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What's your favorite disguise? [/meta]
posted by letter shredder @ 11:59 a.m. on 1/20/2006
"Great art is about conflict and pain and guilt and longing and love disguised as sex and sex disguised as love..."                                           -- Lester Bangs, Almost Famous
I was surfing the net when I came to this site, Undergrad Mathematics Labs. It features Jack and Jill's Love-Hate Relationship and how Trigonometric Functions were applied to the couple's behavior. Here's the situation:
Jack and Jill are having a rocky relationship. Jack thinks he loves Jill, but whenever she gets too interested, he avoids making a committment, and loses interest, starting to dislike her more and more. As soon as Jill cools off, he starts to find her more attractive, and falls back in love. Jill, on the other hand, just follows Jack's lead. When he likes her, her interest increases, but when he dislikes her, her interest wanes. What will happen to these unfortunate lovers?
Honestly, I wasn't really curious about my-first-nursery-rhymes couple's sad or happy ending. I just find it interesting how educators apply technical concepts to stories that could possibly simplify teaching math or just to catch the interest of students.
In the science high school that I went to, my Chemistry and Physics teachers thought of many activites to simplify the basic concepts we should learn. Well, we ended up memorizing the periodic table (almost), computing for the number of covalent bonds and free electrons, writing down the structure of 21 amino acids, manipulating cations and anions, and determining your shadow at different angles and at different times of the day.
I guess the story of Humpty Dumpty could have been a good one when we were studying density and free fall.
No wonder why I took Journalism in college...
If you were/are an educator, which story would be best to illustrate thermodynamics (specifically heat transfer)?
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