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