Is it good to be organized?; Seeing is not Believing!

To skip my midlife crisis, go past the dotted line!


Life has honestly become more and more of a mechanical grind. More than it ever has been, I think.

I wake up at a pre-determined time in the mornings, calculated precisely the night (or morning, hehe) before to account for leftover homework, head to school and finish it, and follow my generic schedule. After-school is pretty mechanical too. I have my schedules all planned out, for each day of the week. Mondays are scholarship, then doc!'s room. Tuesdays are cram for violin lesson. Wednesdays are violin lesson, and Thursdays are quartet. Well, you get the idea.

Even the stuff we learn is pretty mechanical. English will always be vocabulary, and analytical essays. Math will be.... math... and physics will be real world applications of math with lots of equations (kind of?)

So, I don't really know anymore. My friends, teachers, and family all seem to believe that being organized is a good thing. Especially after today, when I had a long talk with my dad about "having a sense of direction, of where I'm headed." I don't know though, if it's good to know everything about where I'm headed. Kind of takes the fun and thrill out of things, especially considering that I only get three more years to be a teenager.

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While pondering above thoughts, I had a water glass on my desk...

I quickly noticed an everyday example of refraction--the tendency of light to travel at different speeds through different mediums.

Light travels more quickly through air than it does through water. As a result, it creates a distorted image of a straw:



And here's some guy who saw the same thing I did, but with a straw, because that's normally what people have in water glasses. Comes with some analysis; which is cool, so I don't have to do any~.



So, although the straw appears to be bent from an overhead observer, the picture indicates that the 'real straw' is a continuation of the straw above the surface of the water, just like our brains would like to believe.

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.

Insulators

Electricity, indeed, is an abstract topic; to read about, understand, and especially blog about. Physics has definitely gotten more challenging, "kicked up a notch," and the added time pressure on tests isn't too helpful, either. But I can't help but feel exicted, too. One more semester from junior year, and i'm done forever. wheeeeee!

Recall from last week that an insulator resists the flow of energy, most commonly either heat or electrical. However, the American Heritage Dictionary also defines an 'insulator' as more generally, something that segregates from and/or prevents from happening. Am I allowed to say that this blog is 'insulating' me from doing my APUSH research proposal? Someone tell me!

In general, insulators and conductors are dichotomous--any object is either one or the other. Just like conductors, an average household is filled with insulators! Here's some that I believe every household should have:

wood (paper is made from wood, sort of)


glass


rubber (so then, what happens when you flip an electric switch with wet, rubber gloves on? someone try and let me know the results)*


now, onto the six pages of my research proposal, which is going to be twice as long as the actual paper itself. see you next week, yo!

* (asterisk denotes that author reserves the right to clarify and will not be subject to any incidents of pain and suffering and/or will not be liable for any accidents that may occur)

Conductors

It's really kind of annoying when the physics test that everyone thought was easy, in (including yourself), in fact, so easy that doc decides to pull off the curve, turns out to be your worst test in second quarter, actually perhaps in the whole year. /sigh; oh well!

In class, we've moved from thermodynamics to electricity, which means a bunch of new stuff, and hopefully (for me) a better test. I did notice that just like how there are thermal conductors, there are electrical conductors. The same, of course, goes for insulators.

In both cases, an insulator resists the flow of energy, either heat or electrical energy. A conductor, then, allows the transfer of energy. This week's focus is on a couple things I could find in my house that are appropriate conductors of heat and electricity (there are a lot more than I thought!).


the wiring system which hooks up my router/road runner
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no idea why that bandaid was there..

so why are cooking things made out of metal? you tell me!

Some observations:

-any kind of metal is a good conductor.
-any kind of wiring is extremely good, too.
-water is a great electrical conductor but a terrible heat conductor. hmmmm....

With this, we know why parents always nag about drying your hands before turning off the light switch in the bathroom. See you next week for insulators.

Thoughts on Finals, Does anyone use CDs anymore? The Future of Google in China?

January 17, 2010

A few blogs into the New Year. Feeling pretty good. Finals are over. APUSH is over, which effectively doubles my free time.
Hell yeah!

We should all take some time to thank Doc, the heavens, and whoever else lent a hand in eliminating the semester AP Physics B exam. I literally got under two hours of sleep on some nights, which is just not fun. An additional exam, especially physics, might just have made me want to kill myself just the same, but a lot more.

I always try my best to give credit where it is due. This week, that means putting my trusty Sansa MP3 in the spotlight, for being my best friend in these times of crises, and getting me through it all. This being, of course, the same one I got for Christmas and generally carry EVERYWHERE:



Of course, I need to keep my 'best friend' updated with the latest music and sound clips. Most of the time, I get the music burned on a CD and download it to my computer, from which I can transfer directly to the Sansa. Takes less than 30 seconds to upload the entire CD!

But I guess the irony of it all, in this day and age, is that CDs have gone through Napoleon status: from towering heights of popularity to completely obsolete. The CDs I use were all ones that I had from before, but never listened to, because, well, they were CDs. Last Thursday, my friend sent me a playlist from a Rise Against album which I just couldn't resist picking up. I decided, then, to take a blast into the past (cliche much!) and burn it on a CD, and listen to it that way, for nostalgia's sake. I had to borrow my dad's coworker's CD player to use it, though, since really, who the hell uses CDs anymore? (did I say this already?) I forgot to grab an actual picture, but it looks something like this:



I noticed that after the initial time it took for the CD to get going, it spun around on the player in uniform circular motion, just like we studied in November. The radius of a standard CD is 6.05 cm, or 0.0605m, and the mass of a standard CD is 14.4g or 0.0144 kg. Knowing these two meaningless facts, we can find a lot more meaningless things!

A Review on Rotation formulae:
Radial/Centripetal acceleration is equal to velocity squared divided by radius. Since Newton discovered that Force equals mass times acceleration, Centripetal force equals mass times velocity squared, all divided by the radius.

Furthermore, if I calculated the period of one rotation, I could calculate tangential and angular acceleration, too. This can be done with the formula, Tangential Velocity equals (2pi)(radius)/(period). Angular acceleration equals simply (2pi)/(period).

We also did a chapter on rotational kinematics/dynamics and studied about angular velocity, angular acceleration, and angular displacement. Given angular velocity, we can figure out so many more meaningless things about my CD on a CD player.

Now, I'm not going to calculate all of those things, because it is 12:31 A.M., but feel free to do it if you want to! I'm off to do my problem set, which looks inherently difficult. . .

In other news, Google has gone down the tubes in China, I guess. Baidu stock at an all time high, as of 8 hours ago!