Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
“It is only by measuring we can cross the river of myths.” — Hans Rosling
Hans Rosling explains, in wonderfully graphical form, how as child mortality has improved so has quality of life, which has in turn lead to fewer births and population stabilization.
More details on the general reduction in poverty in The Guardian.
A facinating simulation of what would happen if a Sun sized object passed through the solar system.
Klaus Lackner from Columbia University describes one type of artificial carbon sequestration technology, and explains why it’s necessary.
To figure out if the climate is actually warming we need to extract from the global temperature curve all the wiggles caused by other things, like volcanic eruptions and El Nino/La Nina events. The resulting trend is quite striking.
I’m teaching pre-Calculus using a graphical approach, and my students’ latest project is to model the trends in the rising carbon dioxide record in a similar way. They’re matching curves (exponential, parabolic, sinusoidal) to the data and subtracting them till they get down to the background noise.
A student (N.C.) sent me this neat video based on the If the World Were a Village website. I plan to show it to my environmental science class because we’ve been talking about human population recently.
In the early stages of the formation of a solar system, dust in the nebula around a young star is attracted to each other because of their minute gravitational attraction to each other.
In the video below, accumulation of dust and gas creates a planet, probably a gas giant, that clears a swath of the solar nebula.
“My life would be worthless without music.”
— Young Paraguayan violinist.
The Fulton School has a wonderful music program, so I’m hoping that this video, about how Paraguayan children living in a slum on a landfill have recycled classical instruments out of the trash, resonates with some of my environmental science students.
Landfill Harmonic film teaser from Landfill Harmonic on Vimeo.
Of course, we’ve seen other instruments invented out of discarded trash. The BBC has a brief history of the steel pan, but Trinbagopan.com has an much more detail. On the other hand, I prefer my history in a musical form.