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Mary_E27

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  1. Mary_E27
    Nearing the end of the year 2013, a new Disney movie came out, sending society into fanatic obsession. This movie was of course, Frozen. Frozen tells the story of Queen Elsa and her struggle to contain her gift. The majority of the movie is her sister, Ana and her entourage tracking down Elsa to try to help her. Well trolls, evil fiances, and talking snowmen later, the world is completely addicted. I still am, quite frankly.
    While I watched this movie a hundred times, I wasn't just belting along to every song in the movie, I was baffled at how realistic it was compared to other animated movies. They made the characters 3D, they used a real reindeer to crate Sven, and they spent years making it perfect. (I'm not actually sure how long it took them, but it did take a long time to perfect.) Anyway, they are now in the works of making a second and...oh right! Physics...
    Well when I watched the movie after I entered my junior year, physics came into my brain. The animators took a lot of time to make sure that the movie followed physics, which I can't say for many animated films. Especially in action scenes, I noticed how they applied how objects would fall in free fall, also how all three of Newton'd laws were used correctly. Another way it followed physics was with their use of projectile motion as well as the other aspects of kinematics. When objects were moving around the screen and giving lines, the Doppler Effect was slightly apparent. This only scratches the surface at all the tech team to create a timeless classic.
  2. Mary_E27
    I have been singing since I was a little girl (not necessarily well) and I love being in Chorale as well as participating in the school musical every year. Earlier this month, we started learning about sound waves. We learned how sound waves, especially standing waves, are why instruments work. While we talked about a variety of different instruments ranging from strings to brass, we never discusses how sound waves are made because of human vocal cords.
    I'm writing this to document my thoughts on the concept so I can embarrass myself in the future, and to do that, I am not looking anything up. I know that we use the lungs and larynx to create sound. Sound waves are longitudinal waves. They are also mechanical. Then does the trachea work as a type of pipe for the waves to make sound in? If so, does the texture and atmosphere of the trachea affect how the sound comes out? These truly baffle me and I hope to study this more in Physics. I didn't write much this blog post, but there's no more knowledge that I have on the subject, so here is a picture of the wave I made when I sang into the microphone during a lab in physics. Pretty crisp right? I'm proud of it.
  3. Mary_E27
    In my physics class, there is a student who believes that I am her biggest fan. She seems to only understand her false perception when I use physics terms, so it inspired me to create a list of things to say to someone you're not interested in in physics terms. Who knows? Maybe you'll end up being the one hot physics person in the future and you need to fight off all the nerds...and they only speak physics. Well here are some tips so survive such instances.
    Forget displacement, we need pure distance between us
    I'm going to get a restraining order for 20 km. Can you convert that to meters?
    In my heart you do not matter much, this is a waste of your energy, and we will not interact. (Things that relate to physics)
    I'm 1.11 x 10^7% not interested
    I don't have room for a significant figure in my life right now
    V=d/t means Victor, don't try
    This will only end in a downward slope
    I didn't free fall for you, like you did, me
    I need to be projected in a different direction right now
    All of this work was catapulted on me and i just don't have time for dating now
    An object in single will stay in single until interested in someone, and that's not the case for me
    I need to be a free body right now
    F=maybe you should ask Gladys out, instead
    There's too much friction in my life for dating
    There's too much centripital acceleration of your ego towards your head
    I already see you too...frequency
    Can you stop orbiting my desk?
    I'm attracted to you gravitationally only
    I need to build up my momentum so i can have a good future, so I can't go out tonight
    I need to conserve my energy for work, I have a big project to work on
    You don't make my stomach spring like there's butterflies.
    There's no electric charge here
    I have soccer on the electric field, so i can't go to color me mine with you and your mother, Richard
    There's a lot of potential difference between us
    I'm sorry, but I'll have to resist
    My compass just doesn't point to you
    There's no magnetic force pulling me to you
    I need to ride the waves of life right now
    I can't have anything interfere with my work now

    Hope this helped with the relationship handling. Some of the suggestions are more for those who just don't get the message. I pray that these will work for me!
  4. Mary_E27
    Since I can remember, I have always loved music. I have been in chorus since 4th grade, have participated in the school musical since 7th, and have done many other things regarding music. Anyway, when I got to high school, I was so excited to have a chorus that actually wants to be there and tries to sing. The first thing i noticed was how weird the room was. In the past, I was in rooms with good acoustics, steps, and something that made sense. This looked like a regular classroom, except with a whiteboard with ledger lines. Then i got an explanation...
    The chorus room used to be located where the orchestra room now resides. There was wooden floors, steps and great acoustics. About ten years ago, chorus was relocated to the worst room for a fire/cell phone service. For years, promises have been made saying that the room will be redone to better fit our purposes, but it has never been seen through. It's not too bad, but we would be much better if we could accurately hear ourselves. And that's when I thought, we could use physics on our side.
    The key to a good room is good physics. Singers make waves with their voices and those waves bounce off surfaces in the room. Our room is literal concrete. We need good services for the waves to bounce off of so that we make good sound that can actually be heard. Also, resonance has a lot to do with music. When the sound is created, our goal is to make it resonate so that we give a killer performance. To meet "self actualization" and our potential, the singing classes need a room that will make us our best.
  5. Mary_E27
    In physics, we recently learned about how naval ships use sonar to detect submarines under the surface. We also learned how in order to detect the ship sends out multiple loud beeps to reflect off of surfaces. The time it takes for the sound to come back can help figure out how far something is from the ship. We even worked on a work sheet and used physics equations to solve sonar problems.
    Overall, I think sonar is very fascinating, but I've never been good at battleship, so i thought back to when we studied the senses in AP Psychology (The best class ever, by the way ). In that unit, we learned about how the senses work and how they interact with the brain so create the perception we experience. In the textbook, there was a small section about the senses of animals. In this section they mentioned bats. I knew the basics, that they sleep in caves, hunt at night, and sometimes eat the flowers at the top of a cactus. When reading the textbook, i learned that bats use sonar to hunt their prey. They send out a small noise to hunt small prey, such as mice, and the waves come back to them.
    Along with bats, there was a fascinating case that had me baffled. Daniel Kitch, a blind man, uses echolocation or "sonar" to navigate himself. David was born blind and as a child, he learned to "click." With it, he was able to detect the waves, so that he knew what was around him. David is able to bike around his neighborhood. When asked, he was able to name what was ahead of him on the street such as pillars leading into a park or driveway. David's skills were put to the test and psychologists had him make his way through an "arena" (I'm not sure that's what its called) that had many poles in various locations, where David couldn't touch them. David made his way through the test excellently by using his sonar. It is truly amazing what some people can do...with physics.
  6. Mary_E27
    As we are to begin a new unit in Physics as we return from Christmas break, we were assigned a video called Work. Just hearing it made me wonder if it has something to do with what parents and most students call work. I was incorrect with my assumption when I watched the video. As it turns out, when you do work on something, you are moving it. In order to calculate work, you must use the equation W=Fd, where W is work, F is the force applied, and d is the displacement of the objects. But as the video continued, I looked at the examples and thought, almost anything that one does in work is actually doing work on something.

    If you worked at a cubicle and you send emails to coworkers about meetings and Sandra's surprise retirement party, you are doing work on the keyboard. If you move the object, you are doing work on it. It may be very small like typing certain keys, but it is work. Let's say you wheel over to the next cubicle because Ronny says there's something really cool out the window, and continues to tell you about his crazy weekend in his mother's basement. You are doing work on the chair because you are pushing yourself on it and moving it across the floor. The chair is displaced, and there is a force applied, but at a downward angle, therefore, you would use the equation W=Fdcosx.

    Cubicle workers are not the only work people to do work on objects. Think about construction workers. They lift objects, throw them, move objects to the garbage, and built other things in its place. All of which are doing work on the objects, but I'm sure none of them think about the work they are doing besides the type where they get paid, and not in knowledge of physics.

    On the higher end of the job scale is surgeons. They work crazy hours and do work delicately on their patients. Let's say Dr Seuss is a heart surgeon and has to perform a heart transplant. He has to do work on the patient when cutting their skin open, cutting away some of their ribs, and finally, replacing an unhealthy heart with a fully functional one.

    Every job does work, I'm only wondering which one had the name first.
  7. Mary_E27
    When I was a child, I never thought of physics. I knew that it existed because I had babysitters in high school, but I never thought anything of it. I simply stayed in my own world, not letting science into my head, because there was no room for it. As I look back now, physics didn't exist to me. Of course it actually did exist, obviously, but not to me.

    I would jump off a swing at the playground, I would throw a ball to a friend, I would kick a soccer ball to a teammate, I would ride on the yo yo at Seabreeze. Not physics, just common sense of what happened. There was nothing in my head that said, "I was just part of a projectile," "I was an object affected by circular motion," "There is tension on the rope."

    I would enjoy a world where everything is as simple as it was. I would enjoy not knowing everything. And that is the innocence of a child. As John Locke assumed, we are born with a blank slate. As we grow and become educated, we add things to our slate. My slate is full of information now, and physics is a part of it.

    Its a wonder what children think of. Children reason in wildly illogical ways about problems whose solutions seem self evident to adults. I don't remember what I thought what might explain the physics I didn't know. I assume it went something like this:

    Jumping off a swing: I don't know. Because the swing was swinging that way

    Throwing a ball: Because I threw it.

    Kicking a soccer ball: Because I pushed it with my foot

    Yo Yo at Seabreeze: I don't know. Just Because.

    Childhood innocence is the source of much amusement
  8. Mary_E27
    In pursuit of my child side, I continued my movie marathon with Shrek the Third. This is a terrible attempt at a third movie, though it's not as bad as the fourth, where Rumpelstiltskin (Rumpypigskin as Charming calls him) gains enough power to take over Far Far Away and turn back time, where Shrek never saved Fiona from the tower. It's pretty bad. But not as bad as many other movies. Don't even get me started on Blue Jasmine.

    As the Shrek movies continue, though, the Physics slowly improve. There are less instances where I want to shield my eyes from the otherworldly jumps and leaps. In the third movie, the plot is more excruciating, while the physics is less. The opening scene has Shrek and Fiona in ridiculous costumes in front of a large group of people and one thing leads to another and flying pork is burning the house down. The projectiles of smaller objects is improving where one could believe that could really occur. The entire idea of these small disturbances is very cartoon-esque, but at least animation is adding to the physics of it all.

    Just like the second Shrek movie where they added circular motion, this movie, they added pulleys. Again with the new aspect of physics, there is some fluctuation in the reality of it. The pulleys seem to be stuck in the same ditch as the projectiles in the first movie. The objects hanging off of the pulleys seem to have a stronger force than gravity acting on it, making it move less when other forces act on it.

    With every new addition, new problems, but old problems are improving drastically.
  9. Mary_E27
    Before going into Physics, I never really thought about the influence it has over everything. I knew there was a way to connect physics to everything, but I didn't think about it very much.
    Now that I have to work to apply physics to aspects of my daily life or other things, it has come flying at me how many things I've done that involve physics. One of the biggest aspects of my life has a lot of physics worked into it.
    Every year since 5th grade, I have done Odyssey of the Mind with almost the same group of girls and sometimes couple of guys. Every year we do the same problem number, but we also have to do spontaneous problems. 1/3 times, the spontaneous problem is a hands on problem and another 1/3 of the time it is verbal hands on. In these problems, we have to use the materials given and build something, whether it is something to carry other items, or something that fits a certain description provided.
    I never thought about it before, but we had to apply physics to what we were building. We had to figure out how to build something that would carry the most amount of golf balls, or build something out of the given materials that uses the most materials, had the greatest height, and could carry the most amount of marbles. (Oh, did I mention that this was all in a matter of minutes?) The team and I had to work with physics to create the best outcome that would benefit the team and hopefully advance us to the next stage in the competition.
  10. Mary_E27
    I am the type of person who, as soon as i start learning something, I apply those things to things I do. Unfortunately, one of those things is Physics.
    Over the summer, I went with my family to see Guardians of the Galaxy. I absolutely loved it. It was hilarious, clever, had great music, and the special effects were out of this world (literally). Also, watching Star Wars Episode IV just before Guardians, really helped me appreciate how far technology has come in the past couple decades. Sadly though, school had to start and my times of simply watching a movie and not analyzing it were over.
    Shortly after school started, my friend Bridget and I decided to go see Guardians of the Galaxy because she hadn't seen it yet, and I was up for seeing it again, because it can only get better.
    Though I was laughing the entire time again, I started noting that my brain was analyzing aspects of the movie such as how the characters move in zero gravity, how certain spaceships maneuvered, and how when things were thrown, they seemed to still apply to physics (except one certain ball, but I suspect some kind of magnetic force was acting upon it). Thanks physics, for my movie enjoying times are over (even though i loved the movie the second time just as much as the first).
  11. Mary_E27
    In the beginning of the year, all of the students had to take a preassessment. Sitting down, I was nervous of what I would see once I opened the packet. Although everyone chose random answers so they could get it over with, I wanted to at least look at the questions given.
    As I flipped through the pages, I saw questions that seemed surprisingly easy, but then I asked myself, "Is this a trick? Am I being punked? Where's Ashton?"
    I continued looking through the test, and most of the questions with pictures and questions about the predicted path of an object still seemed very straight forward. I then sat there and answered all of them thinking, "This is common sense."
    Looking back now, listening to Pirates of the Caribbean Film Scores, after learning a portion of the material, I know that most of the answers I chose regarding those questions were in fact correct. They seemed just like something testing me on common sense, and it was. I didn't know it but, i knew those parts of physics and it was something I didn't have to learn. It was just seeing if I knew any previous physics. Let's just hope the rest of physics isn't too difficult.
  12. Mary_E27
    Since Blog posts are mandatory and I don't look around at how physics affects objects and people around me, I thought I'd begin my posts with the most interesting (and confusing) experience I've had involving physics.
    Let me set the scene: I was an innocent freshman filling out my sheet for what seminars I would like to attend for Science Exploration Day that year. There were many options and I wanted to learn about so many of them. I finally decided on my top 4 or 5 and I was very ready for that day to arrive.
    When Science Exploration Day finally came around, I was most excited for a seminar called "The Physics of Spider-man." Sounds awesome, right? WRONG! Once I entered the room, the man running the seminar was dressed as Spidey, himself. But as soon as he started talking, I was lost. All of a sudden, he actually started talking about physics (which I didn't know he was actually going to do.) Equations were flying across the screen as he explained how Spider-Man moved and saved people. If it couldn't get any worse, he ruined the end of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, when he told the entire room that Gwen was going to die.
    I walked out of the seminar scratching my head and wishing to never take physics, but here I am. How did this come to be?
  13. Mary_E27
    As explained in my previous blog post, I recently watched the first three of the Shrek movies (the last two are abominations) and started observing the strange looking physics of the Movie series. Now I'm on to Shrek 2. Let's begin, shall we?

    In the very beginning of the movie, Shrek and Fiona are on their honeymoon, enjoying the sun and shaving their faces together. During the beginning song (Accidentally in Love- Chasing Crows), Little Red Riding Hood knocks on the candy house, presumably for her grandmother (which doesn't make sense because her grandmother did not live in a candy house) and Shrek and Fiona answer the door. Having seen ogres, she screams and runs away, but not before dropping her picnic basket. As see in the last movie, the kinematics seem off. On the downward part of the projectile, the basket seems to fall faster than it should and looks as though a huge invisible weight was thrown on it. I, again contribute this to the animators lack of awareness of gravity.

    Again there are other spots where physics seems to apply to the projectiles and other things, and in more cases. This leads me to believe that the weird physics has something to do with size. The smaller the object, the weirder the physics. It most likely was the hardest part of the animation (besides getting Price Charming's hair just right).

    Physics seemed to apply with larger objects in the first movie, such as Shrek. In Shrek 2 projectiles work correctly when the guards of the Far Far Away castle are launching fireballs at Mongo (the giant gingerbread man).

    Circular motion was added into this movie and there were correct aspects of it and strange, put together. There is a scene when Shrek is trying to escape Fairy Godmother's factory, and in doing so, he is causing a ruckus. At one point, he jumps onto a machine which spins around in a circle very fast. Shrek, Donkey, and Puss in Boots seem to be affected by the centripital force being applied, but the little green worker is sitting in his booth on the circle and couldn't be bothered by the force (most likely for effect).

    Physics is funny in animated movies.
  14. Mary_E27
    Over this past Christmas break, I had a chance to watch every single movie I own, since wifi was down at my house (I survived guys). Some of those movies include The Watch, Night at the Museum, Let's Be Cops, Tammy, and multiple "chick flicks." Although that was great, my movie highlight was watching all of the Shrek movies, except for the last one with Rumpelstiltskin as the villain- He was different than when he was shown in the previous movies (he had to be really, otherwise he wouldn't have been an interesting villain), and they were pushing too far to make it a good movie like the others (the third wasn't very good either- they should have stopped after two).

    Moving on, as I was watching the movies that represent my entire childhood, I started noticing some certain things that seem peculiar looking. At first I thought it was the animation, which is really cool by the way, but it didn't seem to explain the weird look about it. Finally it hit me- it was the projectiles. In the movie, there are many types of projectiles, whether it be jumping, throwing, or flying through the air.

    My next step to figuring out the strange look was to figure out what aspect contributed to the look. To do this, I unfortunately had to remember as much as I could about kinematics. All of a sudden, vi, vf, d, a, t, popped in my head. To get to the bottom of this, I looked at when Fiona kicks Robin Hood's butt (and his merry men). She flies all over the place, kicking, punching their brains out. First of all, her initial velocity seems too fast. Her small frame cannot be able to propel her to tall branches in the trees, which brings me to distance, her distance when she does such tricks is farther than any human can go. When she simply jumps up and down, her velocity seems normal, as well as distance, but she seems to fall back to the ground at a faster time, and she looks strange in the downward direction, which leads me to believe the animators didn't think about gravity. They way she falls to the ground as if a weight was dropped on her shows that her kinematics don't add up.

    There were many other instances such as this, but what is more peculiar is that sometimes, the projectiles seem normal. When Shrek was attacking the dragon in his pursuit of Fiona, the dragon flings him into the air with her tail. Shrek flies through the air in a nice projectile, which fits physics standards. Maybe they only focused on the bigger things. It just makes the animation seem a little strange at certain parts.

    Also, Shrek bends a tree to be able to cross a river (not possible to bend a tree) and Donkey gets caught in the latter half of the cross and is projected far over the horizon. It follows the laws of physics, but it was just a funny scene.
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