How the months got their names

This question comes up in classrooms throughout the school both in maths lessons and in English when we study the meanings of the roots of words. How can you teach about octagons without referring to octopi or October? The problem is October is now the 10th month, so lively discussions can occur about how this can be so.

1.    January Named after the Roman god of beginnings and endings Janus.

2.    February februa, this month was the time for the ‘festivals of purificatio’ in Rome.

3.    March after the Roman god of war, Mars.

4.    April from aperire, "to open" because in Europe it is spring and the month when buds begin to open.

5.    May Maiesta, the Roman goddess of honour and reverence.

6.    June The fourth month was named in honour of Juno queen of the Roman gods.

7.    July named after Julius Caesar in his honour in 44 BCE,

8.    August named after Augustus Caesar in his honour in 44 BCE,

9.    September septem, "seven". After July and August were squeezed into the Roman calendar the last four months are wrongly named. For example September the seventh month is in fact our ninth. Some people say as March was the first month of the Roman year September was the seventh but the alternative story, whereby an emperor can create a month and name it after him has more intrigue when teaching the root words “sept, oct, nov and dec”

10. October octo, "eight"

11. November novem, "nine".

12. December  decem, "ten".

BBC TV (2009) Battle of the Brain, Notes from a TV show with info from The Mind Institute, Albuquerque, New Mexico

The Mind Institute, Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gardiner’s Multiple Intelligences are opposite what IQ is – a single intelligence.

The most controversial is the bodily kinesthetic intelligence.

“there is little science to Gardner’s theory”

There is more science to IQ and it’s been arounf 100 years or so.

IQ may indicate longevity and health.

IQ increases as you age, more education, more professional your job the higher your IQ goes.

Smokers are less smart!

Also

From Robert Maxwell TV series on The Brain

Extroverts: less saliva

Introverts – more saliva

Puberty: older kids are slower at recognizing emotions than 10 year olds.

Young kids have no control over amygdala

Teenagers frontal lobes are confused so they are more easily led into taking risks –this creates dopamine.

The more risks we take, the more insensitive we become to dopamine so greater risks are need to reach the same state.

Mood altering:

Reading happy words releases serotonin from the brain stem, sad words reduce the amount of serotonin

Citoyenne Henry, is recorded as being the first woman aeronaut, in a balloon, 1798, in spite of a ban on females going up. She was French

(One of my students found a reference on the internet to a June-Elizabeth Thurley who flew in 1795)

Bodanis, David (2000) E=mc2, A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation, Pan Books

E=mc2

C stands for celeritas, = swiftness in Latin.

From Io’s orbit around Jupiter, Cassini’s student Ole Roemer, a Dane, challenged him to predict Io’s reappearance after being behind the planet in 1676.

Cassini said 5;27, Roemer said 5.37 and was correct. T was to do with the extra distance the light had to travel because the earth was now on the on the further side of the sun. His speed of light calculation was accurate, but all scientists in those days thought light was instantaneous

670000000mph, London-LA in 1/20 second/ Mach 1 speed of sound, space shuttle mach 20, asteroid mach 70, light is mach 900,000!

Faraday 1821 found that electricity can be changed to magnetism and vice versa

Einstein Light waves – electrical and magnetic, driving each other forward. Light can only exist when a light wave is actively moving forward. It’s a quick leap frogging of electricity out of magnetism – its speed is the upper limit.

Protons moving close to the speed of light swell to become 2 units of mass each- then at speeds of 99.9997% of c the protons are 430X bigger than their original size, because E can become m and vice-versa , so c is a conversion factor telling how the linkage operates.

Sum of mass and energy always is constant – but why c2??

 P 65 Emilie du Chatelet E=mv2, lover of Francois-Marie Arouet, aka Voltaire used work from Willem sGravesands who dropped balls into clay and found distance squared when height doubled.

When you move 2x as close to a light the brightness increases by 4x. Accelerate a car by 4x stopping distance increases 16x.

Mass is simple the ultimate type of condensed or concentrated energy – a small mass is therefore a lot of energy as c2 = 448,900,000,000,000,000.

Cecilia Payne 1923 –sun is made of H and He through spectroscope analysis. The old guard was wrong, they read the spectroscopes as reading iron but could not understand why. Payne beat rampant sexism and proved her professors wrong

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (Chandra) at 19 years old in 1930 BLACK HOLES because of E=mc2. Time will finish in 1X10(34) years.