Shake Girl, The Graphic Novel

A creative writing class at Stanford got together and created Shake Girl, a graphic novel.

mental_floss: 10 Questions from an 1895 eighth-grade final exam

mental_floss has posted questions from an 1895 eighth-grade final. I wonder how many of our current students would be able to correctly answer these?

Orthography (Time, one hour)
9. What is meant by the following: alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, and syllabication.

Only three of those words make sense to me...

Mental_floss: Punctuation Quiz

Mental_floss' newest quiz tests your knowledge of obscure punctuation marks

ALA Store: READ posters

The American Library Association has celebrity READ posters for sale. Even better: they feature a diverse range of actors, musicians, and athletes. I plan on getting a few when I move into my new classroom next year.

Science News: Music Has Its Own Geometry

From Science News: three music professors have come up with a way to categorize and analyze music from a mathematical point of view.

Writing in the April 18 issue of Science, the trio has outlined a method called "geometrical music theory" that translates the language of musical theory into that of contemporary geometry. They take sequences of notes, like chords, rhythms and scales, and categorize them so they can be grouped into "families." They have found a way to assign mathematical structure to these families, so they can then be represented by points in complex geometrical spaces, much the way "x" and "y" coordinates, in the simpler system of high school algebra, correspond to points on a two-dimensional plane.

News: Newborn Planet is Youngest Ever Found

National Geographic News has an interesting article about a newly formed planet:

The embryonic planet may only be a few hundred years old, providing a unique look at how planets are made, according to a team of astronomers led by Jane Greaves of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
"We were amazed when we found it," Greaves said, noting that the next youngest confirmed planet is ten million years old.

3trillion

3trillion.org allows users to go on a $3 trillion shopping spree. Although it could be viewed as liberal propaganda, students might have a better understanding of the cost of the war after playing on the site.