'cause you never know...

OK Go explains the incredible math behind their "The One Moment" music video

I've always found teaching common factoring to be a little troublesome, especially having them get the correct quotient in the brackets.. I stumbled on a technique that seemed to work very well for one of my students.

When introducing distributive property, I usually relate it back to how students would multiply a single digit and two digit number. So, for example, I'd ask what is 2(34), they'd reply 68, and when asked how they got it, they'd usually say something like 2x3 and 2x4, so I'd show how they were really doing 2(30+4)=60+8=68, and then move on to 2(3x+4).

One of my students though, wrote out the vertical multiplication and showed me that way. Thinking about it, I wondered if that might be a better way to demonstrate the property

When graphing higher order polynomials, one can encounter a quadratic with no real roots as a factor, which results in a "floating quadratic"  turn on the graph. But where do you put it? While working with a student recently, we decided to toss the equation into a graphing program to find out. The equation was y = (x+2)(2x-5)(x^2+1), in case you care. My student guessed that it would be around -1, since that's how the other factors worked, but when plotted, we actually got what looked like a cubic twist at about (0,-1).

Wired article about UCLA professor Robert Bjork's findings on learning and forgetting.

http://www.livescience.com/14138-teen-cystic-fibrosis-drug-cocktail-contest.html

The Sky of Earth is a panable, zoomable image of the entire sky, stitched together from 1200 photos taken with a Nikon D3 digital camera. The pictures were taken in Chile, France, and the Canary Islands.

15-year-old Javier Fernandez-Han won this years Inhabit's Invent Your World Challenge and scored a $20,000 scolarship with his algea-powered system that produces food and fuel, treats waste and captures carbon dioxide.