FoxTrot by Bill Amend for June 07, 2015

I don’t get it.

It’s the trigonometric tangent function: in degrees, tan(135)=-1, etc….

I think that of all the geeky strips that Amend has done, this has got to be the geekiest of them all! Hilarious!

..“working on our tans”!! hilarious!!

It’s Greek to me.

I hate Trigonometry and Calculus! I can live with Algebra, though!

But…who does trig in degrees? Or is this a meta thing where Amend doesn’t think the audience would grok radians?

Degrees because most of us think in rectangular coordinates not in polar coordinates. Tan is just y/x in rectangular coordinates. I’ve never been able to wrap my head around grads.

Glad to see I am not the only CE that reads the comics.

What’s your angle here?

If a couple sign the register, is that a cosine?

From the comments, there are 10 kinds of people – those who understand binary, and those who don’t.

I am horrible at math but I got this. I design and build stuff and need to use Trig a lot for angles. Its that X and Y stuff that confuses me!

I’m glad I’m on the minority that DOES get this joke without asking questions :D :D :D

I admire the mathematical mind as mine is somewhat limited; the’ working on our tans’ is a really great chuckler for the day!!

Even though this looks weird, it is still safer than the normal way.

The only time I use trigonometry is when I’m playing 8-ball.

Nerd jokes are what led me to like this comic in the first place.

A couple of really Tan Gents.Thanks!

General Class was easy, Extra Class is probably easy for “Elmer’s”.

Geeks rule.

Spherical trig for navigation was fun because it went to it’s origins.

True nerds would use radians: 3π/4, π/3, π/2

A bit late but the square root of 3 demands knowledge of the x^2 + y^2 = z^2 rule for right triangles. And the only reason for radians is to make d/dx (sin(x)) = cos(x). It’s the degrees that make the sqrt(3) exactly correct.