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Hurricanes

Sticking with the theme of natural disasters following my post on tsunamis, I decided to look deeper into the physics of one of the most frightening disasters: a hurricane. Starting off simply, a severe hurricane can have a power of 1x10^15 watts. To put that in perspective, that is about 3000 times the total electrical power generated in the entire world. Looking more at what happens physically, a hurricane starts when air rushes in to fill a low pressure system somewhere out over the

zlessard

zlessard

Baseball vs Softball

Yesterday I was talking with my friends and we started talking about pitching, as I used to be a pitcher myself prior to this year. We ended up discussing how the way softball pitchers throw does much less damage to your arm than the way a baseball pitcher throws. Because of this, softball pitchers are able to throw every game, while baseball pitchers throw once every 5 days or so, and I definitely understand how much a shoulder can hurt in the days following a pitching outing. It really made me

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Rob de Federer

Not too long ago, I went to play some tennis against a friend of mine. Long story short, I won 6-2 despite the fact that he's a starter on the tennis team. What truly led me to my commanding victory was my dominant forehand and my supernatural ability to get on top of the ball. I even surprised myself with my ability to get topspin on the ball and still get it to go over the net. This inspired me to look deeper at the physics of the forehand. The spin on the ball is applied by sort of "brushing"

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Shaq

Last night, I watched a 30/30 (which is an ESPN documentary series that I would recommend to anybody) about the Orlando Magic, and one of the focal points of the documentary was Shaquille O'Neal, who was my favorite athlete in the world when I was a lad. If you've never heard of Shaq, he is a 7'1, 300+ lb basketball player. He was a force on the basketball court, for opponents and backboards alike. Throughout the documentary, dozens of clips were shown of Shaq shattering the glass on backboards

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zlessard

The Big 3-0

I Googled "how much force is in a single keystroke" and I'm going to trust a source that says 12.9 N. This will help me in my overall (obviously hypothetical) analysis. Since this is my final blog post of the year I wanted to sort of wrap it up as well as possible and somehow tie in all of my other blogs. Using an online "character counter", I found out that there are a combined 50,015 characters across my 29 other blog posts, which have an array of topics ranging from pole vaulting to doom

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