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Phys-X

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Football to the Face

On a youtube channel that you may have all seen at one time or another they have made a video about throwing a soccer or football at somebody's face. This channel, called The Slow Mo Guys, records things in slow motion. In this video they show a face getting hit by a soccer ball in supper slow motion. The cool thing about this is that you can see the inertia that the head holds and its resistance to movement from the soccer ball. The other cool thing that you can see in super slow motion is that

Shadoof

Shadoof

Speakers and Their Circuits

Not that long ago I came up with a fun project idea when I was bored. I had some spare speakers laying around and felt like a fun thing to do would to add them to my current speaker system to help fill the room with sound better. To do this I drilled small holes in the back of my current computer speakers and then connected some wire in parallel, I then ran this wire through the ceiling and then soldered the leads to the speakers. By connecting them in parallel I reduced the resistance of the ci

Shadoof

Shadoof

Flopotron

A mad scientist over on youtube has made a monstrosity of an instrument, it is made of 2 scanners, 8 hard drives, and 64 floppy drives.... 64... The reason for all of these strange electronic parts is so that the creator can play many different songs. Now how do you get these parts to sing the sweet sound of music. Well first off what is music, it is a bunch of frequencies all put together to create harmonies that sounds good to the ear. This is exactly what the flopotron is doing, each dri

Shadoof

Shadoof

NFC

In most modern smartphones there is a feature called NFC, which is short for Near Field Communication. This tech uses electromagnetic induction with two loop antennas and the information is transferred on a radio signal in the 13.56 MHz band. If a device approaches another device this is called peer-to-peer sharing and both of the devices generate RF fields to transfer data. But in the case of a NFC tag, the tag does not have its own power supply, therefore it uses inductance from the active dev

Shadoof

Shadoof

Fly System

The High School recently put on a musical production called The Addams Family, for stage crew we had to build the set which includes something called a fly system. On this production we had many parts of the set on the system in order to fly them in and out. For instance one of the bars held an entire wall that was used as a backdrop that would only let in small spots of light to resemble stars. This was moved often as the scene changed from inside to outside a lot. The way that the fly system w

Shadoof

Shadoof

PolyMagnets

In the E&M course we learned that there can never be a mono pole of a magnet. We can tell this because of Gauss's law for B-field. But a company has found a way to print different poles on the same surface, they do this by printing what they call "maxels" onto the surface of a magnet. The different applications for these could be magnets that attract to a certain distance and then repel once closer together. They can also make "short-throw" magnets that are extremely strong but only attract

Shadoof

Shadoof

Boston Dynamics: Sand Flea

Another crazy creation from Boston Dynamics is the Sand Flea. This little robot has the ability to jump, very high. the 11 pound, or 4.99 kg robot has the ability to jump 30 feet in the air, or 9.14 meters. Using potential energy we can calculate the energy needed to launch the robot. Using mgh we can see that the robot outputs 446.96 Joules of energy for a full height launch. Also assuming that no energy is lost the launch velocity of the bot is about 13 m/s. Boston Dynamics say that

Shadoof

Shadoof

Boston Dynamics: Handle

Quite recently Boston Dynamics made another cool looking robot that is built with two legs and runs on wheels. In order for this robot to be able to move around without falling over. The ability to not fall over is helped by inertia and the very complex computers within the robot allowing for many calculations to be made in order to put the robots weight in exactly the right spot. What is the most surprising thing about this robot is it's ability to jump completely autonomously. It is able

Shadoof

Shadoof

Pendulums

As we know through kinematics the period of a pendulum is determined by its length, by increasing the length of the pendulum the time it takes for one cycle gets a little longer. If we line up a bunch of pendulums in a row and just make each string a little longer than the last we can make a very cool looking pendulum wave. Eventually these pendulums will become out of sync and it will look like a mess, but they will follow a pattern and will eventually make the very satisfying wave fo

Shadoof

Shadoof

Atlatl

In old times, hunters didn't have guns and cool stuff to help get food. They had to come up with a new and genius way to hunt animals for delicious food. Around 21,000 years ago, some people in the modern day french area came up with the idea of using a lever arm to be able to throw a spear faster, farther, and more accurate. The way in which this device works is that it acts on a lever arm. Since the throwing arm is long more force is applied to the object, effectively multiplying the force put

Shadoof

Shadoof

Kerbal Space Program

A fantastic game that has an incredible physics physics engine is Kerbal Space Program. At the end of Physics C we do get to play with this game, but I own the game and have had many fun times in it. The premise of the game is you own a space agency on the planet Kerbin (earth). You have to design rockets or planes that can power themselves taking into account of lift and mass of the aircraft. You also have to worry about how the atmosphere will effect the craft including the drag due to air res

Shadoof

Shadoof

Brachistochrone

A recent Youtube video from a channel called Vsauce caught my attention. In the video he mentions this line created by a specific set of geometric events. This line is quite special in its properties, if made into a 3D object it is the fastest path from one point to another. This is due to the perfect balance between distance traveled and velocity. In this video you can see the three different paths that are built, the linear path, the Brachistochrone path, and the 'extreme' path as th

Shadoof

Shadoof

Surface Tension of Water

In this picture above it can be seen that the gecko is standing on the water, but how? Well, in between the water molecules in this tank there are hydrogen bonds that connect the molecules together. What is surprising is that the gecko is able to stand and walk on the waters surface and not just stand on the surface. You can see that the water is 'bending' under the weight of the gecko and that the bonds in between the molecules have enough force to not break and let the gecko fall through.

Shadoof

Shadoof

Waffles are the best

Awhile ago in class, our table group got in quite a heated discussion on which breakfast food is the best. Now the other side, pancakes, tried their best to convince me of the qualities that make them better than waffles. They brought up point such as fluffiness, and taste, but they failed to ignore that waffles can also have both of these properties. The way to achieve these properties is the cooking time and the temperature. In order to get maximum fluffiness, cooking for a lesser amount of ti

Shadoof

Shadoof

The Grand Tour

In this weeks episode (Episode 11) of The Grand Tour, a motoring show with the old presenters from Top Gear UK, there was a section in the show were physics played quite a big role in getting a shot right. In the shot they fired a car, assumed off of an air cannon, onto a boat. In order to do this somebody needed to calculate using kinematics how far the car would go given a supplied force. Taking what was shown in the show it is quite difficult to try and guess exactly how they did given t

Shadoof

Shadoof

Prince Rupert

There's a YouTube channel that I watch called SmarterEveryDay, in one of his more recent videos he used a slow motion camera to see how a bullet would effect a Prince Rupert drop. Before I talk about the video I will first explain what a PR drop is. How they are made is some molten glass is dropped into some cold water, creating an incredibly strong price of glass. However everything has a weakness, in this case it is the tail of the glass piece which is incredibly fragile. The hardness of the g

Shadoof

Shadoof

SR-71

The SR-71 was developed in the 1960's by Boeing. This was a revolutionary aircraft in that it could travel at Mach 3 speeds, or 3 times the speed of sound. This plane is quite strange because when it is sitting on the ground the plates of the aircraft don't meet up properly and the plane actually leaks fuel. The reason behind this design is since the plane flies so fast and so high up. At an altitude 80,000 ft the pressure on the metal on the outside of the aircraft is so little that the outside

Shadoof

Shadoof

Autonomous Landing

Anybody even slightly interested in science and technology will have heard of a relatively new space company called Space-X. They are very close to launching yet another craft into space set currently for Jan 14th. But, one of their most memorable accomplishments, for me at least, is when they had a Falcon 9 rocket land on an autonomous barge that was floating in the Atlantic Ocean. The physics and calculations that had to be done before hand, and during, had to be crazy. The team at Space-X wou

Shadoof

Shadoof

Ice & Land Sailing

As you know I have written many a blog posts about sailing. Now when it turns cold in the winter, normal sailing has to stop because of the ice. But some persistent people can't let sailing go over the winter. They take to the ice. What is so surprising about ice sailing is that the 'boats' go much faster than they do in water. And I mean a lot faster. The main explanation as to why the boats go faster is because of the drastic reduction in friction that occurs. The boats that are made

Shadoof

Shadoof

The Serenity of Snow

If you live anywhere remotely cold, you have experienced one thing snow. With snow comes many things, terrible driving, ice, shoveling driveways, all not fun things. But if you have ever taken a walk through the woods on a snowy day, you will recognize one thing, or rather a lack of one thing, sound. The reason why it becomes so quiet when there is snow on the ground is due to the physical shape of a snow flake. Because there are so many snowflakes on the ground, there is a lot of empty spa

Shadoof

Shadoof

The Physics of Hiking

In dinghy sailing a persons weight becomes a much bigger deal in sailing the boat and keeping it upright. As it gets windier out on the water more force is applied to the sail, and the boat is tipped, or heeled, over more. This is were the weight of the sailor becomes more important. In order to counteract the tipping force of the sail, the sailor needs to move their weight out of the boat to create a stable system.   In the picture above we can see that the sailor has to "hike" out of

Shadoof

Shadoof

Maglev Trains

In my previous blog post I talked about how the Hyper Loop worked, the maglev train works in a very similar manner just in a less efficient way. As seen above the train actually wraps around the track and 'floats' on the track by using magnets to pull the train up into the air to reduce any friction of the track. There is also a 'guidance' magnet to make sure that the train stays centered on the track and that it won't crash into the sides. As mentioned in my Hyper Loop blog air r

Shadoof

Shadoof

Hyperloop

Some of you may know about the new development from the amazing person that is Elon Musk, the hyper loop, The new radical form of transportation could make trips from NYC to LA take under 4 hours. The ways this is possible is how the system will be operated in tubes that air will be sucked out of drastically reducing the air pressure and therefore reducing the air resistance the pod has to counteract. Another technology that the system will use is magnetic levitation, which is currently used in

Shadoof

Shadoof

The Deathroll

In small boat sailing there is a type of capsize called the deathroll, and from the name you can probably tell that it is not the most fun thing to do. Let me start off with a picture of this looks and it will help with the of how this happens. Here we can see that is quite windy and that the boat is also on its side, not good. This can happen when one sails in a direction called "by the lee", this is when the flow of wind on the sail becomes reversed from the normal direction.

Shadoof

Shadoof

Physics of a Sail

Most people think that a sail works only in one direction, thanks in part to the tall ships of the past.  (these things) What appears to be happening here is the wind is just pushing the sails and then in turn pushing the boat forward. But what actually is happening here is a vacuum. As the wind fills in the sail it creates a high pressure system on the inside, the lack of wind on the front side of the sail creates a low pressure zone, and since systems move towards a lower pressu

Shadoof

Shadoof

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