basketball activity

Our data shows that we shot at a 60 degree angle. The article said that the ideal angle was between 42-46 degrees. I can see that there would be an ideal range of angles that a shot would go in but a 42 degree angle seems like a very flat shot. It could be that we are off on our measurements. This relates to math in that it deals with arcs and angles.

La Da Vinci

On my visit to this remarkable exhibit, I learned an exponential amount of data. When we arrived at the Science Center, we followed the sine to the Da Vinci exhibit. The first thing we witnessed were some of his paintings. They were adjacent to some of his inventions which were opposite some of his sculptures. And the hypotenuse of these two areas were his military inventions. In a similar triangle, there was a room devoted to the Monna Lisa. If you were to find the tangent of these, you would find some of his inventions that you could touch.

What I learned was that Leonardo's genius can only be matched by his unquenchable curiosity. He came up with some amazing inventions, beautiful paintings, cool sculptures, and pretty much started the study of the human body or anatomy. Also, he was left handed which is awesome.

Credit cards

I am not saying that credit cards are bad but from what I have seen there seem to be some disadvantages of owning a credit card. For instance, it is very easy to go into debt and very hard to get out of debt because of the extremely high interest rates. I personally would rather not own a credit card until absolutely necessary.

Earthquake vs. earthquake

The Chilean earthquake was a 8.8 on the Richter Scale. It occurred on February 27, 2010, the epicenter was located offshore of the Maule region only 11 km southwest of Curanipe.

The Haiti earthquake was a 7.0 on the Richter Scale. It occurred on January 12, 2010, the epicenter was located about 25 km from the capital, Port-au-Prince.

In relation, the Chilean earthquake was 500 times more forceful than the earthquake in Haiti. The earthquake in Chile was so strong that it shortened the length of a day by 1.26 microseconds, moved the earth's figure axis by 8 cm, moved the entire city of Concepcion by 3.04 meters west, Santiago, the capital was moved 24 cm, and the city of Buenos Aires, which is over 1000 km from Concepcion, was moved 3.9 cm.

I think we heard more about the earthquake in Haiti because it caused more devastation, there was more damage, and it affected 3 million people.

Total earthquakes worldwide from 2000-2008

I used data from this site. The correlation coefficient r= 0.835853812. The regression equation is y= 1223.845238x+22764.07143. The slope means that in every year from 2000-2008 the number of earthquakes goes up by 1223.85. The y-intercept means that in the year 2000 there were 22764.07 earthquakes. The data shows the rate that earthquakes are happening around the world. From the data, the number of earthquakes is increasing every year.

I think it is important to be able to analyze scatter plots and regression equations because it is a valuable skill. In most cases a scatterplot is the most convenient way to organize and represent data so in many different jobs you will have to be able to read the scatterplot and understand what it means.

Functions

Linear functions

Relationship between feet and yards.

Linear functions are used to graph things that have a constant rate of change. There are always 3 feet in 1 yard. The equation would be y=3x.

Exponential functions

Bacterial growth.

An exponential function is a function whose value is a constant raised to the power of the argument. If one bacterium divides once everyday then the equation would be y=x^however many days you want.

Absolute value

Force of gravity in comparison to distance from center of the Earth. Absolute value is the magnitude of something without regard to its sign. In this experiment you can't be a negative distance from the earth so all y values would be positive making the graph the characteristic 'V' shape.

I got a lot of my info from mathforum.org