Animated Engines offers fun and functioning illustrations which explain the inner workings of a variety of engines such as four stroke, diesel, jet propulsion, oscillating steam, ross yoke stirling and others you may never have heard of, and includes a fascinating look at how the animations were created in the how-to section of the site for those who are either just interested in how they’re made, or would like to try their own hand at designing an animation: “If there are spoked wheels or gears in your drawing, be extra careful with the number of frames you choose, or the parts might appear to be rotating too fast, two slow, or backwards—like wagon wheels in an old western movie. My solution is to make sure the gears rotate exactly 1/2 tooth (or some odd multiple) per frame.”

At the end of the article you will find links to paper modeling books, paper models directories, paper modeling software and tutorials, and paper models blogs, which in my opinion are the most important of all, just because they are constantly updated and the owners seem to have access to information that’s very difficult to find.”

When you become a member of Awesome Stories … You can see everything on the site (including an extensive image data base), explore all its features (including narrated stories), dig deeper (with lesson plans and text documents) and hear from Awesome Stories once a month (with a newsletter profiling current events and hot topics).

Join the site today. It’s all free!

• The Key to… Series: Algebra, Geometry, Decimals, Fractions
• Textbooks: Algrbra, Calculus, Statistics, Geometry, etc.
• Discovering Mathematics Online
• Software: Geometer’s Sketchpad, Tinkerplots, Kaleidomania!
• Supplemental Materials
• Tools & Manipulatives and more!
• Mathematics is their focus-their only focus. Careful product development and the application of progressive educational standards are the highest priorities at Key Curriculum Press. 

Cliffs Notes also offers course study guides for Business and Finance, Government and History, Languages, Math, the Sciences, plus test preparation guides, advanced placement exams, entrance and exit exams and much more.

Check out this free site which puts anyone in the director’s chair. The developers state:

xtranormal’s mission is to bring movie-making to the people. Everyone watches movies and we believe everyone can make movies. Movie-making, short and long, online and on-screen, private and public, will be the most important communications process of the 21st century.

Our revolutionary approach to movie-making builds on an almost universally held skill—typing. You type something; we turn it into a movie. On the web and on the desktop.

“Can You Count to a Googol? is not only a fun book, but one that actually makes sense, as much as is possible, of really big numbers. It begins with number 1 and adds zeros one page at a time. One is the number of bananas you could balance on your nose if you were a good banana balancer. One with a zero behind it is ten, ten times ten is a hundred…”

Read the rest of this review at the link above, and check out the many other excellent reviews of children’s picture books at this delightful site.

Customers have used American Science and Surplus items in home made cars, sculptures, precision instruments, home made telescopes,costumes, model railroads, window dressings, holiday decorations, and innumerable science projects. Their items are great gifts, inexpensive supplies, and an endless reason for a giggle or a “Gee whiz!” They try to be scrupulously honest in presenting what they have, and always take it back, no questions asked, if the customer isn’t satisfied with it.

They’ve been around for a long time (since 1937), and have multitudes of grateful homeschooling customers. Skip the dreaded retail stores and check out American Science & Surplus for Specials, New Stuff, On Sales and Must Goes. Endlessly fascinating. Incredible stuff. Unbelievable prices.

The Library of Congress purchased the Waldseemüller World Map (1507) in July 2001 from a German Prince whose family has owned it for over 400 years. At $10 million it is the single largest acquisition of the library, and is on permanent display in the Thomas Jefferson wing. Referred to as ‘America’s Birth Certificate,’ this map was the first to show the continents of North and South America and the first to identify the Pacific Ocean as a separate body of water.

It also was the first map to use the name America. The word “America” was written across the southern continent.

Waldseemüller carved 12 wooden plates from which the panels were printed. It was printed on 12 separate sheets of paper each measuring approximately 24 inches by 18 inches. Designed to be assembled as a wall-map, the finished map measured approximately 8 feet wide by 4 ft. 6 ins. high. Over 1,000 copies of the map were published.

The Waldseemuller map currently in the Library of Congress is the only one known to exist. Remarkably, it is complete and in pristine condition. It was believed that all copies from the first printing had deteriorated and disappeared as early as the 1600s.

Johann Schöner (1477-1557), a Nuremberg astronomer-geographer acquired an edition of the first printing. He did not display it as intended, but instead he bound it into a book along with other maps. This volume was acquired by the ancestors of Prince Waldburg-Wolfegg sometime after Schoner died. For nearly 350 years it remained, unknown and unread, in the Prince’s library collection in the Wolfegg Castle, in Wurttenberg, Germany.

Martin Waldseemuller 1507 World Map