Friday 9.3.10

Today we started the first few minutes of class making sure that everyone was able to access their blogger and google apps account (and as it turns out, mine works). We then proceeded to review the rules of significant numbers. The significant figure rules state that all non zero numbers are significant, zeroes between significant numbers are significant, any zero after a decimal is important, and that any zero used as a placeholder is not significant. After the short review we learned the rules to add, subtract, multiply, and divide using significant numbers. The rule for adding and subracting is that you round your answer to the same number of digits past the decimal point as the smallest number of digits past the decimal point. For multiplication and division, you round to the smallest amount of significant numbers. Finally we learned about scientific notation. When writing a number in scientific notation, you move the decimal until it is directly behind the first significant number and multiply it by 10 to the according power (for example 67,989,097 would be 6.7989097 times 10 to the seventh power). Unfortunatly however we were unable to get to a deminstration that involved fire.