Links for 2010-10-29

"It's one thing to put Montana's Indian Education for All Act to work in a social studies classroom.

Physics? That would seem to be a whole 'nother matter.

And it is. But certainly not, as Polson High School teacher Jon Petersen is proving, impossible.

Petersen's physics students spent their class time Tuesday measuring elastic potential energy.

But they did so using two primitive bows, one made of hickory and the other of vine maple, built by Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribal member Francis Cahoon."

"Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto has created a beautiful, undeniably scary time-lapse map of the 2053 nuclear explosions which have taken place between 1945 and 1998, beginning with the Manhattan Project's "Trinity" test near Los Alamos and concluding with Pakistan's nuclear tests in May of 1998. This leaves out North Korea's two alleged nuclear tests in this past decade (the legitimacy of both of which is not 100% clear).

Each nation gets a blip and a flashing dot on the map whenever they detonate a nuclear weapon, with a running tally kept on the top and bottom bars of the screen. Hashimoto, who began the project in 2003, says that he created it with the goal of showing"the fear and folly of nuclear weapons." It starts really slow -- if you want to see real action, skip ahead to 1962 or so -- but the buildup becomes overwhelming."