> I also still don't entirely understand why school focussed on trig so much given that very few of us are navigating by sextant. Trig is useful for practical

> I also still don't entirely understand why school focussed on trig so much given that very few of us are navigating by sextant. Trig is useful for practical problems involving angles, and ubiquitous in applications in engineering and statistics. One year in school we spent a long time on logarithms and trig. Approaching 20 years later I consider it time well spent, and my one regret is that I didn't strive to understand it more deeply at the time, and had to revisit some details later (mostly about logarithms, but same category IMO).