prettybird

It's funny how most of the blogs you post prove than video games are completely unrealistic. Great job!

I didn't realize we could write about ourselves until recently, so I'm gonna join the party and introduce myself. My name is Alaina, and I am a senior this year. I hope to major in Physics and Math in college next year, and honestly I'd like to go to University at Buffalo even though I'm applying to Ivy League schools. I work at Murph's Irondequoit Pub every Friday, and they really do have the best wings in town, but also the best bread. I'm addicted to it. I love cats, and right now we have four at my moms house, and one at my dads. My dad's cat is named Olivia, and he has two dogs as well, Toby and Bailey. The cats at my moms are named Pretty Kitty, Kaylee, Leah and Mia. Mia is my cat, and it's taught me a lot about responsibility because I have to take care of her myself and pay for her vet bills and food, etc. I am currently the President of NHS, and I am the Editor in chief of the newspaper. I also participate in Math League, Link Crew, and Student Council. I recently got a part in the school musical, and I'm really excited because I haven't done a musical since 8th grade. In my free time, I play video games or watch other people play video games. I play on my computer, and I think it's way better than an X-Box or PlayStation. My favorite people to watch are Achievement Hunter/Let's Play/Rooster Teeth because they're hilarious and they make even scary games funny. My favorite video games currently are Terraria and Payday 2, but I've been playing a lot of Stardew Valley, too. Well, there's a little bit about my life. Have a good day!

I love this movie! Great job with the kinematics. I thought it was cool you thought about it in terms of energy too.

When I was in ninth grade, my vision rapidly started to deteriorate. I went from perfect vision to not being able to read simple words more than 15 feet away. Glasses can be used to look at a few topics in physics, the first (and easiest) being how they stay on my nose. The force of friction between my nose and the glasses overcomes the force of gravity trying to pull my glasses of my face, and when they slide down my nose, the force of gravity is higher than the force of friction and so they slide slowly, as friction is still acting upon then, just with a kinetic coefficient of friction instead of static. The other way that glasses can be looked at through a physics lens is with lenses. The reason a person would need glasses is that the eye cannot create a focal point at the retina in your eye, and so you see a blurry picture instead of a clear one. To correct this, a convex lens is used so that the focal point occurs on your retina and you can see clearly. Thicker lenses cause the focal point to be closer to the lens, and so if your eyes have more trouble focusing then you will have thicker lenses.

One thing I do on a daily basis is drop things. For example, pieces of paper or folders. When these things fall, they have the force of mg down, and the force of air resistance up. The paper will reach a terminal velocity and continue to fall at this velocity until it hits the ground. The force that the paper exerts on the floor is equal to the force the floor exerts on the paper. The coefficient of friction between the tile floor and the paper is likely small because the tile is smooth and the paper is also relatively smooth. This means that if the paper was acted on by some force, it would move easily across the floor. When I go to pick up the paper, since the paper's inertia is small, it is easy to pick it up. When I pick up the paper, I increase its potential energy (found by mgh) as I increase its height. When I set it back down on the table, the normal force from the table stops it from going through the table and opposes the force of gravity on the paper.

I recently got an 8 week old kitten on September 20th and have been spending all my time watching her and keeping her out of trouble (not only has she stepped on my keyboard an uncountable amount of times while I wrote this, she also deleted the whole thing twice). I figured I'd kill two birds with one stone and do some physics with her in mind. She often jumps off of my bed, so I figured I'd find her final velocity the instant before she hits the ground. I know her vertical acceleration due to gravity is 9.8 m/s2, and that her initial vertical velocity is zero, as well as her horizontal acceleration. I filmed her running off the edge of the bed and determined she covered around 13 cm (.13 m) before she left the bed, and she did this in around .4 seconds. I also know she falls about 42 cm (.42 m) when leaving the bed. I determined her initial horizontal velocity to be .325 m/s by using the equation v = x/t. I then found the final vertical velocity using vf2 = vo2 + 2ax, which gave me 2.87 m/s. I then used pythagorean theorem to attain the true final velocity, which came out to be 2.89 m/s. I decided to convert this into some other popular units, just because I was curious, and came out with 9.48 ft/s and 4.98e-7 mph. And here's a picture of her while I'm writing this blog post.

This was incredibly interesting! I love Minecraft, and the force on the player was an awesome concept to look into, great work!

Our class was given the task to collaborate on a lab to find the distance a ball would go when fired and place a target where we believed it would land. The class was allowed to fire the ball once, then the ball would be moved and the angle would change. Together, we took measurements of the first setup, and started doing calculations. We worked in small groups and compared answers, coming to a conclusion that the initial velocity of the ball was around 4.65 m/s. This allowed us to start to calculate the distance the ball would travel at the new height and angle. However, the class was running out of time and out of desperation, the book was placed at a randomly predicted location and the ball was fired. It missed the target slightly. We were told to redo the calculations and find out what went wrong. The problem was that the target was placed without finishing the calculations, and therefore there was little chance for us to be right. The initial velocity was 4.65 m/s, and the ball was being fired at -4 degrees, meaning that the ball started with a horizontal velocity of 4.64 m/s and a vertical velocity of .32 m/s. The accelerations for the two directions were 0 m/s2 (horizontal) and 9.8 m/s2 (vertical). The vertical displacement would be 1.035 m once the ball was fired. The equation y = vot + (1/2)at2 allowed me to determine the time the ball would take when traveling to the target. I used the quadratic formula, which gave me .43 s and -.496 s. The negative time was discarded as time cannot be negative. I then used the same equation (x = vot + (1/2)at2) to find the distance the ball would travel, which was 1.995 m.

I also enjoyed AP Physics last year, I'm really enjoying the flipped class with the lectures at home!

Overall, I have been enjoying the first few days of physics class and reviewing the content we learned last year. It was generally pretty easy. However, let me talk about scientific notation. I thought I was good at it before this year, but I guess not. I read the first chapter of the textbook and watched the first lecture and figured I was well prepared to start the intro WebAssign. For some reason, the scientific notation problems gave me the most trouble. I re-read the chapter, and figured I'd give it another go. Again, no luck. I followed all the rules in the textbook and I still could not get these problems to work. I finally decided to type it all into my calculator exactly as the problem stated just to see how these ended up and still I could not get the right answer for the last one. Somehow, I cleared the entry from my calculator and when I finally realized I had forgotten a negative sign somewhere I had to type it all in again, which took another 10 minutes. Overall, Physics - 1, Me - 0.