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Showing content with the highest reputation on 11/04/2014 in all areas

  1. Friday, the day of Halloween I figured I would have a normal day. Have an easy day at school, then have Halloween fun after school. Well I found myself fighting a bear on Halloween instead. It was a tough fight but I managed to defeat the bear and skin it's bear fur and sell it for a profit. While carrying the bear hide I tripped and fell on a small rock and fractured my ankle. Just kidding, I didn't fracture my ankle after the fight, that was later. 3rd period, around 10 o'clock is when the action really happened. 3rd period is my gym period and I always go hard (Go hard or go home, right?). Well this time I wasn't too into the game and didn't go hard for the first time in a while. We were playing soccer and that involves a lot of forces and trajectory and what not. Unfortunately, one of the forces that class period was not applied only onto the ball. When a teammate passed me the ball I was casually standing there as another player ran up and pushed me, clearly I pushed him back though (normal forces and such). When I was pushed I tripped and fell and landed on my foot, sideways. Applying forces in all types of directions. I later went to Urgent Care and discovered that I had fractured my ankle and needed a split and crutches. I'm no longer allowed to apply forces to the ground (even though it returns the favor) because it will make my dusty ankle even worse.
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  2. So if you haven't heard, a rocket that was supposed to bring supplies to the International Space Station (ISS) exploded on October 28. Here's a short article and video talking about it: http://www.wired.com/2014/10/antares-rocket-explosion/. Obviously, this kind of sucks. The rocket cost about $200 million and now most of the supplies won't make it to the ISS. However, explosions are still really fun to watch, especially one that big and I don't feel bad saying that since the rocket was unmanned. Also interesting is that the rocket was made by Orbital Science, under contract of NASA. This shows that the space industry is slowly because more of a private industry with Orbital Science and SpaceX leading the way at the moment. They aren't sure exactly what caused the rocket to fail, but the actual explosion was caused by the self-destruct being purposefully activated. The real problem was right when it fired its first stage - you can kind of see this in the video. As soon as this problem was noticed, it was decided to destroy the rocket before it reached a populated area and could potentially cause damage. Any number of factors can mess up a rocket launch; there are a lot of variables. Wind speed and direction, an area clear of people, weather, calculations, etc. I think the biggest things I learned from this are that those errors we usually don't account for in our physics labs (FRICTION!!) matter a lot in the real world, and that we still have not perfected going to space. I'm excited for space tourism anyway.
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