Fractals

We recently talked about fractals in class and I thought I'd share a brief example of one I made in my high school physics class. According to several online sources I found, the shapes on a CD when you microwave it are fractals. Here's a picture of one that my exchange student and I tried ourselves. It only takes about 5 seconds in the microwave and then the whole disk lights up with what looks like blue lightning forming the lines you see. Unfortunately I can't currently prove that it truly is a fractal, but as far as I can tell it didn't ruin my microwave so feel free to try it out for yourselves. The way things are headed now, CD's will be obsolete soon anyway.

Prezi

I'm probably not the only one who felt that my simple Wordle failed to do William Manchester's book, or even the first section, justice. I doubt this Prezi presentation will add much more (keep in mind that it's not meant to be entirely self-explanatory), but I wanted to try it out both to add a little more structure to the ideas in The Medieval Mind, and simply to experiment with Prezi. For those who aren't part of our class, Prezi is a unique online type of power-point tool that's free for the basic version and can be used for a huge variety of presentations.

The Medieval Mind on Prezi

Mini Book Club - Creation

The Medieval Mind

Rather than simply doing a book report on Manchester's A World Lit Only by Fire, I decided to combine it with a digital literacy lab on Wordle. This is a free online program that lets you write in or link to any amount of text (as far as I know) and it will automatically arrange them in countless ways as you can see above. It also lets you alter things including word size, font, color, layout, etc, if there are particular words that you want to stick out more than others.

I only did this one on the first section of Manchester's book, "The Medieval Mind", that sets up much of the physical and ideological background leading up to the Renaissance. I didn't have access to the book online so I couldn't just copy and paste the whole section, but instead I simply picked out words as I read that seemed to describe some of Manchester's major themes. I'll let the rest speak for itself.

Mini Book Club - The Decision

Ok, so it didn't really take us a week to decide what book we're going to read. We made our decision last week but I kept putting off writing this post. Our group chose A World Lit Only by Fire by William Manchester (one that Brandon had presented to the group).

Recommended by our professor and said to be, "One of the most lively, engaging history books you will ever read," this book not only looks like a very exciting read (unlike some history books that I've read), but I'm also very interested in finding out what historical events and ideas led up the "creative explosion" of the Renaissance.

Mini Book Club - Brainstorm

Our class has been split into groups of three with each group being required to do a miniature "book club" on a book of our choice, as long as it's on one of the historical eras we've covered (Renaissance, Enlightenment, or 19th century/Industrial Revolution). Here are a few of the books that I found as possible choices for our group.



The Creation of the Modern World - Roy Porter
This book looks at the Enlightenment in Britain rather than the places we usually hear about such as France, America, or Scotland. It's said to cover a lot of ground at a fast pace but it also examines many different aspects of the Enlightenment.







Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture - Ross King
From what I can tell, this book doesn't focus so much on the architectural details of Brunelleschi's dome, but rather on how he did it during that time period. It looks like a very interesting story.





History of Urban Form: Before the Industrial Revolution - A.E.J. Morris
In this one, Morris writes more about urban life leading up to the Industrial Revolution rather than on the Industrial Revolution itself. Being a solid history book, it doesn't look quite as exciting as the other two but I'm sure it still has some interesting information.

Online Democracy

In Ancient Greece, the idea of a republic (from the Latin res publica, the "public thing"), primarily that of Athens, was taken quite literally, with the citizens gathering on a daily basis to vote on legislation and bills, rather than electing certain people to do it for them. Part of the reason this was able to work was because of their close proximity; within just one city it is relatively easy for voters to gather regularly.

When America was forming its government, it was quite impractical to have a national government in this form. The area of the United States of course is eminently larger than that of Athens, and the form of transportation had not made many significant improvements. In the last few decades, however, an alternative way of gathering has formed.


Assuming we had reliable ways of keeping out hackers and ensuring that every person only got one vote, how would opening up the government to the people, or at least certain parts of it, through the use of the internet affect our nation?