powers and roots" last week .... you know fractional exponents and negative exponents and such, and to answer the age old query of "who uses this stuff?" .... (or more often put "when am I ever going to use this?"), I scanned through my resources and found a problem that I expanded upon to take all period. It had to do with an equation relating the mass of a mammal to the circulation time of the blood. ... and as part of the problem, they used the given equation to calculate the circulation times of various mammals. One of the mammals was the blue whale, and that just fascinated everyone (me included). There are tons of cool sites on the blue whale.