Monday, December 31, 2007

New Years Tangerines

this break i went to hilo and while there i picked some tangerines from a tree. i used a ladder to get to the top portions of the tree and a bucket so i wouldnt have to go up and down for every tangerine. after transporting the fruits from the bucket to a bag, there were some tangerine leaves on the bottom of the bucket. while my dad was packing up the tangerines into a box, i was bored and started swinging the bucket around. as i did, i noticed that no leaves fell out and that reminded me of the demo with steve and the bucket. so i made the bucket go around again but this time slowed it down at the peak. at the top, i could hear and feel the leaves separating from the bottom of the bucket and falling from the lack of centripetal force.

Happy New Years All!!

Sunday, December 9, 2007

sunday morning

EARLY sunday morning i had to get up and go volunteer at the marathon. my friends and i got there at 6 bc we took an hour to find parking. my friend actually had a parking pass but we could not go through bc it was already 5 and the people on wheelchairs were just passing. when we walked a long journey to the check-in point, i saw so many runners. they reminded me of ants and i got itchy. we got assigned to be security guards at the exit, after the finishers get showered off and get their drinks. it was super muddy and it rained pretty hard a couple of times. bc we were stationed at the finish line, we had more than 2 hours to pretty much do nothing but fool around. i took some random pictures, one of them a person on a wheelchair. i didnt realize until i was fully awake that what i saw in the begining of the race had to deal with torque. the hands of the wheelchairers were the force, pushing clockwise, the lever arm the radius of the wheel. those guys went really fast. i looked up the time for the fastest guy and his time was 1:33:17. the dude who ran it and won finished in 2:17:26.

Sunday, December 2, 2007

wash & shine


during thanksgiving weekend, my dad forced me to wash AND wax my car, and his, and my mom's. i was too lazy to put the wax on and wipe the residue off by hand, i busted out this waxer/polisher thing that i found. i was like cool, less work! this helpful tool has a six inch diameter and finished all the cars in around 20 minutes. i looked on the case and it said that the buffer moved at 4000 revolutions per minute. but, when i pushed on the top of the buffer to make sure i got all the wax, i probably slowed the number of revolutions quite a bit. however, when in uniform circular motion, i can calculate the velocity. radius = 3 in= .0762m. the velocity is equal to about 32 m/s.