Scientists need you to count cute baby penguins via the Washington Post

During my morning commute I read about a great project involving penguins, counting, science, ecology and collaboration. That's a lot of boxes ticked.

You can provide some community service by counting penguins in images supplied by scientists.

I was fortunate enough to visit Antarctica in 2013 and loved the penguins. I'll be counting penguins for science and our world. I hope you do too.

You can read the Washington Post article via this link.
You can check out the project via this link.

Please enjoy two of my favourite penguin photos (I have hundreds)!

Antarctica Wildlife

Not all penguin tummies are white. This one is fine, just a messy eater. That's his lunch you can see. 

BIG NUMBERS and a COOL SITE

Thanks to Tom Avent for sharing two Youtube channels I had not seen before, and I like to watch science and maths videos. I spent about an hour looking around.

Here is one to get you started with some big numbers from the good people at ASAP Science:

But wait... there's more...

This is another excellent Youtube channel called FW Thinking. 

Enjoy! I did (:

Sound Waves Circular Motion Water Coolness from 9gag

24-Hz sound wave collides with water

Click this link to the 9gag video - very cool

Click the link and watch what sound waves do to water

From the people at 9gag and thanks to Annalis in G09 for sharing it with me.

what is the white rectangle doing there? I don't know - I'll fix that this weekend (:

Landing a Rocket on a Comet. Happening in the next 12 hours...

Landing on the moon - done
Landing a robot on Mars - done

Landing on a comet is a little trickier. Why? What do you think?

Why are we trying to do it?

Find out here

Follow it live from the people at NASA right HERE

FINALLY! FLYING CARS

They have been talking about these forever. Many other things have come to be that were only crazy future ideas when I was a kid like...

THIS CRAZY DREAM CAME TRUE
Imagine if you could see the person you were calling on the phone and have a face to face conversation no matter where you were in the world. Hello Skype and some similar type face to face communication technology.

WE ARE STILL WAITING FOR:
We are still waiting for time travel (Alina make it happen!) but I heard the other day that the conjecture is travel into the past is impossible but other dimensions... why not?

Teleportation is being worked on by the Entanglement Generation, I kid you not.

RECENT HAPPENING
What has happened as far as dreams beginning to come true and THE FUTURE IS NOW type of stuff?

THE FLYING CAR - YAY and, quite frankly, about time.

Read about it here in The Guardian and WATCH THE VIDEO TOO



"AeroMobil flying car prototype 3 is ready 8 | wordlessTech." 2014. 30 Oct. 2014 <http://wordlesstech.com/2014/10/10/aeromobil-flying-car/aeromobil-flying-car-prototype-3-is-ready-8/>

Rays of Light and The Lunar Eclipse TODAY

Wednesday Evening's Rare 'Impossible' Lunar Eclipse

Check out the Blood Moon this evening. Hopefully the clouds won't cover it. 

6:13pm for Phuket

Here is a clip from NASA

Watch in more detail here from NASA. 

Nobel Prize goes to THE HEXAGON (and some persistent scientists)

"Neuroscience: Brains of Norway : Nature News & Comment." 7 Oct. 2014 <http://www.nature.com/news/neuroscience-brains-of-norway-1.16079>

Edvard and May-Britt Moser have been working together for 30 years. For 28 of those years they have also been married. 

These two scientists embody the learner profiles and show us how persistence, resilience and problem solving can lead to success. Not only that but mistakes along the way helped them to unravel the mystery of how our brains map out our environments. People are now calling it the GPS of our brains.

They have won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, with neuroscientist John O’Keefe at University College London (their former supervisor).

There is no Nobel Prize for Maths as we have discussed in class, but the mathematics is everywhere. Here in our brains wonderful hexagons form the way we sense location.

Please read more about it in the Scientific American and in Nature Magazine. Very exciting brain research! 

Exciting Space News - Women of India (and some men)

Check out this article about "Nandini Harinath, 44, a physicist and a mother of two, was the deputy operations director of the Mars mission - in other words, she was the person "operating" the spacecraft between Earth and Mars."

Article Here

Image and text from the BBC
original link from Amy Poehler's Smart Girls on Facebook. 

teeny and HUGE Numbers

In Diploma Mathematical Studies we are starting the course looking at the story of Number and how we communicate all sorts of things with different types of Numbers.

You are all probably familiar with Natural Numbers and Integers but there are also Rational, Real and Imaginary numbers. When society needs more from mathematics to push through and develop in some way we develop new systems to make that possible.

Number types tell the story of society and its complexity.

Check out these sites:
FSU (where my dad did his doctorate) and their famous Powers of ten
and this famous video - it's old but the numbers are relevant



We have had these types of numbers in this blog before. Please visit or revisit for your mathematical enjoyment about the scale of the universe(s).

CLICK right here

Perseids Meteor Shower Peak soon - pretty skies

12-13 - Perseids Meteor Shower Peak - These meteors are leftovers from Swift-Tuttle comet and are a favorite among many skywatchers.
We missed the big show but the Super Moon would have made it tricky to see anyway. 

The shower can be visible from July 17th through August 24th, and will peak overnight on August 12th at 60 sightings per hour. Unfortunately, the light from the moon will wash out many of the meteors, though the brightest should still be visible.

You still have a chance to see this. Look up and enjoy.

You can also watch it online using slooh.com 
Check out membership to control their satellites to look into the universe. Cool!
http://live.slooh.com/stadium/live/special-highlight-the-perseids-sensation

Also NASA has recorded some of it (of course):
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/51306509

LIVE SHARING - LIGHTNING STRIKES

COOL! GET IN
ENJOY

HERE

The Weather and its Patterns can be COOL

Below is an animated gif of winds around the Earth.
Check out the key below for deeper understanding of what you are looking at.

Source: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/model-data/model-datasets/reanalysis

A 3-D animated image of Reanalysis-2 data for the first ten days of July 1979, in six-hourly intervals. This animation shows a constant 100mph wind speed surface in red. (Note the stronger, more widespread, polar jet stream in the southern hemisphere--this is July, during the southern winter.) A cyan-colored, constant temperature sheet of zero degrees Celsius ripples across the globe, showing the freezing level. Near-surface wind flow is denoted by white flowlines. This image was generated with plots from Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) combined with ImageMagick.

Mean Sea Surface Temperatures

Source: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/model-data/model-datasets/sea-surface-temperatures-sst-and-winds

A plot of global, monthly mean wind speeds and directions for September 1990. These data are from the Blended Sea Winds dataset, available through NOMADS. This image was produced with NASA’s Panoply visualization tool.

Here is a cool gif relating to what we are investigating in science and mathematics in MYP2
source: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/High_School_Earth_Science/Climate_and_Its_Causes

Solar Power, Hexagons and a Moose

There has been a video of a moose lighting up a road as it crosses doing the rounds of social media recently. Today I clicked on it  and I was very impressed.  Two plucky people have invented amazing technology - solar panels that can be used as roads, pathways, outdoor areas shaped like hexagons.

If you are in MYP2 or you're a bee you know that the hexagon is part of making this technology strong.

It has won awards - check it out at indiegogo.com and in the video of one of their fans below.
Why isn't their government getting behind something like this? Great question.

I got behind it.

How to see when you forget your glasses

or how we see things... from Minute Physics.

The Depth of the Problem of MH370

http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/world/the-depth-of-the-problem/931/

Click on the link, this article has a wonderful infographic about just how difficult it is to try and find the black box (Australian invention) of MH370.

They say time is running out, but what about how long it took them to find the Titanic or the Air France aeroplane? They will keep on looking, but will they find this one?

Which governments do you think should continue to look for the wreckage of MH370 and why?

Units of Measurement:

feet and metres 

from google.com

PSI - pounds per square inch
Source - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pounds_per_square_inch

pings
http://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/flight/modern/black-box8.htm
How Stuff Works is a great site.

MYP2 Coders and Artists and Scientists

MYP2 have joined the world in the Hour of Code and Beyond the Hour of Code.

No one has to wait for MYP2 to learn to code, it's all online and it's free. Don't wait.

In a week we will begin our Summative task - Rube Goldberg Machines.

To be honest I had two other ideas for the summative task but then I was fortunate enough to see what they were creating in Visual Art...

Rube Goldberg machines. Too cool. Their imaginations can go wild in Visual Arts and now we can bring them to life using animation and Scratch programming.

We will work in teams and then piece the machines together; working like a machine in groups.

The mathematics needed covers a great deal:
coordinates; Cartesian plane; translations; reflections; rotations; negative and positive numbers; angles, properties of shapes; formulas, using variables and functions; logic statements; scaling and percentages and more and more...


and this site is pretty cool - so nice what you can do with a lot of free time.

This is HUGE!

Sorry about the lack of posts, I'm planning to make up for it.

And if you find something cool - a video or graphic or story that's mathematical, share it with me and I'll post it (referencing you of course).

It's about our universe, seconds after it began.

It's about theories and persistence

It's about patience and taking the time, a long time...

CHECK IT OUT HERE WOWOWOW

I love science and numbers

Pixels and the Scale of our Solar System

Check out this very cool If the Moon were the Size of a Pixel site, by Josh Worth.

It is very good at communicating the scale of the sun and the distance between planets.

CHECK IT OUT HERE 

Synchronisation or Synchronization depending on your point of view, it's all pretty cool

Lots of people are posting a video about a murmuration of starlings on social networks. I came across this video and others many years ago and I wish to see it at a large scale one day.

For more collective noun names for animals that are as cool as a murmuration of starlings and a murder of crows check this out. It's about naming a group of animals, so technically they are mathematical terms. You can't be a called a group without counting to check if there are more than one of something present.

What's your favourite?
Do you do the same thing in your mother tongue?



On the TEDtalk page of our mathematics blog is a video about synchronisation in every day occurrences. I think you will enjoy it.  Steven Stogatz and his talk on "How things in nature tend to sync up" should be at the top of the blog page.

MYP2 and the Giant Rubber Duck

Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman makes giant ducks.

Each one is unique and they have a message for the world.

What is that message?

The Arrival by Halanslicensed under CC by A NC SA 

MYP2 have been working on the mathematics of generalisation or algebra. They find patterns. They create formulas. They estimate. They justify. They compare methods. They discuss accuracy. They form hypothesis. They tackle long problems, not short one liners. MYP2 are mathematicians at work.

Now they have been asked to bring all of their skills together to work out if Phuket can produce enough rubber for one of these ducks. It is not a yes or no answer, we want details. 

How much rubber is produced right next to PIADS? 

How much rubber is needed?

What are those ducks all about?

Why spread the message with a rubber duck? 

We have more questions - check out the windows of the maths room.