swingggggg

Near the tennis courts is a swing set that little kids are always playing on. The swing acts just like a pendulum. The highest point the kid swings is where they have zero kinetic energy due to zero velocity but maximum potential energy. So esentially, the heavier the kid, the faster they go because total energy is conserved and at maximum kinetic energy, all potential energy, mgh gets converted. Cool ya? let's go eat and get fat. you first

the italien job

i was watching the italien job again this weekend and my favorite part is the speedboat chase through the venice canals. meanwhile, the safe is actually underwater, and the guys are breaking it open to get the gold out. you know why they do it underwater? because gold is very heavy. and underwater, buoyant forces equal to the mass of water the gold displaces. Therefore, the net force is the weight MINUS the buoyant force. ha lighter. smart people right?

Family fair

I hope everyone went out and worked at the family fair or spent lots of money. did you notice all the physics there? on those kiddy rides, kids get in the seat and are spun around the center, with a force equal to the mass of the kid(s) and seat times the velocity squared they're going divided by the radius of the ride. The force is directed radially inward and the velocity is always tangent. Wow, it just so happens that we were reviewing that this week. Don't you love physics?

Baseball

So I was at a family party, chilling outside with my cousin and my uncle. They were throwing around a baseball and I was sitting on the side watching, laughing and listening to music. Then it was like BAM! woah. projectile motion! Now that's something we haven't studied a while in physics. The whole, x velocity remains constant and y velocity changes with the kinematic equations due to acceleration of gravity. And guess what? That was in the first question of the review problems. Physics is all around, it's important to review so you can remember all those different phenomenons going on.

MRI

This week I had to get an MRI, which I still don't what it stands for. But anyway, as I was lying down, I looked up at the tunnel thing (which is like two inches from your face after they slide you in, which makes anyone claustrophobic) and it had this weird "x" shaped hole. On the side, there was a label that said a laser sometimes shoots out of there and not look into it. It gave the wavelength of the ray (I think it was 500 nanometers). So I got all excited! I could calculate frequency, Energy of the photons, and all that awesome stuff we've been learning recently. Unfortunately, big numbers like that were too big for my brain so I fell asleep instead. But physics is all around us!

refraction

So Adeline was having a ball with Doc's laser pointer. Julia and I kept giving each other glances and cracking up. Certain shiny surfaces like the benches or glass doors acted as mirrors and the light was projected back onto a paper Adeline held behind the actual laser.

We were walking past the fountain in front of Weinberg, so I was like "Adeline! Go see if the light refracts!!" She ran and it was amazing, it did!! Julia, who was on the side, could actually see the refracted beam through the water. AMAZING!

o0o Mirage o0o

Ok so let's call the top mirror Mirror A, and the bottom mirror mirror B. As you can see, the focal point for Mirror A is on the middle of Mirror B and vice versa. so when the light rays come in, they are rebounded by Mirror B to Mirror A, come back parallel to Mirror B then, because of the laws of ray diagrams, are rebounded to the focus of Mirror B, which is on the point Mirror A where you think you see the image. This creates the "mirage"

Radddddio

Who else besides me hates long car rides with your parents? ya thought so, everyone. so that's why someone invented something called the radio. it had three valuable uses: 1. drown out ur parents, 2. make them annoyed at "music these days" and 3. itz fun!! i never listen to AM, mostly only FM. i've grown up with radios and i never understood the difference between AM and FM. i thought AM music was just the stations that weren't good enough to appear on FM stations. but actually, they are different kinds of waves. FM stations vary the frequencies on the waves and AM varies the amplitude. cool right? ya, thought so

magnets

I was at home this weekend, bored out of my mind, so I decided to do something physics related. Everyone knows the bigger the magnet, the bigger the magnetic field. So I found my humagangous magnet and had some fun. My dog was lying down and there was a nail on the other side of him. I ran to him and put the magnet by his stomach, the nail jumped to the magnet. Since magnetic fields have forces far beyond what they actually reach, I wanted to see if forces could go through objects too, like through a dog. So i put the nail two inches from his stomach and the magnet on his back. It didn't work, it wasn't strong enough. Which I realized later was a good thing because the nail would have stabbed my dog.

Christmas in february

I finally finished taking down all my christmas lights around my house. it was a sad day. but, as i took down my mini christmas tree in my room (fake, so it was still pretty) i looked at the lights. I realized that all these lights are actually resistors, connected in a series. Or were they in parallel? I wanted to break off one of the lights, to see if the lack of one of the resistors would have brightened all the others. That would have been an easy test. But, i didnt feel like breaking my christmas tree... Santa clause would have smited me, or given me coal for the rest of my life. and im not a big fan of coal. so, ill leave it a mystery, for now

kaboom

Ok so who else thought that this weekend was annoyingly rainy? especially for punahou carnival... which is good, cuz we don't need to support them by going. ha just kiddin. so anyways, it started lightninging too. which is physics! somethin i actually know in physics too, shocker. ha punny. so itz created because of charges between the clouds and the earth. like ur hand and a doorknob, the charges jumps through the air, and a shock is formed. cooooooooolllllll...................

slinky time

I didn't really do anything very physicsy this week, so i decided to play with my little cousins slinky and teach her some laws of physics: waves. she grabbed one end and i ran to the other end of the room with the other end. i swear, the little kid could see the nodes and anti nodes better than i could and she learned everything a whole lot quicker then i had... and she's like 5... ok maybe 10, but same thing. Fun with oscillation. awesome! go physics

poooooool!

so after finals, everyone needed to wind down and have a reason to party. cheeehee. so we chilled at brians for like, 3 and a half hours. i hafta say, sean is pretty good at pool, and kevin chun, but doc doesnt know him, so itz pointless to mention him. so anyways, we used our physics skills to the max to own everyone, well in seanz case, to own and in my case to lose to everyone and scratch on the eight ball.

so we practiced lining up the center of the cue ball and the taget balls so they would go in the hole like in the lab we did SUPPPPERRRR long ago. and it was so fun (the physics of it!) that we're gonna b addicted to pool halls until we graduate. then we can make a decent living in college by hustling people like doc did. auuuuu right.

Engines

So basically, my dad says if i'm going to drive, i need to know how the parts of the car work. When we got to the engine, i could actually tell him stuff! Like the fact that heat goes in, expands so the piston moves, then heat moves out and the piston moves back down. And we could find out how much work it does by finding the area under a PV diagram as well as the efficiency. Of course, a car engine works much faster and the gas expands a lot quicker due to sparks, but it's all basically the same.

The World is Flat

Hey guys, I'm sure a lot of you read The World Is Flat as well. Pretty good huh? Makes you think about real-time conversations with people across the world. Pretty cool! Or the scary reality that hackers and terrorists have advanced technology as well. Anyway, the world is being flattened. Read about it.