How many? part I

As i was sitting in my room thinking of PCH I realized there are a lot of monkeys in my room. This blog will be part one of a x amount of blogs series called how-many-monkeys-I-have-in-my-room blogs.

Today we will be looking at a rather curious monkey i received from family fair a couple of years ago(one of the better prizes). This particular monkey has two springs for arms and hangs on my mirror/closet door. In the first picture the monkey is in equilibrium because its weight is equal to the two componentized spring forces . When no outside forces are acting on it, the net force on the monkey is zero.



In the Next picture I pulled the monkey down away from equilibrium so that it has spring potential energy upwards. Since the monkey will travel upwards once I release it, the amount of spring force is greater than the weight.



Once the monkey reaches the top part of its amplitude, the spring potential energy maxes out but in the downward direction. Thus the net force is the weight and the spring force going in the downward direction. Here ends part I of the monkeys series.











PS Notice any holday activities u might want to go see

Extreme HULIing

This past Thursday was a very windy day. For those of you who failed to notice this, basically, fail. One of the most noticeable effects of the wind and rain was the massive (for Waikiki) waves at Waikiki Beach. Although I was given the chance to paddle with the Varsity guys, mainly because everyone else above me wasn't there for unknown reasons(e.g. theatre, sick, robotics, didn't want to, drafted elsewhere, run swimming, missed the bus, etc.), the waves still looked pretty discouraging. AS we paddled through the channel, our boat started taking on a lot of waves. In a few seconds our boat was completely filled and we were forced to bail out. Our boat's mass increased, but our volume stayed the same, so our density increased. Thus our boat started to sink.

very long swim


Now the physics part comes in as we tried, in vain to huli our boat (For non-paddlers huli means to flip it.) After forty or so attempts at flipping the boat it became obvious that the buoyancy force wasn't significant enough to hold the boat up and allow us to bail out the water. The equation Fb=pVg meant that our mass was somehow different because the volume of the boat was still the same. After about an hour of flipping swimming the boat out and flipping some more, the waves proved too much for our crew, two kayakers, and another crew to flip over our one boat. As we decided to swim back to shore, I was stuck with the job of supporting the water-filled back because i was the swimmer. I realized that the back was water-filled when the rest of the boat would ride the wave and it would sink far below it. So on the day of the buoyancy test, buoyancy seemed to be against me in the classroom and at practice.