Daily Archives: July 6, 2008

Update: I discovered a new comic site (abstruse goose) that I like almost as much as xkcd… it’s more ribald and there are a number I could never show my students. Which is a good thing! An example below:

Update 2: xkcd has a forum with math jokes.

I’ve been doing a lot of “internetsing” in the past few weeks. Some things of note:

1. Math Teacher Mambo’s “volumes of revolutions” project [here]
    
2. A superduper awesome puzzle to give to your students when learning trigonometry: “explain this crop circle” [here]. If I gave extra credit, I would probably give it to the student who could explain the math encoded within it. 
    
3. Wordle [here] creates clouds from texts — text frequency. I love the idea for using this to create images for a English class website (different word clouds, different books), or for the cover of a dissertation or a book. I created the images below. Guess which books they are for? (I got them from Project Gutenberg.) An interesting English discussion could spring out of this type of word counting…

   

4. SensibleUnits.com [here] converts standard distances and sizes to things we non computers understand. 

   Example: 500 gigabytes is 17 dual layer HD DVDs, 160 Human Genomes, 62 Window Vistas Installation, 190 English Wikipedias (without images) 
    

5. For an English or History class, have students design a facebook page for famous authors, poets, scientists, political figures, etc. Look at this one for Einstein on DaleBasler.com [here].