I am finishing up my work with vectors in classical mechanics. The Agave Worm book has given me lots of problems finding vectors from triangles, using the sine and cosine formulas, which I remember well from my tedious 8 months of trigonometry. I can then find the resultants of the vectors, a process which is done with trigonometry. But tediousness is my talent. I am evolved to do dull, detail-oriented, non-risky, repetitive work, if you believe some evolutionary psychologists.

But the problems with vectors, force, weight, tension, and distances put me into a rough-hewn, industrial world full of heavy lifting, sliding blocks, cranes, brackets, bolts, metal frames, ropes, guy wires and towers, ships and planes and oil pipelines and the occasional artillery shell or missile. I feel as though I should be wearing a hard hat and work boots when I solve these problems. Some of the problems even have a kind of dark "gothic-industrial" feel, as with these two from my vintage 1952 text:

2-8. A horizontal boom 8 ft. long is hinged to a vertical wall at one end, and a 500-lb. body hangs from its outer end. The boom is supported by a guy wire from its outer end to a point on the wall directly above the boom….

2.18. A flexible chain of weight w hangs between two hooks at the same height…at each end the chain makes an angle theta with the horizontal….

It reminds me of the famous "Prisons" etchings by the eighteenth-century Italian artist Piranesi filled with ominous machinery, sooty furnaces, and shadowed massive archways. Here is the land of classical mechanics, grinding its way into the earth, weighted by Newtonian gravity and trigonometric tyranny.

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