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