Blog midnightpanther

I already talked about raking so I decided to do a short thing about what causes the leaves to fall onto the ground in the first place, which is a mix of chemistry and physics. I am not so sure about the chemical part but the leaves turn colors for some reason and they die, and fall of the trees for reasons I don't know, but the physics is somewhat more manageable. If we set up a free body diagram for the leaf on the tree, there would be mass times gravity pulling down, while tension is going up in the stem. Before the leaf falls, the sum of the forces in the leaf is 0 because it is not accelerating, but as the leaf dies the stem grows weaker and the other forces remain the same until it is at the point in where the mass times gravity of the leaf is stronger than the tension in the stem can hold and it breaks. Then the leaf falls to the ground and then once on the ground the normal force of the ground is equal to the force of MG and the leaf rests there until someone rakes it up.

So today I had to rake my whole frontyard and there were plenty of leaves to deal with thanks to Sandy, but doing the mindnumbing work that wastes my Saturday, I pondered the physics of the job. While raking, I make an arching swing with the rake, hitting the leaves at the lowest point of my swing, and continuing the swing, putting the rake head sort of into a form of uniform circular motion. While in the motion, I pick up the leaves and they join the rake head on its path until they fall off, and as we all know about UCM, once something comes off it will fly on a tangential path, which is what makes the leaves fly out foreward and makes raking the yard possible. However, while the leaves are in the air because of their small weight and large surface area the retardent forces slows them down a lot and often pushes them back into the area where I had already raked, but that's physics.

I made the U in trebuchet a capital because every time David says it he says it wrong so this thing shows how I feel ->:banghead)

But on a physics note, after we fired our trebuchet I was wondering how fast the softball went and how we could have improved the firing. So our maximum distance was 38 yards which I'm and just going to say is 38 meters, and to go this distance if was in the air for 2.55 seconds. With this we can find that the initial velocity of the ball in the x-direction would be about 15m/s! In an ideal situation the ball would have launched at a 45 degree angle, so the horizontal and vertical velocities would have been the same, making the total initial velocity 21m/s, which is quite far. However, if we were to do this again one thing I would want to try would be to make the lever arm longer because the equation for touqe is force times distance, so the longer the distance from the pivot point, the more tourqe there would be which would hopefully fire our softball farther. Just saying.

So it felt like a good time to write a second blog so here I am. Writing the second blog. Well we just got back that test on dynamics I think and I got an 8 out of 20 so thats not too good. Slim Shady tells us not to worry about the grade but I don't know how to do that if it's a big part of our grades. I guess the thing that I'm not too good at is making all the algebraic connections we have to make to get from one equation to the other and to solve for all the things we want to find out. And often even when I do know what I'm looking for I feel like there isn't enough information there to get to the desired conclusion. On the test we just got back I feel like I could have gotten a better grade if I actually took the time to draw out a free body diagram instead of assuming there isn't enough information to do the problem and staring at the paper without writing anything out to try and work out the answer. On an entirely seperate note, our soccer team is doing pretty poor and I think it is because of our lack of physics knowledge. A lot of times we just kick the ball over the goal clearly underestimating our initial velocities or the angle we hit it at and that definatly presents a problem for us. I on the understand understand some of the physics of it, I just stink at the rest of the stuff like controlling the ball but its a process after all. Tomarrow is one of our last home games so I guess we should start learning how to play soccer before sectionals gets here. What I'm hoping is that the whole year we don't really care about what we're doing but once we get to sectionals we'll get serious and kick some face. This is not physics related at all but maybe we can just change the website to apwhining or something like that.

This one goes out to all my peeps. Woop woop

So I'm kind of cutting close here with this blog post starting it at 11:30 on Friday night but I'm not worried. I guess that from this you could gather that I am a little bit disorganized and I procrastinate a little bit but other that I am a hard worker. I like physics a ton and hope to become an engineer of sorts when I get older, but I'm not sure what type yet. I love to play soccer and we finally won our first game tonight and I expect many more to come. In terms of physics, I'm taking AP-C because B was such a joy and I definatly think that it will be a big part of my life once I get out of high school and college. I hope that by the end of this year I will have a basic understanding of calculus based physics but I still expect to take it in college as well because it will most likely be something I use almost every day at my job, but hopefully taking this class now will make it much easier for me in college. Also I'm taking it because it is one of the hardest classes in the school and taking a class this difficult will hopefully show colleges that I am challenging myself and I am focused in an engineering based area. This year, I am most excited about learning all the things we said we wouldn't learn about last year in physics B such as air resistance and things of that nature. However, I am also anxious about the tests and the AP exam becasue it is going to involve a lot of studying and constant work throughout the year and that may be difficult for me. Finished at 11:40, thats how midnightpanther does it.