For an engaging way at looking at real-life science, check out the NOVA site on the chemistry behind fireworks by clicking here.
Archive for October, 2009
Chemistry and Fireworks
October 29th, 2009LibriVox Audio Books
October 26th, 2009For free electronic copies of public domain works, I have always loved Project Gutenberg.
For books in my phone, I like Books in my Phone.com (imagine that).
For audio books, though, the public domain recordings that I had previously found mostly sounded like a computer reading the book, like the Mac VoiceOver emulator.
Today I stumbled across LibriVox. It seems like decent enough public domain recordings. LibriVox consists of volunteers, so the quality is as good as the community wants it to be.
Heist Society Cover
October 21st, 2009When I have time I’ll put up a photo or two from the great author visit from James Dashner.
Until then, enjoy the cover for Ally Carter’s new book, Heist Society, coming out February 9, 2010.
Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends
October 20th, 2009It’s like what Howard Rheingold talked about in Smart Mobs (back in 2003) with a definite focus on collaboration and mobile web.
Images used from readwriteweb.com.
Recommended Corrections
October 17th, 2009I was doing a search for a project I’m working on and Wikipedia, like many times, came up as the number one search result. I scanned through to see what it said, and found something I hadn’t seen in a while:
I forgot that how-to information was not supposed to be in Wikipedia, even though it slides by all the time. At least this editor caught it, but did you see when they made the recommendation? May 2009. Previous to that, someone caught that the article was a jumble of contradictions caused by people with very different opinions trying to edit the same section of the article. That was caught in March of 2009. Both of these notes asked for a re-write, but no one has taken the time to actually correct the errors.
Once again, make sure to not use Wikipedia as your only source of information.
Future Professionals: Intro to Photoshop
October 7th, 2009For today’s club meeting, we’re going to be getting used to Photoshop. We’re going to keep it simple – copying from one image and pasting it onto another picture’s layer.
Here’s the background for your creation:
Use Photoshop’s lasso tool to draw around the picture you’re going to put in the courtyard. Use the crosshairs with an arrow to drag that selected picture onto our courtyard.
My Connection to McKinley
October 2nd, 2009Students are in the library today researching the presidents using Whitehouse.gov and the Miller Center of Public Affairs as resources.
But what grabs my attention is that a cousin of mine, John W. Griggs, was governor of New Jersey and then attorney general with McKinley.
Do you see the family resemblance?
