My introduction was through model rocketry. Somewhere along the line, Al-Biruni's method for finding the radius of the earth was brought up. That was in the ear

My introduction was through model rocketry. Somewhere along the line, Al-Biruni's method for finding the radius of the earth was brought up. That was in the early '70s, in what would be "junior high" in the US (elementary school in my part of Canada). It was always about right triangles, not periodic functions, at the beginning, which makes a whole lot of sense - trigonometry was both useful and used for a whole lot of years before calculus was invented. And like logarithms in the pre-scientific-calculator days, there was a point where one turned to tables for practical reasons without thinking of the table values as "magicical" - we were taught how to calculate intermediate values to the limits of practicality. Is there any practical sense (a sense that would be useful for people who would be entering the trades track) in being able to calculate much more accurately than you can measure angles?