Oh, The Irony

A few years ago, my family and I were on our way home from a movie. We were waiting to turn at a red light when this guy rammed the back of our car. Luckily, it was just a minor accident and our car only suffered a dent in its bumper. When the guy hit us though, we lurched forward. We were objects at rest before that, but then an external force, the guy's car, acted upon us, causing us to fly forward. The guy's car, on the other hand, was an object in motion, and it stayed in motion until we, his external force, acted upon him. The reason I have a picture of soup here, is because the guy in the other car had chowder (sorry about the inaccuracy of the photo, but I didn't have chowder) and the reason he hit us was because he really didn't want it to spill so he was watching it very closely, too closely and not paying attention to anything else. So when he hit us and I turned around to see who was behind us, all I saw was this window full of splattered white stuff. The chowder- hey! another object at rest!- had spilled all over when that guy rapped our car. GOOD GREIF!

Physics in Jackass

YouTube - Broadcast Yourself. So last night I was watching TV and Jackass was on MTV. It was kind of gross watching some of the things that they did, but then I noticed that a lot of other things they carried out were related to physics. I hope I can get this clip--- well in this one episode, they sit in these shopping carts and just get thrown all over the place. Sometimes the carts are in free fall, but a lot of the times the person in the cart is in free fall. This also demonstrates one of Newton's laws: that an object in motion stays in motion. The carts never stopped rolling until they hit a tree or a bush or something, and the people never stopped flying until they hit a tree or a bush or something. If those obstacles or external forces had not acted on them, they would keep rolling. Well, I just have to say that those guys are CRAZY FOOLS!!!

Dodge, Dip, Duck, Dive and Dodge

Back in my "younger" days, all my neighborhood buddies, my brother and I all used to play games together. The one we used to play all the time was dodgeball. We played that game in our backyard so often that our grass got all dead and brown. This older boy named Christopher who was like in highschool back then (when I was in like the sixth grade) and his two younger brothers, (they were probably like seven) used to play with us. Christopher would throw the ball so hard at his two brothers and everyone that it was pretty scary. If he had the ball, he would face his back toward the people in the middle, then swirl around and just fly it out at us. Getting beaned by that ball was so sore! Well back then, I had no idea what was going on scientifically behind the scenes, but now I do. All those balls that Christopher beaned at us were projectiles. They were objects thrown, or shot as I should say, at us and then affected by gravity (although to me they just seemed to be coming straight for me). They had a horizontal and vertical motion. Because Chris would throw it at such a seemingly high velocity, the shape of the projectile, the trajectory(?) would look like a really wide parabola. The boy in the picture isn't Chris, he's my brother. If it were Christopher in this picture, the camera probably would have been broken by now.

My Thoughts on Physics

Well, this year is a lot harder than sophomore year, that’s for sure. It’s really different getting adjusted to the whole double period thing but I’m working on it. There is so much more work for me this year compared to the last, and sad to say, my first test grade wasn’t very excellent. But most definitely, I can say that I like physics more than chemistry. That stuff was so hard and abstract with all those empirical formulas and concentrations and chemicals and ahhhhhh, whatever. I like physics because everything is right there in front of you…like, it’s more concrete. Biology and chemistry were both so confusing because everything is either inside of you or inside of something else. I can understand most of the material, I just need to practice more of it. I guess I’m pretty excited for physics because it really is all around you; I’m scared that I won’t be able to keep up with all the material though. Why does Brit Lit have to have so much homework?!

Scooters

So I was wondering what to write for physics this weekend when thought about my neighbor, Pualei. She is like my sister, and comes over all the time to do homework, hang out, sleep on our couch, stuff like that. Well anyway, she lives closer to the top of our cul-de-sac than we do, and our cul-de-sac’s on a slight hill. Whenever she comes she’ll ride her scooter down the hill to our house, then go up our driveway, which is slanted upward, and come knocking on our front door. She has a weird scooter, it’s like a skateboard and a razor put together, so to turn you have to lean one way, not just turn the handle… I don’t know, I didn’t really understand the mechanics of that contraption, so I fell down many a time on it. Getting back to the subject, as I remembered this, I thought of physics. When she rides down the hill, she has a negative acceleration. When she reaches our driveway, she’ll probably have to pump her foot to get all the way to our door, so first, she experiences negative acceleration and velocity as she goes up our small hill, then she experiences positive acceleration and velocity while rolling to our door.

Negative Acceleration

This Friday, my friend drove me back to school after going to the beach. We were in the parking structure going up a ramp to floor 3a or something like that. As we were going up the ramp another car was coming down and my friend had to slow to a stop. After the car had passed she let go of the brake and the car started to roll backwards for a fraction of a second before she stepped on the accelerator. During those couple of seconds, while we slowed to a stop then rolled backwards, we were experiencing negative acceleration. We were going up the ramp in a positive direction, but we were slowing down, then we were going a little faster in the backwards direction. This is somewhat like the toy car experiment in class where the car was pushed up the slanted table. The toy, just like my friend’s car, went up at a decreasing speed, then down at and increasing speed.