WANTED: Jason Preble, Destroyer of Magnets

I guess I've been aware of it all my life, but physics isn't always.. amazing. :[

Sometime during Saturday's performance, my precious magnet (see last week) was destroyed by a tumultuous force of nature. Our bassoonist, Jason Preble, haphazardly crushed my red, star-shaped clip.

Jason's force exerted by gravity (weight) is much greater than the magnet is able to handle. Assuming Jason's mass is about 60 kg, his weight would be about 600 Newtons. 600 Newtons divided by 4.184 Newtons per pound results in a weight about 143 pounds. Of course, it's no surprise then, that my magnet which weighs about six pounds, was brutally crushed.

Additionally, we can't forget about impulse: the product of force and time. Since we have already established that assuming Jason's foot came from straight above the magnet, impulse would simply be that number times the amount of time Jason took before realizing that he smashed my magnet and taking his foot off. I'd assume that this time is no more than maybe, half a second?

And then, there's the transfer of momentum from Jason's foot to my magnet. Since the magnet simply got crushed, without really moving much, the collision was clearly inelastic (kinetic energy is not conserved)

The mistake was of course understandable; after all, the pit area is always dark, and navigating through a sea of stands and instruments is difficult.

Don't leave home without your magnet; Kiss me Kate to open in Five Days!

As far as things that needed to be done and time available for me to do said things goes, this was probably the worst week of the year. Frequent readers of this blog have informed me that I begin every single blog this way, but it's so true. You have to put up with me, readers, because this is always the first thing that comes to mind when I start writing on Sunday night.

On Saturday, the pit orchestra had a Sitzprobe five hour rehearsal, in which we played the same stupid music millions of times, for five hours. And the music is in itself, impossibly hard (or maybe just for us violins). And we played this impossibly hard music for, you guessed it, five hours. Probably one of the most memorable (worst) experiences of my life, actually...

also, why the hell is Hawaii Theatre in the middle of Chinatown? cmon, seriously?

After the rehearsal ended around five, I decided to relieve some stress (read:procrastinate) by heading over to Ka'kaako park with a friend. The area itself is always hilly, almost always windy, and almost always a place with noone around. Of course, my friend had to lose her stupid keys at some point, with hills everywhere and nobody else around. So we spent a fair amount of time looking for a tiny gold thing in a probable three acre area, like a needle in a haystack [cliche, i know, sue me!]

so we searched for a while, of course with me chastising about not putting a string thing around the keyring like i do with mine.


I of course, came up with the brilliant idea of using the clip I used to hold my kiss me kate music together to find the keys. The catch is, that it doubles up as a magnet! Because keys are a metal, and magnets immediately feel an attractive force towards metals (which contain 'a sea of electrons' throughout), I was able to search much more efficiently by just running my magnet around the long grass (as opposed to moving it around with my hands). Soon the keys turned up!


I, of course, have no idea why I have a Hawaii State Teacher's Association magnet-clip, but it sure was awesome at the time.

had i left my house without this ridiculous clip, or had i forgotten about the awesome power of magnets, i may have been looking and annoyed for a very long time.

don't leave home without a magnet, kids!

Gravitational Potential Energy: An Episode from the Past!

Today, I made some new friends at Richard's house. And I just love introducing new friends to people! But I don't have names for them (yet).

For the last couple of weeks during our study of electrostatics, a key to many problems is calculating electric potential and electric potential energy (there IS a distinction between the two!). Conceptually, doc! used the model of gravitational potential energy to help explain electric potential, as the two are actually quite similar.

While finding homes for my new friends, I discovered that some habitats were at greater heights than others. Since gravitational potential energy equals mass times acceleration due to gravity times height, the habitats located higher on the storage bin should have a greater potential energy, right?

To take a page from the writers of the AP Physics B book, this blog will have a "Gotchas" section (which doc! never makes us read, but it's fun to, anyway). Because I forgot to mass each of my friends and measure the actual heights of each level of the storage bin, calculating gravitational potential energy is impossible. Ranking the gravitational potential energies is hence, also impossible.

While usually a higher elevation results in a greater potential energy, we cannot assume that the highest potential energy habitat is at the very top without making our own hypotheses about the masses and heights of Hamtaro, Dog, and Bear. For example, Hamtaro is the highest, but probably has the lowest mass. M will be a smaller value than for the other friends, but H will be a larger value. The same dilemma holds for dog and bear; we can only generalize about whether M and H are greater or lesser in correlation with the other friends.

The only thing we can say for sure, is that the potential energy of Mr. Killer Whale is zero, because he is at a height of zero: mass times acceleration of gravity times zero equals zero, regardless of what the other numbers are.