Silver Linings (and a Dark Cloud too)

In keeping with the holiday season, I'm going to do something positive. Here are a couple of holiday gifts from me to you:

1. If you need help with using a graphing approach to solving systems of linear equations, there's a great little FREE program on Solving Linear Equations (It's towards the bottom of the page.) It lays things out clearly, and walks you through the steps to find the solution. I like that it lets you use your own numbers (great for "checking" your homework), and also that it will acknowledge the trick questions of identical and parallel lines.

2. My college accounting textbook had a balance sheet in it, but it did a poor job of explaining what each entry meant. If you're taking accounting, then, there's a FREE tutorial on the Balance Sheet at College-Cram.com that you need to see. Click the "To Learn More" button to bring up a tabbed breakdown of the four sections (Assets, Liabilities, Equity, Summary). By mousing over the tabs and labels, you get detailed explanations of each line item. This is some very useful stuff.

3. OK, this one isn't positive, but I ran across this and you have to laugh. Check out the OnLine Study Guide for chapter 12 on this publisher site. First of all, the chapter name you picked doesn't match the one on the screen. Second, it has four links for #12-16, each of which has exactly the same picture. How is that helpful? Third, it has four links for #12-13 -- not only are they all dead links, but someone brilliantly noted on the page that two are dead. (Was fixing them too much to ask?)

All this from a publisher that supposed to be helping you pass Art History. Yeah, right.


P.S. Woah, this is cool. I went back and tried to trick the program in #1 above by giving two equations that were almost but not quite parallel (3x-2y=8, -3x+2y=5). The bugger figured it out, and told me the lines weren't parallel but 'nearly so.' Impressive!