the beach!

After school on Friday my friends and i went to walls to boogie board! we didn't get there till like 5:00 though cuz we stopped at my friends house and then we got acai. but we were really excited to go boogie boarding. i haven't done that in a long time. but we got there and there was absolutely no waves. and there were also no people on the beach. it was so weird it was the emptiest I've ever seen walls during the day. so since there were no waves to catch, we just floated out past the end of the wall on our boards and relaxed. here comes the physics! the water was super clear so we could see the reef and everything. one of my friends kept asking if the bottom was shallow enough to touch because it looked really close. I then tried to touch it but found it was actually pretty deep. and i was like "hey it's refraction!" The reef appeared closer to us than it actually was because light travels slower in water. Since it was getting pretty late, the sun was really low and a lot of it's light was reflecting off the water. One of my friends was like "I could use some polarized sunglasses right now." Polarized sunglasses would have blocked the glare on the water with a horizontally aligned filter because the light rays that were reflected of the water were only vibrating horizontally. yeah so that was my physics experience of the day. yay.

Iron Man!

haha so this weekend my friends and i saw iron man even though i wanted to see harold and kumar. but iron man was pretty cool and it had a lot of physics in it; it probably wasn't all realistic though. so first of all something happened to tony stark and he got metal shards in him that was affecting his heart or something so this scientist guy put an electromagnet inside of him to make his heart keep beating. i got excited when i saw that cuz i was like "oh we learned about electromagnets!" hmm what else there was a lot of action reaction stuff. like iron man was able to fly by making his shoes propel off the ground. and the metal his suit was made out of must have been super strong because it was able to withstand bullets and explosions and all that stuff. tony stark said that iron man wasn't a precise name because his suit wasn't actually made out of iron. also all those big explosions propelled people backward because there was a lot of force acting upon them. there were probably more specific examples but i can't think of them right now but if i do i'll update this later. here's a picture!

april 27

last weekend at family fair, physics concepts were happening everywhere. my friends and i played about 10 minutes worth of games out of the whole 2 days and our favorite was the shoot the moving can game (i forget what it was called). anyway, you had to put a cork in the gun, and with pressure it would get shot out. the cork launched into a projectile flying towards the moving cans. the force from the shot cork would knock the can down. i think you had to hit down three to win. i hit three cans, but they didn't fall down down probably because the cork was not fired with enough pressure to create enough force to knock the can down. this is a picture of my friend ready to fire her gun. sorry it's kinda dark.

This weekend was exhausting and I drove A LOT. Saturday I drove from Kaneohe to Moanalua High School (for the ACT), then to Hawaii Kai, then to Hawaii Loa Ridge, then to Ward, then to school, and then finally back to Kaneohe. Then Sunday I drove from Kaneohe, to Hawaii Kai (for a community service project this time) to Kailua, then back to Kaneohe. Plus there was traffic. I was probably in the car for about 4 hours. So being on the road for so long I was able to witness many examples of the doppler effect with many ambulences speeding by, and fast, noisy cars and motorcycles driving past me. The Doppler Effect is a change in the frequency of a wave due to motion of the source and listener. As the vehicles approached me, the frequency of their sound waves were higher because the waves arrive closer together. However once the vehicle passed me and drove away, the frequency was lower because the sound waves weren't reaching me as fast. Although the frequency of the sound emitted by the source actually stayed constant, me (the listener) perceived the frequency to be changing due to the motion of both me and the source.

waves.

like we are learning now, i have noticed that when waves in the ocean pass by, it is not the water itself moving forward but rather the disturbance of the water that is moving forward. when you see a stick or ball floating in the water, it moves up and down when the waves pass by but it doesn't move forward with the wave. i barely ever go surfing but i've noticed that when i'm sitting on the board waiting for a good wave, the small waves pass by me while i stay in place. here's just a random picture of little waves coming to the shore.

magnets.

about every month my grandparents who live in florida send my little brother and me a box of "goodies." sometimes it's money and sometimes it's just useless stuff. a couple months ago, my grandma sent me a Magnetic Hematite Lariat Wrap. it's basically a string of magnet beads that can be formed into like a necklace or a bracelet or whatever. each bead is

magnetically charged hematite.

this past weekend was my friend kelsey's 17th birthday party at the top of hawaii loa ridge. i thought it was cool that we happened to both be wearing orange. mrs. sin and mr. kang mix us up even when we're not wearing the same color. we look nothing alike. and mr. monaco thought i was this girl erica butters in eighth grade. just because we're white doesn't mean we all look the same.

anyway at her party (since it was very hilly up there) she brought up card board boxes for people to slide down on. (she also brought lots of redbull). so at first there was too much friction between the grass and the card board boxes so we sprayed the hill with water to reduce the friction. it then got really slippery and we were able to slide down! she also hired a masseuse and we all got massages! haha.

center of mass

this past week my parents were out of town so my little brother and i stayed in a room at our friend's apartment so that their parents could keep an eye on us. my parents didn't trust us to stay home alone. my little brother found a lolipop in his bag that had been in there for a couple weeks so he tossed it at me and told me to throw it away. i just let it fall to the ground and it stayed there for a few hours. finally i told my brother to throw it away so he said he wanted to try to make a basket from his bed. he didn't make the basket but look where it landed!! (the handle of the drawer). it was so weird because the probability of it landing there is like less than zero and then the probability that it landed perfectly at it's center of mass so that it could balance there is like less than zero too! so i took a picture of it and my brothers like "why would you take a picture of that?" so i told him about the center of mass=) ....the first picture is from his bed to the trash can and the second is of the lolipop and where it freakishly landed.

paddling!

sooo this is the last week of paddling and we have two more races. my friends mom has been taking a lot of pictures at our races. when we paddle, we're pushing the water back with our paddle making our boat go forward. this relates to newton's 3rd law: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. also right before we start a race, our boat is at rest and has a lot of inertia. because it resists change in motion, we have to put a lot of force through the water with our paddle to get the boat moving and accelerating.

So just like everyone else, my friends and I went to Punahou Carnival this weekend. Most of the pictures I took were standing in the incredibly long lines but I was a able to get a couple on the rides. All the rides I went on were spinny rides (Music Express, Spin Out, the swings, and Tilt-a-Whirl) so centripetal force played a role in all of them especially Music Express. I was sitting on the outside so when we started going super fast my friend Emily and I got forced outwards and I got really squished. Now that I think about it, the swings are exactly like the flying pig in our classoom and the lab we did for it. When we sat in the swings waiting for the ride to start, the chain hung straight down, but when we started to go around in circles, the swings rose and the chains became angled. We also went on the Tilt-a-Whirl, which is what the pictures are from. It was a really sucky ride that just made us dizzy but it was the least expensive one. It was a fun night except for the fact that Pharoah's Fury was closed because of computer problems. That made me sad.

balloons!

When i was younger, like 5 years old, whenever it was one of my brothers' birthdays, i would help my mom decorate for them. She taught me how to rub balloons on my hair or the carpet and stick them to the wall. I thought it was so cool. My mom explained to me that it was because of friction, but of course I didn't fully understand it then. After doing the lab with balloons in class, I know excatly what's happening. When I rub the ballon against my hair, or the carpet, they become charged--the electrons transfer to the rubbed spot giving it a negative charge. When i bring the charged balloon towards the neutrally charged wall, the balloon attempts to neutralize itslef by transferring it's electrons to wall. This is what creates the attraction and causes the balloon to stick to the wall. (picture to come)

Maui #2

Alright so my family and I took the Super Ferry to Maui and to be honest it really was not worth it. My family slept the whole time (except for my dad who took pictures of us sleeping) and my mom and little brother got motion sickness. (me in the back, my mom, then thomas and steven in the front)

It would have been much faster to take a plane (because of a higher velocity and a more direct path--less displacement) but by taking the Super Ferry we had the advantage of taking our car with us. Anyway this trip mainly consisted of creating a lot of unneccessary/unwanted displacement. First, the Super Ferry and second, the whole adventure I talked about in my last entry about my dad making us believe he knew his way around Maui. We were staying in a town called Kihei (I think) and we wanted to drive to Lahaina. After my mom got a map and found a direct route my dad insisted that we did not need a map which resulted in driving up and around a mountain. Fortunately despite the wasted gas and the wasted time, we had quite an adventure and i was able to get some pretty good scenic shots. Finally after we took the Super Ferry home after three days the family fun was over.

maui

mmm so unfortunately it's the last night of winter break and i have not yet written my journal or a previous journal from some weekend a long time ago so i'll be writing 2 tonight. over the break my family went to maui for three days which was really not fun at all. one day my dad insisted that he knew where he was taking us but we ended up driving up and around some random mountain for about an hour and a half. it was really windy VERY narrow road with cars going both directions. every time time we made a turn the dead lei hanging on my mom's rearview mirrow would swing the opposite way we were turning due to centrifugal force. centrifugal force gives a feeling that there is an outward force, so in this case the end of the lei was "fleeing" from the center of the turn our car was making. fortunately we finally made it off the mountain and my dad admitted that he didn't know where we were going. oh and this picture isn't a good action shot of the lei, but it did happen! haha and my mom didn't trust my dad driving up the random mountain so they traded seats.