The following is a subset of the ideas for science fair projects found on this science fair site.
For each project, your assignment is to come up with an experiment that would test the idea.
Continue reading Science Fair Ideas!
The following is a subset of the ideas for science fair projects found on this science fair site.
For each project, your assignment is to come up with an experiment that would test the idea.
Continue reading Science Fair Ideas!
The joys of markdown are many.
Markdown is a formatting “language” like HTML that you can use to specify the final appearance of text. When you use a “word processor” like Microsoft Word or Openoffice.org Writer, the text you generate is “marked up” (or “marked down” as it were) with formatting codes that determine how the text looks on a screen or when printed out. If you were to look inside a PDF file you would find commands that do this as well. And, a web page is rendered properly in your browser because of formatting codes in HTML. (If you want to see what the HTML guts of this web page look like and you are using Firefox, just hit ctrl-U and a window with the raw HTML coding will pop up and amaze you.)
Markdown is a version of format coding that has three important characteristics:
Here’s an example. The following text uses italics in one place and includes three links, in HTML:
The best places on the web to learn about the evolution of <em>Homo sapiens</em> are <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/">Greg Laden’s blog</a>, <a href="http://johnhawks.net/weblog">John Hawks’ blog</a>, and <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/">Talk Origns</a>.
Here is the same text written in markdown:
The best places on the web to learn about the evolution of *Homo sapiens* are [Greg Laden's blog], [John Hawks blog] and [Talk Origins].
[Greg Laden's blog]:"http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/"
The second text is easier to type (fewer formatting characters) and easier to read (for the same reason).
Markdown is a way of formatting text that is easy, fast, clean, and slightly dangerous. In other words, totally cool. But if markdown codes specify formatting, how does the formatting get put on the text and where does the text go? Well, markdown can be used in connection with LaTex to turn marked-down text into some universal format such as PDF. Or, it can be used to specify text that will be converted into HTML. On a Mac you can get software such as Marked which automatically reads a text file to convert it on the fly into raw HTML and allows this to be previewed on your screen, like this:
Writing things like blog posts in markdown can be easier, cleaner, and more fun than using those dumb editing boxes that most blogging platforms use, and it is quicker and easier to proofread than HTML code.
In Linux, and probably on other platforms, one might use either the markdown utility or pandoc to render the markdown code. Pandoc uses a variant of classic markdown, and can convert markdown into HTML, LaTex, PDF and many other formats, using in some cases LaTex software that you should already have installed.
hat tip: buzz feed
Is scheduled!
Continue reading 2010 Home School Science Fair
Hat tip: Glen
PLoS Blog Post Pick of the Month for January 2010 is as the NN blog Endless Forms, written by Anne-Marie Hodge.
Click here to read this post.
THERE IS A PIK-CHER OF A KITTEH!!!!
Ideas that were once championed by evolutionists are no longer valid, much like the false science behind man-made global warming. Students deserve the truth.
That’s from a guy running for school board in Wisconsin. Pharyngula has the details.
From the amazon web site:
….ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books. Amazon customers will at that point decide for themselves whether they believe it’s reasonable to pay $14.99 for a bestselling e-book…..
For some back ground and discussion, see this earlier post and links among the comments that describe the situation.