Cvankerkhove

That's true, life would tough, especially driving. No turning!!

Interesting take on football with physics..... But go Vikings!

Everyone loves going to the amusement park; a local favorite is seabreeze. When we are little, we enjoy the ride, and have a good time. However, as I have grown more and more into my physics career, going to the amusement park is not quite that simple for there is physics all around the park. In fact, if it weren't for human accomplishments in physics, there would be no park! The first ride I thought about this was the musical express. On this ride, people sit in carts on a circle and the entire ride rotates over and over again, until the ride is going a very fast velocity. One of the warnings of the ride is for smaller passengers to sit on the inside. Why is this? Cause the smaller passenger would get squashed! There is a centripetal force with this ride, based on the equation a=v^2/r. The ride gets to a point so fast that the friction of the seat is overcome and th people squish together! Secondly the Jack Rabbit is a classic example of conservation of energy (kinda). Based on the conservation of energy, when the ride is at its highest point, the potential energy will be converted into kinetic energy, and therefore the ride cannot reach a higher point without being acted on by an outside force. Unfortunately the world is imperfect and there are outside forces, like friction! The Jackrabbit has three humps, and each hump is lower than the prior, this is because friction steals energy, and therefore it cannot reach a higher point. All in all, physics makes our lives a little bit more complicated because we can no longer enjoy the ride without thinking.

Fluids! Cool post. Uk I used to dabble in baseball.....

On Friday the 16th in AP Physics C class, Mr. Fullerton assigned us a lab with a very simple task: shoot a ball to hit a book, if it hits the book the whole class passes, if it misses the whole class fails. Although the task seems simple, there were multiple layers to this problem, clearly with high stakes. Through this lab we were to use our skills of kinematics to determine the velocity that the instrument shoots the ball at, and then use this information to place the book at the correct location. Furthermore, we were asked to work as a class really testing out communications skills. The 22 kids in this class are some of the brightest in the school, yet our communication is where we failed. While we should of broken up works into different groups, the whole class was all over he place sound different things, and using different values. Personally for me, my problem was trying to find the exact time of the first trial, and this prevented me from having a sufficient amount of time to do the math. Also, a problem we had when calculating the distance was using the displacement direction as a negative and the acceleration as a positive. Because the vertical displacement of he ball and the acceleration due to gravity are in the same direction, there signs should be the same. This was a vector analysis that further screwed up our final values. After making this change in the math, I was able to find the true velocity of the ball (using the equation d=(1/2)at^2+vt). With this information I could then find the distance the ball should travel with instrument set to a new angle of -4°. Using a two step kinematics problem (work attached), I was able to find the new displacement to be 1.92m in the x-direction. This value is very accurate to the actual loctation of the second firing, and if we had fixed these probaes we would not have failed. The simple truth of it is that we did fail, as at the end of the period we were pressed with time and placed the book at a pretty random eye-balled location. It's ok for us to fail because if we analyze our failure we can learn and then chances our, we will do it right the next time!

I am a senior at IHS ready to finish my high school career off strong. Some things I am interested in are basketball, football, music, tennis, and of course, physics. I am one of six kids, and right in the middle. In school I am strong in math and science classes because it comes naturally to me, but also because I enjoy the curriculum. In the future I plan on going to college and majoring in engineering (not sure which field specifically yet). I'm taking AP Physics C this year because I was introduced to the topic last year in AP Physics and it instantly appealed to me. I understood the concepts and the math, but most of all the stuff was really cool! This year I hope to get as much and more out of this physics class. I am excited to learn more about how and why things happens in the world, and hopefully do some cool labs. I am anxious about the fact that this course will be extremely challenging in comparison to all other classes I've taken this far. Also the fact that I must push to keep myself at a good pace and do the work myself; I no longer will have the training wheels like other classes I've taken before. All in all, this class will be fun yet difficult, yet it will all be good because this will be the closest I've come to taking a college level class thus far.