Phinal Physics Phun (the one you've been waiting for)

Finally it's the end of a good year and it's time for the blog yo have been waiting for. *drum roll* The Hair-combing blog. Now doc! mentioned at the beginning of this weekly chore that we could do anything we want including brushing our hair. Now I am here to discuss this physical activity that involves electrostatics, kinematics and optics. In the Electrostatics arena combing one's hair is similar to brushing electrons off of atoms to create and electrical difference. Now the reason brushing our hair with a comb doesn't create a shock like rubbing latex against it is the fact that the plastic combs people use now a days cannot create an electrical imbalance due to the nonconductivity of the material.
In regards of kinematics, hair combing creates two-three-dimensional forces. If was brushing short hair as seen above, the comb creates a torque on each individual strand of hair with the base of the strand a a pivot. If one was brushing longer hair, the comb would create tension and friction within the hair follicles.


The third area of hair physics is the optical effects of hair. Hair tends to have a nice sheen to it when brushed properly (easier to see in longer hair). This effect is similar to a butterfly's thin-film wings since a single strand is slightly reflective. A bunch of the strands perfectly aligned create a reflective surface where light bounces off and makes the hair appear to shine on its own different colors. AS the light bounces off and has different amount of path differences, different colors appear. Well until next year doc! this will be my last words.

Rock Band Physics

On Saturday as I was hanging out with my lion dance friends, we were playing Rock Band, pool and poker. Now as I watch my friend sink the eight ball to lose, I noticed how the horribly the singer was on the mic. I realized then and there that this is similar to the harmonic motion of sound waves. Due to his vocal cords vibrating, the voice coming out of his mouth was horribly out of tune. The difference between the wavelengths in sound cause what is known as dissonance. This scratchy sound was then picked up by the receiver in the mic, which converts sound energy into different currents of electrical energy to tell the Xbox what to do.

Apparently Rock band is tone deaf because it only measured the big differences in pitch and not the dissonance. This raises the question why was I out at eleven in Chinatown with friends when exams are coming? I am preparing to sell apples in Waikiki.

Truck Physics

This weekend my lion dance group had to go pay respects to our late sigong, over the Pali at Hawaii memorial cemetery. On the way there some of us were sitting on the back of a Chevy Silverado. AS I was sitting there, I realized that the wind was blowing really hard against my face. Now the frame of reference from my pint of view was that that I was stationary while the wind was blowing, but in reality the truck was accelerating at at about 15mph/s for three seconds from a still. As I sat there I realized I had a revelation: I needed to do a blog. I saw how my had would feel differently depending on how I held it in the wind. Now assuming the wind is moving (or I am moving) at a constant acceleration each time I took the photo, the air pressure against my hand would be constant. Now the experiment comes from varying surface area acting against this constant pressure in AP=F to determine the amount of drag force.
An open had has about .022 meter squared,


a closed hand has about .0066 square meters,

and a flat hand has an area of .001. As the area becomes smaller the force acting on my hand would become smaller and smaller. This is why cars are designed to have minimum surface area to face oncoming wind drag.

1 scrip for 1 malasada

A while back in electrostatic, doc! told us the story of when we grow up to sell apples in waikiki for 5 cents an apple. Well that moment might be closer than you think. This past weekend at Iolani Fair I noticed a sign for the junior's malasada booth. The sign you see below is the price board for malasadas in differnet quantites. Now the original purpose of the apple story was to say that the electric potential of a particle was one Newton per coulomb. These particles in space have verying amounts o electro poential depending on where the charge is placed in space. If the charge were placed closer to the particle the elctic potnetial would go up. But the amount of force acting on the particle would increse with the charge of the particle to maintain the certain Newton per coulomb ratio in the electric potential. This picture shows that story by illustrating that no matter how many malasadas one buys, it will always be one malasada for one scrip. Pretty darn stupid.

Me magical physics Stick!

This past Friday after the robotics team demonstrated their bot for the PSA, we started fixing up the robot to prepare it for family fair demonstrations. AS we combed the bosch for miscellaneous loose or broken parts we stumbled upon a stick. Now this "stick" was a decorative neon light that was placed near the front of the bot.



As you can see the inside of the neon light was broken, but it still demonstrates many properties on why it is the magical physics stick. First off notice that the wire forms a spring. The spring was created from wrapping the wire tightly around the tube and then untangling it to form a thing of harmonic motion. Next is the solenoid properties of a spring made of wire. A solenoid is a tightly wrapped coil carrying a current in one direction. If one was to run a current in one direction through these wires a magnetic field could be created flowing in one direction on the inside. Now this couldn't possibly happen in real life due to the duel nature of the wire carrying the "in" and "out" current

The last property of the magical physics stick is the refraction caused by the glass all around the tube. As light passes through a material of higher index it causes the light to bend as well as diffract. One example ids how the wire hole from inside of the glass seems to be higher then where the wires actually come out. Another observation is how the inside of the cube end forms total internal refraction by reflecting the light off its inside and preventing it from being completely transparent. So these are the properties of me magical physics stick.

Cool Magnet toys

This past Saturday after the AP English workshop me and a couple of other special individuals went to chill in doc!'s room. As I walked around waiting for a functional computer, I stumbled upon a rather cool toy. It was a bunch if individual magnetic balls that were about gram each.

I started experimenting with these balls by rolling them on the table by swinging a chain magnetic balls creating a fluctuating magnetic field. In response to the rotating field the stationary ball started rolling in the towards the chain till it eventually flies up and catches on.

In another experiment I mounted the balls on the board and lo and behold the horizontal structure I formed didn't fall down despite the weight of the structure being like 70+ grams. When you think about it it makes sense, When the ball on the table had enough magnetic force to overcome its weight when it was about 10 cm away from the chain, 70 balls together would have an amazing amount of attractive force to each other and the board. Despite the weight on the ones further from the board pulling the entire structure down, the force between the force between the balls was strong enough to hold it all up. These are really cool doc!

By the way Bobby if you are reading this the labs are done and you don't need to go to Doc!'s room on Sunday

MOTGOR and friends

This past Saturday was the IDP's Dramathon. It was a solid 9 hours worth of fun laughs, drama, and talents. The 9 hours post-SAT helped little to relax my brain. Anyways the Dramathon ended with the performance of two bands. The first band was Micah and his friend whose name escapes me. The Second band came from the forge of Valhalla to bring the godly gift of rock to us mortal humans, MOTGOR. After blowing away the crowd (quite literally after they started the first song), they invited Micah and friend to jam with them in their last song. With the combined might of the three guitars, one bass, one set of drums, and one singer, the sound wave overcame the first few rows, even the some of us wearing earplugs. It then occured to me as Anders ripped away at his guitar that the reason they are so loud is because the sound wave from each guitar adds more amplitude to the existing sound wave of the one guitar. AS such the sound of 5 musical instruments blasting away makes a loud end to a tiresome day.

MOTGOR!

The last thing you will ever see

This weekend I performed my sword kung-fu for my lion dance group and apparently had pictures taken of me while I performed. In this picture you see here, my blade acts like a plane mirror as it reflects the light of its side. Polished metal acts like a mirror because it reflects the light of objects straight back to them. It is not a perfect mirror because the light it reflects back is intensified by the light from the sword's surroundings. As the objects' lights hits the sword they return at the same angle they hit the sword at, and unfortunately that some stray light rays hit the sword so that the angle it leaves is the same is in the same direction as the primary object's eye.
These stray light rays from surrounding light sources are what causes cameras and eyes to see a glare. Since the sword reflects its own light and the light from light bulbs, flashes, and other objects, it creates a glare that tends to blind opponents until it is too late for them to block.

The Physics behind Kiss Me Kate

This weekend was the culmination of work for the cast, crew and pit of the spring Musical Kiss Me Kate. AS a member of the crew it was my job to make the magic of the show happen for the cast to shine in their full glory. For some of the times that required being on fly rail (the part of the theatre that manually pulls in and out the drops that come onto stage.) Now mind you I shared this task with a less experienced whiny senior. But the physics for moving the these set pieces remain the same on the stage or above. On the stage there are the two big rolling pieces which require a Strong force to overcome static friction of the wheels. The wheels make the job a lot easier because they have a smaller static coefficient and can glide across the floor quicker in the dark.

The second part of the theatre magic is in the fly rails. These thousand pound drops experience a large weight force and have a lot of potential energy being raised about 20 meters up.

To assist with lifting these beautiful drops, we have a combination pulley system assisted by weights. A combination pulley system is comprised of a stationary pulley and a movable pulley, which in this case has weights on it to decrease the weight we are actually pulling. Since there are only one complete set of pulleys, we halve the difference between the weight of the drop and the weight of the weights. The overall force we had to move is supplied by the rope via tension to life the drops in and out.

This is the magic of the theatre.

The Current of a class

This past test was on Direct current of a circuit. Now If you think about it a class in doc!'s room is considered a complicated circuit, namely pd. 7. A complete circuit needs a power supply or a battery to give it energy. Going with the Classroom metaphor the power supply would be doc! and the energy would be physics. With every circuit there are the light bulbs that light up, people who get it,
and those that don't, stupid.

Now the light bulbs will have varying amounts of resistance, some will get it faster than others, and varying current since the ones in the back would usually have more resistance. Each row would be a series of bulb in parallel with the other rows. The back rows would receive more current because of its higher resistance, but everyone would receive the same amount of volts because we are all on the same wire (classroom). Some people would also act as capacitors where they will store all the information and then release it when the test comes, our class has a lot of capacitors because capacitors need to be recharged after each test.

Images protected for anonymity. This all makes sense if you think about it.

Chinese New Years

This past week end was Chinese New Years and being a lion dancer I was out 13 hours of the day. Some of the minor physics I observed a lot this weekend is the concept of work. Work is the term used to describe the amount of force used over a distance. Distance is rate x time so the amount of work I completed this weekend is Force x rate x Time which was a really fast rate and for a really long time.

Another offspring of the same concept is the change in potential energy of lion dancers. We performed a lot of tricks and routines this weekend that involved acrobatics and jumping. One of the better examples is the use of the jong or pole jumping. AS the performers increase in height of the poles, their potential energy goes up proportionally to the amount they went up. So if they were to fall from the 6 feet pole as from the 2 foot table, they would have 3 times the amount of energy went they hit the ground.

Tension save us all

This past week was one heck of a week. The Cheryl Hayashi lecture on Thursday got me started thinking about the tension. The wide medley of spider silks that exist have high durability (because its near impossible to break up silk strands) and able to pick up lots of tension. As I was sitting through the lecture and quite a bit after wards I started seeing how high tension material is need in this world. She explained how silk could be used for bullet proof vests to tennis rackets. But the best place I learned from her lecture was the amazingness of tension. At Lyon Arboretum on Saturday, yes 3 days thinking about same principle, we had to do extreme weeding.

AS you can see from how much stuff we need to pull out of the ground it was made even more fun by the sheer verticalness (not a word) of the cliff. As I pondered how to pull out the non-ferns, non-grass, and no-tea leaves, I realized that maybe nature already found a perfect combo of tension. Since it was found in spider silk, I prayed that roots had the same principle, so I climbed the mountain using natural fibers to pull me up. And it worked, although I fell down and slid 20 feet, and I was able to rest against a tree (that also had to be cut down)and ponder why physics was stuck in my head that long? Seriously Doc why? whyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?

By the way this is what the cliff looked like and the ground about 20 fet behind me

Card House

This weekend was another Chinese New Year performance weekend for me. 6 more weeks till I can drop dead and work more for school. Anyways I was staying at a disclosed location with my friends in Chinatown and was really bored. They were playing some kind of shooting game and I found a deck of cards. Since I don't know how to play solitaire and playing other cards games by myself and figuring out which hand will win grew tiresome, I started building a house.



As you can see in the picture the card house only goes up so far because of potential energy. As each card layer increases in height, the next layer on top will have that much more potential energy since PE=mgh. The tower eventually fell, because of the higher potential energy of the cards on top and the second law of thermodynamics, which states the entropy of the universe is the same or increasing. The highest level of the card fell into its more entropic state and leaving me forced to build another card tower (Note: I build card tower because Chinese people do not build card pyramids, we build tower-like pagodas)

When a sword meets the spear

This weekend officially marks the start of the Chinese New Years celebration on the chinese calender. Yay and boo. Yay because its about 8 weeks worht of partying and eating (great after the American holidays!). But it is boo because as a lion dancer the majority of my next the next two months will be lion dancing, sometimes whole days at a time. If anything this would be considered my tird sport season because the amount of time i put into this will conflict horribbly with everything else. Well enough of my pain time for physics.
Today's post is about what happened while I was practicing my sword/spear dueling set. I was teaching it to someone else the sword pat of the routine this weekend and hoping they will learn the set. I would normally play the spear part,but I know both. So as I was going through the set, actually about five to six strikes in, the sword is suppose to do an upper block against the spear's strike coming down. But the person who I was practicing with, needless to say is kind of lacking certain gray matter, whipped the sword out as a strike and came in contact with the wooden part of the spear. Normally you would never block a spear strike with a sword stike for two reasons. One the strike will dull your sword. Two the spear could break off and end up hurting you. No one was hurt, but the large amount of force behind the small area of the blade ended up combing with the initial strike of my spear ended up damaging the shaft. The resulting pressurenearly snapped the poitn right off.

This demonstrates first hand with physics why you neve block with the blade.

Picking up my shattered soul

We all endured the long and painful suffering of the past evils this week. The horror of semester exams, studying, and lack of proper personal care in some cases. One of the few good things I can say is thank the mighty heavens as well as DOC for not having a Physics exam. I spent over 11 hours studying for the APUSH exam and I was still puzzled by some of the questions Soares (Pflinger?) decide to put on the exam. One of the questions (I can't reveal what it was) dealt was particularly not difficult to handle since all it required was a brain dump to answer the question. As I was writing as much as I knew about the *censored* I realized that my thumb was beginning to burn from a blister I was getting from writing too much in the past 48 hours. Than as I was continuing to spew information, I realized that the pen acquired rotation mechanics in multiple ways.
One way was the use of my thumb as a fulcrum to carefully manipulate it to make words. Although I was making minimum movement with my pen side, I saw the other side of the pen making bigger movements and circles due to the tip being father from the fulcrum and having to travel a faster velocity. Another rotation was the rotation of the ball in my pen to produce the ink. A ball point pen works by rotating to carefully let ink out onto the page in a controlled fashion. SO thank you physics for forcing me to think about you while I was taking a very critical exam.

Seto Hall at night isn't cold at all

This past weekend the robotics team had to wake early to attend the FRC kickoff at Mckinley. So we had a sleepover at Seto Hall to make less of a hassle for parents and have a night of group bonding and games (If you think we actually had sufficient sleep from this you didn't see us at the kickoff). We spent all night inside Seto Hall with the air conditioning on. Let's just say that isn't the warmest of of things to do. AS I was receving carpet burns on the bottom of my feet from friction against my running, I remebered the problem about heat capacity. I than realized why the night was so cold.
Heat capacity, or heat coefficient, is the amount of energy it takes for a material to go up 1 degree celsis or the amount of energy it gives off to go down 1. As I looked around the big hall, I saw very few things that would give off enough erngy to the air to raise it one degree. Combined with the laws of of an ideal gas evening out the herat energy with the cold night air, seto Hall became very cold. The carpet, whch would normally have a higher heat capacity, was dimally small, so most of us spent the night in blankets or hopping around in sleeping bags. The Kickoff at the Mckinley gym was slightly warmer due to more human bodies to give off heat, but the night was wonderfully cold. It was very fun:)

sex, God, Jobs, and Professional wrestling

During this winter Break I spent a lot of my now free time reading the World is flat and learned a number of reasons why the world is flat and how to cope in this flat world. For those of you who didn't read it, it basically says that the world is becoming flatter as a economic playing field because of advancement in connectivity that allows other developing nations and companies an even chance at competing with the US. The high-speed fiber optic cables and convergence of the Internet after 11/9 (the fall of the Berlin wall (the physical economic and social barrier)), led to countries like India, China, and Japan to compete for jobs with the US. Although the menial jobs like tax accounting, tutoring, online management, and receiving fast food orders, are shifting over to India, we can compete with the IIT grads by using our distinct imagination and creativity to give us an edge. In this flatter playing field, each one of us need to dig deep inside ourselves and find what we are good at and combine it with our distinct imagination to find and hold a job that can compete with others. Big companies, medium businesses and individual entrepreneurs are all competing for the same clients, but what will win the clients pay is whoever woos them with their creativity. A blogger can reach more audiences than CNN, a guy in a basement with a camera can have more clients than a million-dollar photography firm, and a small package delivery can hold a monopoly in an area without UPS. These things are occurring thanks to a dramatic increase in technology and connectivity in this flat world.

I leave this saying:

"Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up.
It knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed.
Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up.
It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve to death.
it doesn't matter whether you're a lion or gazelle
When the sun comes up, you'd better be running."

Oh yeah the title of this blog is the top four most searched terms on google, one of the flatteners of the world that allowed more information sharing. and the image is from Google(sorry doc but I don't have images of a flat world.)