Saturday, March 8, 2008

APPLICATIONS OF TRIG FUNCTIONS IN THE REAL WORLD

I apologize for my post being late for yesterday, but blogging is hard work. Ha ha. But I'll try to recall what happened on Friday's class.

Firstly, we were all happy and reunited once Mr. K was back so we could get back on track. The first thing we did, was review what we struggled with in the given assignments from the other day-- a quiz, a worksheet and basically question seven on exercise twelve. People were most likely overwhelmed with graphing three functions at the same time, but all that had to be done was graph each one separately but on the same Cartesian plane. Another thing we had to be cautious about was the DOMAIN.
The domain could cause some grief since a part of the graph would exist with an infinite domain, but then with a finite one, a large portion of the function could be erased [I probably didn't use the correct terms, but I hope it's understandable. Don't get lost in MY translation.]

Then of course...uh oh. writer's block.. **I sit here for hours trying to figure out what happened next, grab a snack, tap my pencil on the desk and then LIGHT BULB!!** An epiphany! The next thing we did was start the new lesson for that day! He warned us briefly in the beginning that we would not finish that day, so that means I have to pass along the responsibility for the next scribe. The first slide asked the question: WHAT DO PLANETS HAVE TO DO WITH TRIGONOMETRY? As usual, everyone thought he was talking shenanigans, but I'm sure we all know that there's some point to it. An exceptionally fine and dandy point, I might add. We all got into a heated discussion, about how the moon orbits around the earth and how that affects the tides-- high or low, which affects the seasons and weather. The changing of seasons of course, if measured in time and in precipitation and so on, is periodic. The conversation was so heated that it turned into an epic debacle and Mr. K lost it. He checked the statistics in Manitoba over the last couple of years and we saw how cold it was. "Yes, it's this cold outside. We should build a city. Maybe that'll warm us up. We shouldn't just stand here and shudder to death, we should do something productive like build a city." Now those weren't his exact words, but that was basically what he was saying in a semi-sardonic tone. Then he happened to spot the stats on precipitation and snowfall rate in May--- "IT SNOWED IN JUNE!!!" He said that quite repetitively and I saw the emotion in these precise words, his contempt for snow in the middle of summer. I over exaggerated everything there, but now you can see how easy it is to make a simple boring story into a stimulating telanovela. ha ha

Anyhow, we looked at a picture at what was supposed to be a nice view of the mountains in the very FLAT Saskatchewan. But he used Saskatchewan because there was no daylight savings time. That's another random fact to learn everyday. The first step we took to solve the problem was to determine the points of the graph, sort of find the intervals so that each co-ordinate given could fit on the grid. We figured out how many days were in each month assuming it was not a leap year and had the y-axis set to start one year before the day given in the timeline. Then the x-axis would be the number of hours in a day and what time was given so that the function may be graphed. 9:15 was 9.25 hours because there are 60 minutes in an hour and 15 minutes is a quarter of an hour which is where the 0.25 came from. But of course, we didn't get very far because of the introduction to our new sort of long-term assignment.

For a change, we students were assigned to take out the CREATIVE fedora hat ha ha. It doesn't have to be a fedora, but it's just a hat, thinking cap was taken, so you know. Well, our assignment was to go out into the world or stay inside and take a minimum of five pictures which have trigonometric functions present in them and upload them onto flickr-- which is probably a world-renowned [after the very frequent use of Mr. K.] site to publish images with a CREATIVE COMMONS license. Which reminds me...

When making a flickr account, remember to not include to include anything to well, I guess, jeopardize your personal security like your last name or your postal code. Instead, an alternative could be making our course name your last name because WE ARE FAMILY!! and using the school's postal code which is R3E 2H1 and make sure you have a YAHOO account because of the whole corporate wars between major companies and their constant exploiting, but who are we kidding, we love to see them fight and see who will be bought.

The real reason why you need a minimum of five pictures is because a certain individual from the flickr administration will check on your account and see if you will actually use this account. It will then, in a matter of perhaps five business days from the day you first make your account for them to put you on the archive of public searches. This is not a project to procrastinate on or else!!! Also note that the images for this assignment shall have the course tag [pc40sw08] and trigonometry and do so in lowercase, just in case we have ourselves another case-sensitive website and tags are with spaces not commas! This project is due the first day back from spring break. I wanted to blog today to keep my post short, but I guess I just fail to do that all the time. I think that's about all that I remember from Friday and the continuation will be on Monday. Also, test on Transformations will be on Wednesday.

The next scribe will be ELEVEN!

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