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.