physics in my life

Tied with Disneyland

2008-05-11T23:12:00.002-10:00

WoOhoo! Okay, I would have to say that Discovery Zone probably is one of the BEST PLACES EVER! In my mind, it could be tied with Disneyland for the happiest place on earth. I know right? Well, whatever, call me crazy then, but I think it's true. Well, when I was a little kid and traversing the many tubes, nets and slides of DZ, I had little physics insight, but I do now! Now I know that as I zoomed down all those cool slides, I demonstrated the conservation of energy! I had PE at the top of the slide which changed into KE at the bottom. OOOOH! and also, I just remembered, one of my most FAVORITE things to do at DZ was... ok, there was this long rope that just hung in a straight line, and there was a bar across it. So you stood on this platform and then you would grab that bar and then jump off the platform and you would just slide across the rope hanging onto that bar until you hit that squishy material on the all the way on the other side. Well the physics in that is, the cable that runs across will always sag even when there is no crazy kid on it. The bar, and the rope itself, gives a downward weight vector. Well you guys might think I'm foolish or weird for writing a journal like this, but hey, I know that you secretly love DZ too and wish that they would make one for kids our size!

I'm Yours!

2008-05-04T21:51:00.002-10:00

Okay, on friday night I went and saw Jason Mraz! HE IS AMAZING! So the concert was at the Waikiki Shell and I had lawn seats. Even though I had seats far away from Mr. A-Z I could still hear his beautiful voice perfectly! Why is this so, you may ask, well it is partly because the concert is in the shell! Look at it! There are multiple layers of the shell, just like in a theater. The sound bounces well off the layers so his heavenly voice eminated throughout the whole vacinity! He was really really really good. I hope he comes again and again and again so I can listen to him again and again and again!

Family Fair

2008-04-26T16:13:00.002-10:00

At family fair last weekend, I got burned on an inflatable slide kinda like this one. But that's not what I want to talk about. Ok, here comes the physics. When I was at the top of the slide, I had no kinetic energy because I had to wait for this little kid to go down the slide first, so I was at rest. I had potential energy though, because that equals mass times gravity times height, and I had height. After I had ridden down the slide and had gotten by burn on my elbow and was at the bottom, I had kinetic energy, but no potential energy because I had no height. Because of the conservation of energy, I know that the amount of potential energy I had at the top of the slide was equal to the amount of kinetic energy I had when I was at the bottom fo the slide. Oh my goodness that was so much fun. I wish I went in a bouncy house though. I'm actually pretty sad I didn't. Next year though. Well I guess the slide will have to do.

Ukuleles and Physics

2008-04-11T18:29:00.002-10:00

Sorry if you guys can't see the letters on the picture, but I sure hope you can. Well, I just wrote out the equations for velocity. I'm actually kind of scared to write this because I'm not sure if I'm right of wrong. I hope I'm right because if I'm wrong then I would just sound foolish. But what I wanted to say is that we all know from the sound of music lab that a change in frequency changes the note which is being played, so if you play a c note, then a d note, the frequency changes. In an instrument like an ukulele, you can see how this happens. When you change the note, you change the length of the string which you are playing, because you press down on frets with your fingers. This change in L changes the velocity that the string is moving. Then you go down to the second equation. Since the v changes, the frequency and wavelength have to change proportionately. Because the frequency changes, you hear the changed note. I'm not so sure about this way of thinking though, so don't take my word for it!

Squeaky Clean

2008-04-06T15:59:00.002-10:00

Every Sunday at the Baba house is cleaning day. I am practically pro at cleaning bathrooms already- and I'm not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing. So today I had to clean the back bathroom. Most of the cleaning stuff is in the front bathroom so I was going to have to transport everything from the front to the back. Those things in the picture are all the things I needed to bring to the back bathroom. I could easily carry the roll of paper, the scrubbing bubbles and that non sterile mirror cleaning stuff in the white can. But the lysol toilet bowl cleaner was a toughie. I didn't want to make TWO trips just because of that stupid blue bottle so I decided to try and hold it on my forearm. I thought I was holding it in the geometric middle of the bottle, but it fell on the ground (don't worry, I didn't make a mess). But then I remembered center of MASS. The bottle's geometric center wasn't the cm because the mass of the cleaning juice inside it adds more mass. Then I positioned the bottle on my arm and tried to find the real center and lo and behold! I didn't have to make two trips! And I cleaned that bathroom really well, if I must say so myself.

The Sweet Sounds of Variable Resistors

2008-03-16T21:02:00.003-10:00

I think that the coolest sounding instrument you could play is the guitar. It sounds sooo awesome when people are just improvising and having fun. I REALLY wish I was a cool guitar player. Then I'd be the coolest person EVER!!!!!!! Unfortunately I can only stumble on a couple of chords but it's still fun. My dad has a couple of guitars and fools around with them every so often. He has one acoustic and one electric with a pick up. I always wondered why an amp was called an amp, then I found it was called an amplifier. What happens is there's some variable resistors in the amp and guitar. When you turn the dials, the resistance changes and there is a larger current. The larger current contributes to a larger power, and that's where you get that lovely sound you can rock out to.

2008-03-09T21:34:00.002-10:00

Well, in lieu(spelling?) of the finished paddling season, I thought that I would write a journal to paddling in trubute. When we paddle, although it feels like we are doing all the pulling, we aren't. And we aren't pulling either. What we are doing is pushing the water backwards, and the water is pushing us forwards. It's weird to think about it that way, but after looking at those online notes, I saw that that's what's actually happening in real life. Our girls came in sixth in the whole state! Yay vars one! Well, paddling season was really fun, and maybe later this year, I can think of more paddling physics journals!

Basketball Jones

2008-02-24T18:50:00.002-10:00

Well, to start off, I would like to say that I am really sucky at sports. In elementary school I thought that the coolest thing wasn't the slam dunk or anything, I thought that spinning a basketball on your fingertip was absolutely amazing. Little did I know that there is a physics lesson hiding in that miracle. Those pros like Michael Jordan and whoever else know that to spin that basketball, you need to support the center of mass, or the ball will fall of your finger. The center of mass resides in the very center of the sphere. You will never see a basketball player spinning the ball on its side. Their finger is always on the bottom of the ball, right in the center, supporting the cm.

TIMBER

2008-02-10T14:02:00.000-10:00

I love Newton's laws! You can apply them to everything! For my sweet sixteen last year, me and my friend Bridget rented a bounce house because we are super cool. It was a big hit... haha literally. It was so fun bouncing around in there, but when a lot of people came, it got kinda trippy. There must have been at least fifteen people in that bounce house, and everyone was just falling on top of eachother- we all wouldn't stop bouncing until we hit someone. And sometimes, the whole bounce house was topple over! It happened when a lot of people were on one side and fell against the side. The force of the side of the bounce house wasn't enough to go against the force of several teenagers, so it fell over until we could touch the ground through the net on the sides. It was the BEST!

MUD MUD MUD

2008-02-03T09:20:00.000-10:00

On Friday and Saturday, my friends and I went to the Punahou Carnival. Once again, I apologize for not having a camera, but believe me when I say it was as muddy as heck. My friend and I were determined to ride the Music Express. We waded through the mud and stood in a really long line and finally got there. My friend was really scared to ride that ride so I told her she could sit in the seat where I would be the one getting squished. At first we were like, ok, so that would be the middle because of centripetal force, but then we thought that it would be the outside because of centrifugal force. While riding the ride your body would want to keep going in a straight line, which would be to fly out of the cart. Your inertia would "push" you to the side. Sure enough, when we asked the EK fernandez guy which side gets squished, he pointed to the outside. PHYSICS TRIUMPHS ONCE AGAIN. So I sat on the outside and I was getting so squished it felt like my guts were popping out but it was so worth it- we had so much fun!

Make way for the Chinese

2008-01-26T22:04:00.000-10:00

Last week Sunday I went to the Shanghai circus and it was a trip! I couldn't take pictures because I didn't have a camera but this one is of them from off the web. All the stuff that they did was really mind bottling (blades of glory is totally legit) and it had a lot to do with physics. The main thing that I saw there was center of mass. They balanced soooooooooooo much stuff. Like you know the number of o's I just put in the word so? This one girl balanced more chairs than that. Yes, but anyway, they could balance all of those things on top of one another because the center of mass was always supported. Just like in this picture, the center of mass is within the support area, the bottom chair. Well i must say that was a crazy experience, but since we know physics, i bet we could do all that stuff. We just need to learn how to throw things with our feet, balance plates, and ride unicyles. Then we're good to go.

Christmas blog

2007-12-21T21:31:00.000-10:00

Merry christmas! Well, this is my neighbor Kehau, Pualei's cousin. She likes to dance and stuff so she took this picture and gave it to us because she thought that it was cool. I was going through my pictures and found this and was like wow! we just learned that stuff! For Kehau to balance like that, her center of mass must be supported. I'm pretty sure her support area is her foot, I mean, how could it not be? Her arm out helps her to balance. Maybe you guys could help me out. Where is her center of mass?

Ok, well, and if you think that blog was a bit lame because I didn't know where her cm was here's another small one. Paddling has started and practice lately has been GREAT(but not really). One thing that I have learned about paddling from physics this year was that when you pull the water, you aren't actually pulling it, you are pushing it, and the water is pushing you back, so you accelerate forward. Another thing that I have noticed is that whenever we paddle towards Diamond Head, we go a lot slower. That is because the wind is a restricting force that opposes our motion. In contrast, when we head towards Kewalos, we go much faster because the wind is going in our direction. Have a great rest of the break!

Rise of the Lumberjacks!

2007-12-07T19:50:00.000-10:00

Wow, what a great week! I'd say school getting cancelled was probably the best thing that ever happened!!!!!!!!!!! Well now that I think about it, maybe not the best but it was still pretty dang good! OK so I took these pictures of this tree by my house- that white speck under the trunk in the first one is a boy...shows how HUGE this tree was! o yah, and sorry about the random guy without a shirt in the second picture but he wasn't moving and I didn't want to tell him he had to move because he was kind of creepy looking. Anyways, I really wanted to put up these pictures and was thinking about what this tree and whole weekend had to do with physics and at first nothing came to me, but then I thought of a few things. All the rain that we experienced were little projectiles coming down and -9.8m/s^2. This tree was once an object at rest and was pushed down by an external force which was those seventy mph gusts of wind! hoooooobrah! Also, the roots in this tree are pretty flat as you can see. They don't go down deep like the deep roots of friends and family- that's why it fell. Just kidding, but seriously. The tree wouldn't have fallen if the roots were deeper because its center of mass would be shifted closer to the ground, and just like Mr. Kohara's example of being buried in the sand, if the tree's roots were super deep, it would be like being buried up to your chest! It would never fall! Well there it is, I'm sure there's more physics stuff you can think of about this week too! Man, it's a good thing the tree didn't fall on the house right in back of it yeah? Well HAVE A B-E-A-UTIFUL DAY, and stay warm and dry!

It's as simple as something that nobody knows...

2007-12-01T20:34:00.001-10:00

hello everyone! A somewhat large portion of my life over the summer and currently is teaching ukulele. One of the things I notice about it when I teach the little kids is that they have trouble holding down the notes to get a clear, clean sound. You can relate this to physics because the uke string is kind of like an object at rest. This will stay at rest until an extraneous force large enough acts upon it. Those kids who have trouble don't push down on the strings with enough force. Some people who do though, are Jake Shimabukuro and Jack Johnson- I got to meet him! They were both at the Ukulele Festival this year! It was awesome! Every single note that Jake plays is crisp and you can tell that he pushes down on the strings with just the right amount of force! I tried to put the videos that my parents took of Jack Johnson and Jake on here but they wouldn't go, but Jake Shimabukuro has a lot of stuff on you tube and it's pretty MIND BLOWING...well maybe not mind blowing, but it's pretty cool. And everyone already knows how good Jack Johnson is too, so I guess that I don't need proof of that. That was by far the most awesome Ukulele Festival I ever worked at! MAD PERKS!!!!

OUCH!

2007-11-18T17:25:00.000-10:00

Okay, so last weekend was probably one of the only times I watched a football game on television in my life. I know some of the big names, like Colt Brennan, and Tyler Graunke, but until last week I had never seen them in action. Last week the game was against Fresno State, and during the game, one of the Bulldogs pummeled Colt Brennan, practically driving his body rgiht through him giving him a concussion. Now when I think about it, would it hurt more if that Fresno guy bounced off of him? It would right? because of the greater change in velocity, creating a larger momentum. Thinking about this reminded me of that example Mr. Kohara gave in class about the difference between a regular bullet and a rubber bullet. Well all I know is that hit Colt Brennan took looked pretty gnarly!

It's fun to stay at the....

2007-11-09T18:10:00.001-10:00

TGIF. Ok, so a few years ago, during the summer time, I volunteered at the YMCA in Kailua as a junior swimming instructor. It was pretty fun- the kids were so cute! One of the things that the kids had to do when they were learning how to swim was the ROCKET LAUNCH, or something like that. It was this move where you crouch horizontally in the water, and push off this vertical wall, with your hands out in front of you. You kind of look like a rocket because your hands are pretty straight out, with one hand on top of the other. Yeah, so they would push of the wall and then glide for a little while then start their freestyle. I always thought that they were pushing off the wall, but after physics, I now know that the wall was pushing against them with the same force. This, I believe, is Newton's third law: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Therefore, the kid was pushing the wall with a backward force, and the wall was pushing the kid with a forward force, ultimately making him move in the forward direction.

woohoo!

2007-11-04T13:49:00.000-10:00

hello! well, remember that week when we had to do the self evaluation journal?... yah, i actually did two because first i thought it was a regular journal, but then i looked at the assignment sheet... so if you want to see the first one i did just scroll down to the beach one! thanks Mr. Kohara!

My second blog of the night

2007-10-20T19:58:00.000-10:00

Sorry this picture is grainy but you guys can deal with that right? OMG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I am soooooooo mad at myself for not reading the stupid assignment sheet first!!!! Well I know it's not stupid Mr. Kohara- it's actually great but I just feel pretty retarded right now because I just spent so much time thinking of that beach house surfing summer blog then I went to the e school and saw that it was supposed to be a self evaluation! Haaaaah. ;as;dlfjewoirad;slfj. that was me feeling retarded just there. So anyway, I put this picture up because I think I can make it! It was pretty hard getting used to everything at first, kinda like I was going up a mountain! but then, with persistent practice and studying, I made it through the first quarter! After the test i'll be flying down that hill! that will be a nice break from practically breaking my back all the way up there! Well I wasn't really breaking my back, but I worked pretty hard and I am proud of my grade! I know there will be many UPS and DOWNS this year, but the end result will be MAGICAL! I just have to keep telling myself I think I can I think I can I think I can!

Here's another one of those blogs about the beach

2007-10-20T18:49:00.001-10:00

Okay, so this summer my uncle brought his family down from Arizona, and whenever my uncle comes down, my family, the HI Babas always do something big with the AZ Babas. So this summer, we stayed in a beach house in Kailua and all we did was eat, sleep, and full on beach it and pool it. One day we walked down to this beach where turtles were like EVERYWHERE... it was kind of disgusting and cool at the same time- turtles kind of freak me out- but anyway, the turtles weren't the only things there: there was also little waves that would roll in every once in a while. My dad had brought one of his longboards- we call it Frankie- that's another story- anyway, and he was pushing my cousins Riki and Jenna onto these tiny waves. When I thought about it, I was like, "How are they able to ride those small waves?" but then, someone correct me if I'm wrong, I was just thinking about it and I don't really think that their weight matters because if they are laying on Frankie then that means that they are on a surface so there must be a normal force to cancel out their weights. That must mean that all they needed to worry about was the friction stopping them from riding the wave. But in the end, the horizontal force of the wave and the force from my dad's pushes were enough to get them hanging ten...well maybe not, they fell down a lot. Aww man, now I miss summer!

FUJI-SAAAANNNN!!!!!!!!

2007-10-16T17:11:00.000-10:00

Okay, sorry this isn't about class day but just today in class I had a revelation about something that happened in Japan in the spring. So over spring break, my cousin's family, my grandma and my aunty took me to Japan with them and it was a very interesting experience. My first physics example (yes, I have two this time!) is about these cable cars to in Hakone. We wanted to get to this lake and in order to do that we had to take all these trains and buses and these cable cars. The Japanese tourists there went CRAZY when they spotted Mount Fuji through the window. While I was flipping through these pics, I saw the one of the cable car. Remembering the lab, I thought of how the cable line, although it looks straight in this picture, actually sags because there is always that weight vector down. The second thing about Japan that I had a realization today about in class was... while we were getting to Hakone, we had to take these tiny trains all the way up this mountain. During the train ride, we would go forward one way then backwards over and over again. I was wondering why we kept on backtracking but then after class today I know that we weren't backtracking, we were zig zagging up the mountain because it probably would have been too much work to go straight up the mountain.

Oh, The Irony

2007-09-30T11:14:00.000-10:00

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

2007-09-22T15:55:00.000-10:00

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

2007-09-15T15:39:00.000-10:00

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

2007-09-10T21:00:00.001-10:00

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

2007-09-08T16:39:00.000-10:00

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

2007-09-02T12:10:00.000-10:00

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.