| HN Mirror

From what I understand, 'rave' was a late 1980s to early 1990s phenomenon. It was a time when everyone had an excellent time, high on drugs. Nobody was 'calculating generator loads and building power grids' even if you had 14kW of sound system to plug in, monitor speakers and some lights obtained for the weekend from the local theatre.

Electrical items would be plugged in with a slight risk of electrocution or fire, possibly in a pig's shed, in the pouring rain and in the dark. But this was not a worry since the show had to go on and there was the danger of the police turning up in force, with the legal right to steal the whole sound system, which could be big enough to require a semi truck to get it places.

Either the setup worked or it didn't. There was nobody doing advanced maths to get it working, and yes, there would always be a setup problem or two, which happens with kit that is made to work hard. The far more useful skills were the soft skills, so teamwork and coordination, not maths.

In time the rave scene was commercialised to the festival nonsense we have today. A proper rave was a full-on temporary autonomous zone where you could have small children trying to sell you acid tabs or ecstacy. Everything about it was illegal and nobody was sober.

Moving on to festivals and organised mandatory fun events, you have to have an entrance fee, the guys providing the music have to be paid, there has to be a small army of people in high visibility 'security' jackets and you certainly don't have small children trying to sell anyone any drugs.

In this secondary 'professional' context, where the goal is to make money not give people the best party they have ever been to, you really do have to 'calculate generator loads and build power grids' or else you won't get the venue, insurance or the event happening.

Clearly the free party scene is not what it was. Kids today have their five hundred social media friends so they don't need to socialise in real life. However, there was a time, not so long ago, when it all came together wonderfully, with the rave scene, and, part and parcel of that was the complete lack of professionalism. There was fun in taking your life into your own hands.

The aerial circus sounds fun (as does the canopy making). However, across all of the extreme sports where some acrobatics is needed, nobody is doing maths. Engineers behind the scenes, maybe, but the performers? It is all about dedication and practice. To take a relatively modern 'sport', parkour. That dangerous jump from building A to building B, that is done by eye, gut feeling and intuition, after lots of experience doing other jumps. No parkour person is going to whip out the old slide rule to work out the parameters of such a jump.

You mention the carabiner, which is a mountaineering gadget. Again, nobody doing mountaineering is doing fancy maths to select the right carabiner for the job. It comes down to intuition again, and what you and your climbing partner have fielded for the day.

Regarding finance, maths is allegedly useful, but how many bookkeepers are doing any maths beyond addition, subtraction and calculating percentages, mostly for tax paying purposes? In America, where everything is financially engineered and the economy is all about debt payments, maybe more maths is needed for the average citizen, but those hundreds of millions struggling to make their car payments just need a living wage, not added maths skills.

I will stop shouting at the clouds now, however, have you done any of your canopy designs in Blender with the cardboard box plugin that enables you to unwrap a 3D shape into 2D flat surfaces? If that is a no, then give it a go and see if it works for your projects. Note that it enables you to do a render that the client can approve before printing happens.