edit: got the picture to work here it is


so i'm pretty easily distracted by shiny things. such is the case with this weeks blog. so there i was innocently doing homework when i heard the crinks and cracks coming from the corner of my room which houses my used space blanket (i don't know why i haven't gotten rid of it yet). anyways, the light from my ceiling lamp made the light dance across my walls. the light from the lamp was reflected off of the surface of my space blanket and contorted into different shapes and patterns. i experimented a bit with the shape of the blanket to make it concave and focus the light to a single point, and make it convex so that the light is spread throughout my whole room. the light photons bounce off the smooth surface of the blanket and are shot off at an angle to form the many different patterns and shapes that now fill my wall

one thing i love about having not enough free time is the fact that i have to literally run everywhere. which is probably the reason i do cross country and track, however these guys must really be in a hurry. when i'm late for a class i usually just take the stairs, these guys jump out of a window. the amazing examples of projectile motion exhibited here are.... well, cool.
when jumping out of a window or off the top of a building the x velocity they have at the moment of jumping is the same throughout their flight but the y velocity is what is affected by gravity. in most of these clips they are merely falling off of what ever they jump from, but in a few we can see them move vertically by having a velocity great enough to momentarily escape the -9.8 m/s2 and fly upwards long enough for the force of gravity to not make them move in a negative direction.
there are also many good examples of momentum and rotational force throughout these videos but i do not know enough about that to properly explain them.

funny thing happened to me today

so i was playing some world of warcraft last night and i noticed that when i jumped off a ledge or cliff, i would fall at a steady pace. i thought "well this is weird i should be accelerating in stead of falling at a constant velocity". well actually i wasn't thinking that, i was thinking about how i was going to get away from the guy chasing me. then it dawned on me, i would cast the spell that allows me to fall slower when i jump off a cliff (it is called "slowfall" incase you wanted to know). so i would run off the cliff with the guy chasing me, cast the spell, and watch as i decend at a much slower velocity than the man who was following me. also, as an interesting side note, because i was falling at a slower rate i was able to cover more ground in the x direction than had i jumped normally. my decreaced rate allowed me to continue moving forward at my Vo velocity from when i had initally jumped.

who says video games aren't educational?

hooray physics

yeah, i am really looking forward to this year. i was not really a fan of chem for reasons known to me and everyone else who had the same teacher for me. i liked biology, but i think that physics will have more meaning to what i want to do in my life. since i want to become a aerospace engineer, or just an engineer in general, physics will probably be the most important class i could take second to calc. but i am looking forward to this year because of all the hands on labs. i didnt like chem because i could never really get a grasp on what was happening, but in physics i can really apply everything to my life. pic is related because physics and cyborg pirate ninja jesus are both completely awesome.

sept 9 2007

so i was watching some youtube and i stubled upon this little gem of the internet proving two things. 1, you neck is enough of a conductor to allow the flow of electricity from one end of a circuit to another; and 2, people are really really stupid. in the video a man is electrocuted from a dog collar intended to keep dogs in the yard by emitting a radio signal that will trigger the shock if the dog goes beyond a certain point. well, the man passes that line and receives a healthy dose of e- from those two nodes sticking into his neck. his skin is used as a connector between the two nodes to complete the circuit. however, not all of the electricity flows to the node, most of the electricity stimulates the muscles in his neck causing what is commonly known as pain. he twitches and writhes on the grown as his arms flail in an arching motion. at the moment of shock he accelerates his body backwards away from pain and his body falls at the acceleration of gravity assuming there is no wind resistance and his body is not fighting gravity on the way down.

so that is my journal this week.

sept 2, 2007

as i was thinking (read: scrambling) for an idea for my physics journal i decided to toss my lighter around for a bit. up and down, up and down it went until i finally dropped it on my foot. considering the lighter wasn't very heavy it didn't cause much pain. it did, however, give me an excellent idea for my journal.
my lighter was making a very nice parabolic shape as it was being tossed up and down and i noticed how its velocity and acceleration changed each time i threw it. i tried to then make the speeds about the same when i threw the object up and down. i also noticed the increase in acceleration and velocity as i increased the height at which i threw my lighter. all of these reminded me of the kinematics we discussed in class just a few days earlier. i would have tried to find the speed at which the lighter was moving by taking the total distance covered by the lighter on its way down from my ceiling to the floor and then dividing by the amount of time it took to reach my floor, but then i realized that it was the weekend and i really just did not want to do that right now.