The thread drifted when people started asking questions (more AOA = more lift or more drag?). I enjoyed the chance to link everything together from start (AOA) to finish (drag force). Of course nobody is going to do that while they're flying. But maybe somebody who digs aerospace engineering will benefit from how that was laid out and a lightbulb will go off for them somewhere in the chain of events.
I actually quite enjoyed your explanation, before you tainted it with your [HASHTAG]#haterade[/HASHTAG].
I think you may have misconstrued my tone. I'm basically amused, and trying to be funny. I'm definitely not trying to bash you—it's just that generally when people think they're explaining things by using equations, they don't notice that everyone else is basically glazing over. I've tried to read a few aerodynamics publications like that, and I find it very irritating to have a simple, intuitive concept contaminated with ever-increasing levels of weird glyphs and symbols. It's the same as when I try to explain to people what I did with computers. I'd spend a whole series of excited paragraphs explaining how I was the senior systems architect for a massive global compute cloud, and talk about the provisioning system I designed, and all of the automation I built, and people would come back and say "So... you were a programmer?"
Personally, I am relatively technically ept, but to me math is like sheet music that I can't read—I am a musician, and I can play all sorts of music on all sorts of instruments, and pick it up by ear really quickly. But when people break out sheet music, I just see lines and dots and gobbledygook. I can pick through it, given enough time, and figure out about what it's supposed to sound like... and then if it's something I recognize, I can just pick it up from memory by association. But it's a lot easier to do without all the ink.
Thinking in mathematical terms is much like sight-reading—if you're trained to do it, and you practice it hard enough, often enough, and long enough, it can become a language that makes sense. Given a deep enough understanding, it can seem like the most logical, beautiful form of expression...but to most other people, you're just speaking in tongues.
I speak unix, ruby, c, objective c, bourne shell, bash, mysql, a bit of python, a bit of perl, a bit of regexp, forth, ada95, java, LaTeX, etc. These languages I know. And to me, I can communicate entire ideas and concepts in them. But mathematics is not a language I am fluent in, and that's something that I've found most pilots share. For us, if you start getting more complex than a(bc + de) = f^2 we become completely illiterate... we pick through a few basic terms to try to decipher it, then throw up our hands and move along.
I don't mean any offense.
-Fox
