The mathematical side of my job

I am perfectly willing to do a little light trigonometry myself as part of the morning at work; I am not going to write exercises that call for it outside a math book. (I noted that at the time, did something else instead, and no longer remember what I was thinking about using that would have required trig.)

Also, given that this is in fact a science book, we really want physical plausibility in the examples. Particular examples today included a motorcycle moving at one kilometer/second, and an exercise calling for calculating the frequency of a hypothetical wave based on a given wavelength in meters, v=fλ, and the speed of light in meters/second. It came to something on the order of 10^-29 Hz. (Yes, -29.) Swapping f and λ there doesn't produce a physically plausible answer either.

This is for one of our "all of high school science" review books, in the subcategory "states that have vast and detailed standards." The trig was incidental, for a setting-the-scene paragraph on relative motion, after I got a (correct) hunch that the orbital velocity given was for the equator. We're not selling books in Ecuador.

The motorcycle was easy, just swap in minutes for seconds; on the other I threw out the numbers and came up with some I liked. And wondered aloud to my colleague about whether the writer had actually read the manuscript.

The mathematical side of my job

I am perfectly willing to do a little light trigonometry myself as part of the morning at work; I am not going to write exercises that call for it outside a math book. (I noted that at the time, did something else instead, and no longer remember what I was thinking about using that would have required trig.)

Also, given that this is in fact a science book, we really want physical plausibility in the examples. Particular examples today included a motorcycle moving at one kilometer/second, and an exercise calling for calculating the frequency of a hypothetical wave based on a given wavelength in meters, v=fλ, and the speed of light in meters/second. It came to something on the order of 10^-29 Hz. (Yes, -29.) Swapping f and λ there doesn't produce a physically plausible answer either.

This is for one of our "all of high school science" review books, in the subcategory "states that have vast and detailed standards." The trig was incidental, for a setting-the-scene paragraph on relative motion, after I got a (correct) hunch that the orbital velocity given was for the equator. We're not selling books in Ecuador.

The motorcycle was easy, just swap in minutes for seconds; on the other I threw out the numbers and came up with some I liked. And wondered aloud to my colleague about whether the writer had actually read the manuscript.