Sunday, January 29, 2012

World Population Growth.

Over the past couple years, we have learned to apply some of the mathematical theories we've learned to real life phenoms. One statistic I find interesting is the world population growth. If you look online for a grph that portrays the world population over a period of time, you should notice one thing, that it looks like an exponential equation. It makes perfect sense. Like the examples we are given about how you start off with one cell, which turns into 2, into 4, into 8 and so on and so on, we can apply that same thinking to humans. 2 humans create more humans, who create more humans, who create more human da, da da ,da da. Is this a bad thing? Possibly. Let's see what David Susuki has to say,

Nuff said.

Friday, January 27, 2012

blogs about logs? sure.

Well after finishing the most emotional math test I've ever done (lots of jumping up and pouding my fists on the table when I made breakthroughs, good thing they put us in a seperate room for tests)I can safely say that logarithms are the weirdest thing I've encountered in math so far. I mean, just the concept of it, What number when acting as the exponent to a number gives me a certain number? Learning logs is like learning a different language.

During the test there was one trick that is probably responsible for any possibility of me passing the test, the trick is what I call "The Flippy Floppy" or as Miss McGoldrick called it, "Counterclockwise trick" or something like that and it is when you need to change a logarithmic equation into an exponential equation and vice verse.

Let me show ya!
Silly, I know, but this one little rule is so important with logarithms, it's the seed from which the whole unit sprouts from! Anyways, just thought I'd express my feelings for the Flippy Floppy. Next time I'll teach you the Whirly Whirl! :D

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Weird Time Signatures

To start off, if you don't know what time signatures are, in music, I'll give you a brief summary. The time signature in a peice of music, identifies how many beats there are to a bar. For most pop music, you can count four beats per bar.

Now let’s talk about songs with weird time signatures. Although it is somewhat rare that these songs become popular, there are some exceptions. Of course there are songs by the Canadian Progressive rockers, Rush, who seldom use only a 4/4 in their songs. It is very common in Rush songs that they use many different ones.
Take the song Tom Sawyer for example. It starts off as a 4/4, as you can count 4 beats until the riff seems to loop. But at the keyboard solo (1:35 on the video) the time signature changes. It becomes a 7/8, if you count the beats at a constant rate; you'll notice that it starts over after 7 beats. Isn't that funny. This requires excellent musicianship as the musicians must constantly count in their heats in order to stay in sync with the rest of the band. Most popular musicians these days don't bother with these odd signatures for a couple reasons. Either they are incapable of performing music to these weird rhythms or they can't make it sound good enough to have their music appeal to an audience. Either way, when you hear a song with a weird sounding time signature, even if you don't enjoy listening to the music, you should respect the talent of the musicians creating the music.

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

My Independant Assignment

My IA is on the math behin music. Fittingly I decided to Make a rap about it, that way I could use the music behind the lyrics to explain my points. I don't want to give too much away, but since I don't have too good of a singing voice, I may feature someone to do the chorus :o who you ask? you will just have to wait and see. I have a big portion of the lyrics written, I just have to write the music and record it and make a cool music video!

MC Downey... coming soon!