Archive for March, 2006

Edge detect

Friday, March 31st, 2006

Photoshop edge detect works best with strong outlines

Preview in Mac OS X

Tuesday, March 28th, 2006

Preview allows you to cut diagrams out of PDF files and save them as PNG or JPG files

Superposition of two sine waves

Monday, March 27th, 2006

Spreadsheet shows effect of adding two phase shifted sine waves

Flash movie test

Sunday, March 26th, 2006

Is it possible to upload a flash movie through WordPress?

Straight line graphs

Sunday, March 26th, 2006

Pop some graphs on the gcse blog and ask for the equations by e-mail?

Gestures!

Saturday, March 25th, 2006

“Gestures that complement rather than simply illustrate verbal instructions can boost children’s ability to complete problems in mathematics, researchers report.”

Complementary gestures are illustrated as…

“When using complementary gestures, however, the teachers pointed to each of the numbers on the left and then signalled the subtraction of the five on the right side by scooping their hand [...]

City centre land use

Saturday, March 25th, 2006

Google Earth and data handling activities

Google Earth

Friday, March 24th, 2006

Google Earth for Mac OS X

Textwrangler: remove blank lines

Sunday, March 19th, 2006

To remove blank lines from a text file in Textwrangler, you have to run search and replace, tick the ‘use Grep’ option and then search on the pattern ^r. Replace with nowt and the effect is magic. A boon to the ‘everything in one big text file’ advocates.

The pattern < /?[^>]> can be used to [...]

WordPress export

Saturday, March 18th, 2006

Use a special theme to export posts!

GCSE Mind Map

Tuesday, March 14th, 2006

Put the whole of GCSE Maths where you can see it

Migraine and hole in heart

Monday, March 13th, 2006

According to the BBC News quoting research by doctors in London and Shrewsbury, there may be a link between migraine with aura and a hole in the heart. Their figures (quoted from the BBC article) are as follows…
“The latest study screened 432 migraine with aura patients, and found 24% had a moderate [or] large PFO [...]

Central England Temperature series

Monday, March 13th, 2006

Notice any trend? Upwards? Downwards? Part of a sine wave of longish period? Scribble an idea now, then compare with the full series.

The chart above (shown without axes on purpose) is a plot of the yearly mean temperature from 1800 to 2005 taken from the Central England Temperature series. The series extends from 1659, as [...]

When is a blog not a blog?

Monday, March 13th, 2006

Metropolitan Police officers have apparently received ‘guidance’ about blogging that includes the following phrase; “consider the impact of expressing views and opinions that…bring the organisation into disrepute”.

What is, exactly, a blog? Perhaps an online notebook where you list links, tips, ideas, common experience (like the blog you are now reading) or sometimes a place where [...]

Netscape 8

Wednesday, March 8th, 2006

Netscape 8 for Windows has a spyware/adware scanner built in

Crate in Warsaw

Saturday, March 4th, 2006

Crate in shop window in Warsaw, Poland. Margarine?

Beaufort Scale

Saturday, March 4th, 2006

I once heard the Beaufort Scale rendered as epic poetry. The reader started in a quiet conversational tone, speaking fairly quickly. As he ascended the scale, the voice grew louder and the pace slowed. The word ‘HURRICANE’ was bellowed at considerable volume.

The table below was copied from a notebook entry made one foul day in [...]

Forensic ICT new version

Saturday, March 4th, 2006

Just storing a draft in a convenient location

200 cubic kilometres of ice every year

Thursday, March 2nd, 2006

A recent post to the Real Climate blog details recent work on satellite images of Greenland showing the volume of ice flow into the sea from the glaciers that surround the coast.

The numbers are large – 220 cubic km of ice per year is currently flowing from the glaciers into the sea. That apparently corresponds [...]

OpenOffice 2.0 on Mac

Thursday, March 2nd, 2006

OpenOffice is an Open Source office application produced with a large amount of support from Sun Microsystems. Because the application is open source, you can burn CDs and pass copies to students (or anyone!). Students have downloaded the package and used the Impress presentation component to produce presentations – laptops are often sold with [...]