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.