Blank Stare

If you ever catch me giving you the blank stare

It means that you have bored me so much, that I'm doing something else in my mind instead of having to deal with you. I'm thinking about ANYTHING other than what it is that you're making me go through, and it's better than you.

Now, on first guess you're going to say that I'm nerding out and dealing with something fun, like D&D or games of some sort. Now this is true, sometimes, but not neccisarily the rule of thumb. If I give you this blank stare and then I start looking happy like I just solved a math problem in my head that's been bugging me for a long time, then yes, I'm most likely thinking about something like this.

For example, today in the flavor of boring that was hitting me I was trying to remember trigonometry so I could solve the question that if a ramp was sloped down at only one degree or even less than one degree for an entire mile, assuming that we're not taking into account the curvature of the world, how far down that would go. This mean that I started to draw a right triangle in my head with the hypontonuse being one mile, and then the angle being 1 degree and then working out what I would need to do to that to solve for the opposite and not the adjacent.

I can't remember exactly why I was thinking this, it might have had something to do with the sewer system in the D&D game and I wanted to make them run at a slight angle down to drain water, but I didn't want the sewage to get too out of hand so I was trying to figure out what the rise over run would be if the slope was only at a 1 degree slope.

The math for anyone wondering turned out to be


tan (1) = 1 mile (5280 feet) / opposite
1.557 = 5280 feet / opposite
opposite (1.557) = 5280 feet
opposite = 5280 / 1.557
opposite = 3,391.13 feet.

So at a slope of only one degree, a mile length of sewage pipe would drop roughly 3,391 feet which is almost two thirds of a mile drop (rounding up by a lot, it's actually 60% of a mile, but whatever). Needless to say, sewage pipes are going to now have a much smaller slope in D&D now. Yes, I'm a nerd, and yes I use trigonometry to answer basic questions about city planning in a fictional setting, and most importantly, yes finding the solution to that does make me smile just a bit.

Back to topic.

Blank stares, and me.

It's going to happen. And realize that when it does, I'm just trying to make myself not yell at you for things being so boring. Instead of yelling, I just remove myself from the situation. Now because I know that most situations don't work that great with me just walking out of the room during the middle of whatever is going on, I remove myself mentally. I'd much rather be vacationing in the sewage system of some not yet named city and doing city planing within it, than do what I'm stuck with you doing, so I blank stare. The best part about it, is that blank stares are where I get my best work done. It's in those boring moments that I come up with some of the best and most creative ideas. The more boring life is, the better I get at creativity, so thank you. Thank you for contributing to the fine art, and not so fine art, that comes out of my mind when I blank stare you.


EDIT- I just looked at my math and it seemed wrong, when it's not 3:30 in the morning, I'll give it a second look and work it out on pen and paper, I think I got my ratios wrong and did the trig wrong. Don't tell me the answer! I'll figure it out when I get bored at work!

Edit #2-
So I've come back to this problem, and the question is if we're focusing on 1 mile of distance above ground, (which would mean that we know the adjacent length, looking for opposite) or if we're talking about 1 mile of distance on the ramp (which would mean that we know the hypot length and looking for opposite).

With that in mind, we have two potential problems, both which deserve to be solved.

Problem #1- We know adjacent length, and are looking to solve for opposite.

This is where we would use tan(x) = opposite/ adjacent

You'll notice here that I did the math wrong the first time I did this and forgot the ratio of tangent functions. In the first post I had the ratio of tangents being adjacent/opposite, but now that I'm awake I can see the mistake and say that tan = opp/adj as we can remember from the little phrase, "SOHCAHTOA" so-ca-toe-ah.


The other problem that I ran into was that my calculations were in radians instead of degrees. This makes numbers look a LOT bigger, and considering that I'm starting off with one DEGREE I should be smart and make my calculator work in degrees.

With those changes done we get
tan(1) = opposite/ 5280 feet
5280*tan(1)= opp
92.16274 feet = opposite.

This means that assuming that the above ground distance of one mile, the sewage pipe at 1 degree only drops 92.16274 feet. This makes MUCH more sense than what I said before, and sewage pipes are resting a bit easier than the botched math that I was running before.

Problem #2, you have a mile of the pipe and want to know how far you drop in that mile (this should be less than problem #1 by knowing simple geometry, but we'll use trig to show you just how much of a difference.

For this one we're going to be using-
sin(1) = opposite/hypot
sin (1) = opp/ 5280 feet
5280* sin (1) = opp
92.1487 feet = opp

THERE WE GO! Finally, when I'm awake and know what I'm doing, I don't make as many mathematical mistakes.