For my Physics exam soon we're going to have to draw a little pictographical representation of a triangle being reflected off of a concave mirror, and draw in the image. But to do this, we have to draw tangent lines. Tangent to a curve, the curve representing the concave mirror. Nobody could do it right, because the stupid tangent lines are hard to do and you can't really tell when they're crooked, and even a slight shift from their proper position messes up the result.
Everybody is pretty worried about the exam, and the homework we have to hand in. But I've just had a stroke of brilliance. I won't use the crappy tangent-line-drawing method our Physics teacher offered, which is to measure out a millimeter from the point where we want the line to touch the graph to either side of the graph. That sucks, it's super imprecise.
I'll use Calculus instead.
Tape a cuadriculated sheet of paper to the back of my exam (have to use blank sheets), find the slope, draw the line, easy-peasy. I can't believe I'm the only one that's figured this out. I mean, HELLO. WE SPENT MONTHS DOING THIS IN MATH CLASS. The fact that nobody understood what was going on and just blindly filled in numbers and solved equations is no excuse.
HA! I'm not sure if I should keep tell my friends and classmates about this or pretend that I just had a stroke of genius while actually writing the exam. I know it's selfish of me, but I want to keep this to myself.
Because I love you all so much, I spent twenty minutes drawing this in Skitch.
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