Sunday, January 27, 2008

Mythbusters



This past weekend, I was watching the Discovery Channel and came across a cool show known as Mythbusters. In this show, they actually attempt to confirm myths, or else they reject their existence if their experiment shows so. In the past they have tried to prove which appliances have enough voltage to kill a human if dropped into a bath tub. It really is an interesting show if the myth is proved correctly because most of these outcomes are unpredictable. The myth they tried to prove this weekend involved a car going on a freeway, and trying to load onto the back of a car-carrying truck. The myth says that if a car going a certain velocity tries to load onto the open ramp on the back of the truck that is going at a lesser velocity, than the car will speed up as it mounts the ramp. However, they found that the car does not speed up as it hits the ramp and it loads on fine. They explained it by saying that the truck's velocity becomes part of the car's velocity as it loads on, allowing it to seem as if the car loads onto the ramp slowly. This was extremely interesting because I had originally agreed with the myth.

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Christmas Vacation




During Christmas Break, our basketball team and my family traveled to Tennessee for an annual tournament held there called the Arby's Classic. Besides the usual projectile motion that I use to discuss basketball, we were able to experience the majority of what Bristol, Tennessee can offer. For example, one of the most famous raceways in the country is the Bristol Speedway which is used for a couple of Nascar races throughout the racing season. Although we weren't allowed on the actual speedway, my brother experienced a bit of physics himself when he raced in a gocart. Because the track he was on included several turns in it, my brother needed to slow down to complete the turns and allow the friction to maintain the car's general direction. He was able to do this for the most part, but did end up losing some control of the gocart on a few occassions. Overall, it was a fun but grueling trip in a sense that the plane rides were at the worst times of day.