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.

space camp

A little more than five years ago my friend Emmy, who moved to Alabama, and I met up for a week at space camp. It was actually really a lot of fun and we got to try all these cool simulataions. We got to ride on hover crafts, experience what it feels like to walk on the moon, take tours of space crafts, perform missions, rock climb and eat space food! haha. One of the rides that I really enjoyed was the G-Force which is that spinny ride we talked a lot about in class where it spins so fast, that the centrifugal force pushes you up against the circular wall. Another ride that I liked was the Sapceshot (in the picture). I guess it's kind of like the Tower of Terror and Disneyworld except it goes like a million times faster. As we were dropping down, the seats we were secured in were dropping faster than our bodies would at freefall. So because we weren't strapped in so tight to the seats that we couldn't move, it felt like we were being lifted off the seats. But actually our bodies were just dropping at a slower speed than the ride. haha it was so thrilling! So much fun. Oh yeah and I'm the one on the left.

A while ago, my friends (Shantha and Lauren) and I got the opportunity to swing on swings! We hadn't done that in a long time so we pretty excited and we got our other friend, Kelsey, to take pictures. haha yeah. So swinging on swings could be an example of many physics problems, especially energy, in the form of a pendulum. When we first sat on the swing, we had zero kinetic energy and zero potential energy. As we swung and "pumped" our legs to get higher, we gained both kinetic and potential but at different times in the pendulum. At the peaks of the motion, we would have a high potential energy but zero kinetic energy. As we accelerated towards the ground, our kinetic energy would increase as the potential energy decreased.

collisions

Sooo last weekend I forgot to make an entry so I'm doing 2 tonight. Over the summer my friends and I went to Bayfest at the Marine Corp Base the night Three Days Grace was playing. And because it was Three Dyas Grace, there was a mosh pit...which consists of momentum and collisions! In the mosh pit people were running into us and getting thrown and shoved into us. These collisions were bouncy collisions; sometimes the other person and I were both in motion going towards eachother when we collided and other times, I was standing still when someone collided into me. I didn't get a picture of the actual mosh pit because that wouldn't be safe for my camera but here's a picture of us when we were standing in the crowd waiting for Three Days Grace to come on.

About a week ago my friends and I ended up staying late after school and we really didn't want to do homework so we went around taking pictures. My friend, Kelsey, wanted me to get an action shot of her jumping out of a tree. I held up the camera concentrating on when to click it so that I caught her while she was in the air. I snapped the picture and I was still focusing on my camera to see how it came out when less than a second later I heard hug BOOM. I looked down and Kelsey was on the ground cracking up and grabbing her feet in pain. I didn't excatly see what happened but apparently when she jumped to the metal bench below the tree, there was not enough friction between the bench and her feet so she slid off and gravity brought her to the ground. I'm glad she was ok because it was soooo funny. Unfortunately, lacking in photo skills, I didn't really get a good picture.

End of 1st Quarter

As a follow up to my last reflection, I was right about physics turning out ok even though I knew it was going to be challenging. I'm happy with the grade I finished the quarter with, though I will still try my best to improve it for this quarter. My test grades are a little lower than I like but the good thing is that the grades have been consistent and hopefully I'll be able to do better in that area this quarter. Free body diagrams on ramps still confuse me but the chapter we are learning about now is so far my favorite. I feel I have adjusted to this class and it's requirements in the past quarter and I'm ready for this next one. (ahh i know this is 3 days late already but i don't have a picture right now....but i WILL put one up later!)...haha good picture, yes?

Yesterday when i cam home from the beach i was SO hungry and all i wanted was something to eat and i was like "ooh! we have taquitos!" Our freezer is right across from our counter where a glass of water happened to be resting at the very edge. I reached to the bottom of the freezer, grabbed the box of taquitos turned around while holding them out to put them on the counter and before I realized what happened the glass of water went flying through the air and shattered across the kitchen floor. So following Newton's law, the glass was happily sitting in place until a big net force came and caused it to be pushed off the counter. So instead of sitting down and enjoying my food, I had to get the broom and the vacuum and clean up all the broken glass. Thank you, physics!