An Angle Inscribed in a Semicircle

Nathan Karsjens website

Posted on April 13, 2020 by drjimo

Nathan Karsjens website is https://mednathan.wordpress.com/

Nathan is a mathematics major in secondary teacher education at Western Illinois University (and a Leatherneck football player).

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Atmospheric Pressure, inches of Mercury, and Pascals

Posted on January 13, 2020 by drjimo

I got a smart watch for Christmas. It has a ‘compass’ that also shows my longitude, latitude, altitude, and the Atmospheric Pressure in hPA.

So I studied up on the units for Atmospheric Pressure. Disclaimer: This is crude. I want to get some numbers I can remember.

Pa is an SI unit for atmospheric pressure. It means Pascal. One Pascal is 1 Newton per square meter. hPa is hectopascal. 1 hPa = 100 Pa

The ‘Imperial’ (English) unit would be PSI (pounds per square inch). BTW, 1 PSI is quite a bit, but 1 Pascal isn’t much.

Often the weather person on television give the atmospheric pressure in inches of Mercury (inHg).

Conversions

1 inHg = 33.9 hPa
.02953 inHg = 1 hPa

Low, Regular, and High Pressure

1000 hPa (29.5 inHg) is low pressure.
1010 hPa (29.8 inHg) is ‘regular’ pressure.
1040 hPa (30.7 inHg) is high pressure.

The key is which direction is the barometric pressure going (rising or decreasing).

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Graphicacy

Posted on November 16, 2019 by drjimo

Good summary of what graphicacy is, especially early graphicacy in children.

This definition of graphicacy does not seem to be comprehensive enough to include spatial sense, but is an important subset, or component of, spatial sense and visualization. This definition of graphicacy seems to emphasize data visualization.

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Two community colleges show how students can succeed without** remedial math courses

Posted on November 15, 2019 by drjimo

**Actually there is remediation, but it is just-in-time. There is corequisite support/remediation.

Two community colleges show how students can succeed without remedial math courses

This sounds promising. Students do not like (or, equivalently, are not motivated) to take a semester-long remediation course.

Under this plan, the students may be taking a similar amount of math, but the (previous) pre-requisite is now a corequisite.

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How to Graphically Interpret the Complex Roots of a Quadratic Equation

Posted on September 13, 2019 by drjimo

Very good stuff here. Nice mathematics, nice symmetry, nice visually!

Nice paper with an explanation of what is going on by Carmen Melliger here. Good mathematics!

Nice graphic by Shana McKay from Scaffolded Math. See also.

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Websites for Spring 2019 – Math 304

Posted on March 4, 2019 by drjimo

Evan Wignall – https://etwignall98.weebly.com/

Will Kline – https://kline55.wordpress.com/

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Make Your Daughter Practice Math. She’ll Thank You Later. (And by the way your son, too.)

Posted on August 8, 2018 by drjimo

Good opinion-editorial piece. I think it does deemphasize conceptual understanding problem-solving and may over-emphasize practice, but overall this is a good article.

I like the analogy of doing math in playing a musical instrument.