Astronaut Self-Portrait

If this isn’t the coolest photo ever, I don’t know what is!

How Snowflakes decide what shape to be!

Their chemistry decides! Awesome video from awesome website Boing Boing.

Probability of a White Christmas from NOAA

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency, via Accuweather, gives this info. On it’s own site, noaa.gov, it has amazing footage of the earth at night and record warming in the Arctic.

How we Measure the Universe

“The Royal Observatory Greenwich answers in this wonderful short animation, a teaser for a new exhibition titled Measuring the Universe: from the transit of Venus to the edge of the cosmos.” from a Brain Pickings Tweet December 10, 2012 Thanks Brain Pickings!

Trigonometric Functions: What are they good for?

Even if you don’t understand everything that the articles produced by this particular search says, you can understand what their purpose is.  Parts of each of these, several of them extremely detailed and heavy on mathematics and scientific terms, will be recognizable to you.

Check it out…

First, from the article referenced at the bottom of this page, check out their sine function.  What is happening in this equation?

Can you see a, b, c, d?  Does this graph have a standard period?  What is the amplitude?  Were there any shifts?

OK, now this:

And what is it all about?  Can you tell?  Look at the reference in the next to last screenshot if you want “help”.  🙂

Lastly, this is an entirely different article, just a little more than a page.  I’d like you to read it, see if you can apply it to your own learning.  Just click on the title for the full article.

Answer the questions after and through discussion with your partners to see what kind of progress you can make.  You may not understand all of it, but you all can understand much of it.

LaForge

Graphing Stories

SOOO awesome. Thank you, Dan Myer, for the reference.

Places I’ve never been on the Internet

Pastebin

First, an EXCELLENT…article? no. Commentary? maybe. Monologue? perhaps. In any case, really interesting words on studying higher level math.

Second, what is this Pastebin? Ok, I know what it IS, but how would YOU use it? Or me? (Answer in comments please.)