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The Physics of Procrastination!

I'm sitting in the commons. Enjoying my Friday morning, of course. But suddenly, I am awakened to the thought of physics. Not actual physics, but a deadline! I needed to finish my blog posts! And now I sit, with two other helpless Physics C students, as we plow through some blogs. As I sit, inactive, I burn about 100 calories per hour. Which, suprisingly, is not too bad. So I'm actually excercising. If you just sit, however, you burn a suprising 65 calories per hour - the energy it t

bobbyburns

bobbyburns

Catapults

A week ago today, the physics students sported their freshly made catapults. Loading and firing them,the softballs sometimes fired backwards, down, or straight up. So how did the armies of the middle ages perfect the art of catapults and trebucehts? I'm sure there was a bit of trial and error involved. The final form, however, was truly a deadly weapon. Easily 5 times larger than our flimsy 2x4 catapults, this massive trebuchet (at the Château des Baux, France) could send hundreds of

bobbyburns

bobbyburns

Why students (like me!) abhor E&M

The average AP Physics student enjoys the course until one thing hits....electrostatics. It is doable, but it is much different from the usual "block slides down the incline" norm. What makes it so weird, intangible, and seemingly impossible when one moves on to magnetism, electromagnetic induction, and other hellishly sounding topics? My understanding is simply that you can do the following: -Touch an object -Throw, drop, kick, or destroy an object -Feel gravity and gravitational

bobbyburns

bobbyburns

Newly Discovered Stars Leave Our Galaxy...forever!

Called "Hypervelocity" stars, giant balls of gas are recently discovered to be leaving our galaxy. These stars travel at speeds of over 1500000 kilometers per hour (roughly 932057 mph), and have enough kinetic energy to overpower the galaxy's gravitational force...sending them off into space. The weird part? They're thought to originate from the galactic core, where gravity is the strongest. The current accepted theory is, in simple terms, that the immensely strong gravitational field g

bobbyburns

bobbyburns

How long until another meteoroid disaster?

Scheduled to hit in 2032, a massive asteroid is on a collision course with Earth. If in fact it impacts, it would have a explosion with forces 50 times greater than 2.5 million tons of TNT. Although it's on a collision course NOW, the chances of it actually impacting our planet are 1 in 60000, which are extremely low. Asteroids of this size, however, are not very common to observe coming towards our planet. The last time this happened was in 2007, but of course it changed trajectory.

bobbyburns

bobbyburns

Can we control Earthquakes?

Recently this year in France, a team of researchers conducted an experiment with seismic waves, and were able to slightly deflect them. Could this be the start of a new age in which we can avoid catastrophic earthquakes and maybe even tsunamis? It's quite the possibility. Using "cloaking" devices and meta materials, the researchers hope to someday cloak "desired" or important geological areas with the cloaking material, to fend off (reflect, to be specific) seismic waves, therefore signific

bobbyburns

bobbyburns

Titanic...step aside

If you still think that the Titanic is the largest ship ever built...well...that's SO 1912. There're some huge ships out there (mainly cargo), and they make the Titanic look like a twig. The Seawise Giant statistically is the largest ship - ever. The crude oil tanker was built in 1979, and was sunk during the Iran-Iraq War before being repaired and brought back into use. Empty, the ship weighed 650000 tonnes, or 1.4e9 pounds. Unable to navigate the English Channel, Panama Canal, and o

bobbyburns

bobbyburns

Light is pretty slow

We are all amused by the fact that light travels at "c", which for all intents and purposes is REALLY fast. But that's just a human perspective. To reach the sun, light takes about 8 minutes. To leave our galaxy, it would take about 100000 years. Not to ruin your hopes and dreams of intergalactic travel or anything, but if you COULD in fact create a spaceship that flew faster than the speed of light and could reach point A from point B within a human lifespan, the ship would arrive bef

bobbyburns

bobbyburns

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