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.

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.