Compliments

Compliments by Maggi



You light up my life

I'm so glad I found you.

I never thought you could be mine.

You have the most beautiful eyes in the world.

You make the world go around.

Thank you for doing such a good job.

Thank you for being you

Thank you for the great dinner

You are a wonderful cook.

You are the best

Thank you for sharing your thoughts with me

I want to thank you for teaching me so many valuable lessons

Thank you for teaching me that listening is just important as talking

Rainbows

How a Rainbow Forms

A rainbow is a combination of water droplets and light, that spreads out into an spectrum of colors. You will see a rainbow when the sun is behind you and there is moisture in the air in front of you - this is important to remember when understanding how a rainbow is formed.

Light Refraction
Light can bend. When light hits a surface it will bend over it, through it or around it. It changes speed and direction. When light hits a transparent material, such as glass or a water droplet at an angle, it refracts (bends) and disperses through the droplet. The arc of the rainbow appears by the angle the sun hits the droplet, the bending of light through millions of water droplets causes the colours to be shown in a semi circle. This process is called "Snell's Law of the Refraction of Light." See the image below for a demonstration:

Light Dispersion

White Light
We see light as white, but it is made up of many colours. When the beam of light passes through the water droplet it slows down and spreads out or disperses, separating each colour that makes up white light as a spectrum of colours. The colours we see in a rainbow are : red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.
There are other colours, but we can't see them through our human eyes - even infra-red and ultra-violet! The index of refraction is the measure of speed of the wavelength of colour. Each colour has a different speed of refraction. You will see the colours of the rainbow in the same particular order because of this speed.

This image below shows light passing through a glass prism, which illustrates what happens when light passes through water droplets. You can see that the beam of strong white light hits the glass and reflects up (the thin white line) and it also refracts through the glass, dispersing out the other side in a spectrum of colours.

Summary : A rainbow is therefore millions of water droplets, each one refracting and dispersing sunlight. The sun is hitting every droplet at a low angle and is situated behind you as you look at the rainbow. The arc of the rainbow is caused by the way the light is bending through the droplets.

Melbourne

What do you know about Melbourne?

Add a Fact about Food

Add a sentence or story about Food
What foods do you like to eat?
What is your favorite food?




http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/FoodFoodFood

The Man from Snowy River

 Ballads are stories written to Music.
The old campfires were where the workers sat at night after their dinner, and sang songs, or listened to someone singing. They loved the ballads that told a story of some adventure or yarn.


Listen to the story sung by Slin Dusty, and retell the story

English Lessons

                                                                        

Welcome to English Lessons 

English is learned through experiences and activities that lead to speaking, through reading, writing, listening, and speaking.

Content based activities  extend student vocabulary and knowledge, giving students words to use when they speak or write, extending vocabulary and speaking and writing skills.

All the activities extend the knowledge of the student through student research, with students doing the task.

Speaking is a natural extension of any activity.

Students record their progress in their own Journals in individual wikis.

Active English provides activities and experiences that promote the Active learning of English Speaking.

To learn to speak English, you must speak English.

"You learn to speak by speaking"

"You do by doing...this is Active English"

To read more, and to learn to speak English,  you need to enrol at 

http://activeenglish.ning.com

 online virtual lessons available..

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Ancient Greek Calculator for the Date of the Olympics

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=antikythera-mechanism-eclipse-olympics

An ancient Greek astronomical calculator that showed the positions of the sun, Earth and the moon, and outshined any known device for 1,000 years after it, also kept track of something more mundane: when the next Olympics would take place.
And its design just might have sprung from the skull of the brilliant scientist Archimedes.
View a Slide Show of the Antikythera mechanism
Researchers have pried these and a few other fresh secrets from the corroded bronze fragments of the Antikythera mechanism, a clockwork-like assemblage discovered in 1901 by Greek sponge divers off the Greek island of Antikythera, between Kythera and Crete.
Members of the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project (AMRP) and their colleagues used data from high-resolution, 360-degree x-ray scans to decipher markings as small as 0.06 inch (1.7 millimeters) tall on a spiral dial on the rear of the instrument. The five-twist spiral is inscribed with 235 sets of markings believed to indicate the months in a 19-year calendar.
Known as the Metonic calendar, people have used it since Babylonian times to account for the fact that 12 lunar months add up to only 354 days—11 days shy of a solar year. (Gears located behind the dial face would have moved a pointer like the minute hand on a clock to refer a user to particular markings on the dial.)
Writing in Nature, the team was able for the first time to read the names of the months on the dial, which match those of calendars once used in the Corinthian colonies of northwestern Greece, suggesting that the mechanism was built in the area.
Seven of the month names match a calendar used in a part of Sicily believed founded by settlers from Syracuse in the fourth century B.C. Syracuse was home to Archimedes, the polymath who in one apocryphal story leaped from a bath shouting, "Eureka!" (I have it) after figuring out how to tell if a royal crown was made of solid gold by submerging it in water and measuring the water it displaced.
Researchers assume that the Antikythera mechanism, built in approximately 150 to 100 B.C., sank on its way from the Greek island of Rhodes to Rome, then a major trading route. Although Archimedes died in 212 B.C., too early to have built the Antikythera mechanism, the Roman philosopher Cicero attributes a device to Archimedes that was similar to it.
"There's a chance that it's a kind of descendent of his invention," study author Alexander Jones, a historian of ancient science at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, says.
Whatever purpose Archimedes may have had in mind for his instrument, Jones says the use of the Corinthian calendar indicates that the Antikythera mechanism was not built for scientists. Instead it may have been for teaching nonspecialists about astronomy.
Bolstering that interpretation, the researchers discovered that the markings on a smaller dial inside the Metonic one spelled out the locations of the names of Panhellenic games, the highly popular sporting events of which the most famous is the Olympics.
The games were on a four-year cycle, and each quarter turn of the dial indicated which games took place that year in the cycle. "That's something of no scientific interest. That's of human, social interest," Jones says.
One of the things the mechanism was well-suited to teach was the predictability of eclipses—the apparent task of a second, four-twist spiral dial on the instrument's back.
Its 223 divisions correspond to months in the Saros cycle, another ancient calendar system—this one an 18-year cycle—for tracking eclipses. Of these divisions, researchers had previously identified 16 that were marked with glyphs, or sets of characters, indicating solar and lunar eclipses. The team increased that number by two to 18.
The pattern of glyphs was highly accurate: it matched the start dates of 100 eclipses that occurred during the final four centuries BC, as determined by NASA. "We could start the dial at any of these dates and all the known glyphs would exactly match actual eclipses," says study author Tony Freeth of Cardiff, Wales, a former mathematician and member of the AMRP.
The device seems to have fallen short, however, in predicting the exact hour of an eclipse. An inner dial is divided into three sections that may have specified the number of hours to add to the eclipse time marked on the glyph.
But the authors were unable to figure out a way to make the times match those of the eclipses calculated by NASA. They suspect that the device's maker used an imprecise method for calculating those times.
The shortcoming does not diminish the brilliance of the Antikythera mechanism, which "has at its heart a real genius about it," Freeth says. Of particular ingenuity, he says, is a pin and slot mechanism involved in the front side of the instrument, which shows the positions of sun, Earth and moon.
Freeth and his colleagues reported two years ago that the pin and slot were used to account for variations in the speed of the moon in the sky. One can almost hear the inventor of that little trick shouting, "Eureka!"