.

For dinner tonight I varied my pizza making by trying out some calzones.

Calzones for dinner

I filled one with spinach and ricotta, and the other with mushrooms and ricotta. I didn’t know how much the insides would cook in the oven, so I pre-cooked the spinach and the mushrooms, and that seemed to work well. I also made a tomato sauce with garlic, onions, and herbs for spooning on top.

Calzones for dinner

They turned out really well! I was a little worried about the insides leaking in the oven, but they were fine, and delicious. My wife told me I can definitely make these again.

New content today:

2 thoughts on “Trigonometric survey”

  1. Thanks for the calzone idea! I made similar things yesterday, and they were very good.

    I used ready made frozen dough from the grocery store. I put tomato sauce on the inside, along with spinach and mozzarella. The pie leaked a bit, so I think I need to have a bit thicker base next time, and might put some onions and garlic in there, too.

    The only complaing my spouse had was that the portions were bit too small as I used one “regular” ball of dough for the calzone. Next time I’ll use two pieces and make a larger one.

  2. As a teacher, my advice to students on questions like this is always “make a clear picture showing how you interpret the question then solve based on your picture. Any conscientious grader will check whether your interpretation is feasible, even if it differs from the solution key.”

    Of course if it is a multiple choice test this may not help (I dislike those in part for that reason)…

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