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.)