hstarbuck wrote:
[tan (pi/4) = 1]...was my cute/coded way of saying that a tangent was taken on several of these posts (i.e discussion got off track). Nothing wrong with this--it happens all the time here on the Asterisk and I am also guilty as charged. Taking the tangent path to an orbit will take you out of the system, but its ok, plenty of other interesting systems to encounter.
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Tangent, n. [L.
tangents, -entis, p.pr. of tangere to touch; akin to Gr. having seized: cf. F.
tangente. Cf. Attain, Contaminate, Contingent, Entire, Tact, Taste, Tax, v. t.]
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M.L. Weems — The Life of Gen. Francis Marion. 1801 "But in reaching the ground where we had left him encamped, we got advice that he too, with all his troops, were gone off, at a
tangent, as hard as he could drive."
James Fenimore Cooper — The Monikins. 1820
"This person was a Tangent, who had a besetting wish to become a Riddle, although the leaning of our house was decidedly Horizontal; and, as a matter of course, he took the Riddle side of this question."
Jack London — Michael, Brother of Jerry. 1896 "The mate obeyed, although he kept an anxious eye on the whale, which had gone off at a
tangent and was smoking away to the eastward."
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The Stark Munro Letters 1894
By Arthur Conan Doyle
I daresay you`ve quite come to the conclusion by this time that Cullingworth is simply an interesting pathological study--a man in the first stage of lunacy or general paralysis. You might not be so sure about it if you were in close contact with him. He justifies his wildest flights by what he does. It sounds grotesque when put down in black and white; but then it would have sounded equally grotesque a year ago if he had said that he would build up a huge practice in a twelvemonth. Now we see that he has done it. His possibilities are immense. He has such huge energy at the back of his fertility of invention. I am afraid, on thinking over all that I have written to you, that I may have given you a false impression of the man by dwelling too much on those incidents in which he has shown the strange and violent side of his character, and omitting the stretches between where his wisdom and judgment have had a chance.
His conversation when he does not fly off at a tangent is full of pith and idea. "The greatest monument ever erected to Napoleon Buonaparte was the British National debt," said he yesterday. Again, "We must never forget that the principal export of Great Britain to the United States IS the United States."
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Art (full of pith) Neuendorffer
The Bubble Nebula
10 light years across; that's a pretty good stellar wind from the O type star. 
but I must admit 
and my degree is in math. 
