Ball It Up-Flash Back

I was going through some old video footage of my basketball days back in the days (junior year). I found a clip of me making a basket and realized the ball was a projectile. Now you may be saying, "I know what a projectile is." Well you may know the general idea of a projectile, but the more conceptual physics way of describing it is: Any object in the air having a set path with gravity as the only force that is influencing it. Oh you already knew that? Well did you know that in the case of my shot of the basketball into the basket, the ball has a vertical and horizontal plane it is travelling in. With these two components together my ball moves in a diagonal pattern. Since gravity is acting on the ball, the ball will follow a parabolic type path as the ball goes up reaches it peak (where its vertical velocity is zero, horizontal velocity remains constant) then comes back down. With the correct trajectory the ball goes into the basket. Oh you knew all that too? Oh well I thought it was cool.

The Physics in Science Fiction

The topic of outter space has been coming up recently in physics class. It has reminded me about movies and books like 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and even Star Wars. There are a lot things that defy physics in these books and movies which is cool but there are a lot of things that correspond to real physics which is even cooler. One thing that corresponds to what we are learning recently is space stations. In order for humans that live on space stations to feel the same gravitational force they would on earth the space station would have to some how create 1 g of force on the station. This can be done by manipulating the radial distance and the rotational speed. A space stations radial distance would have to be large enough to make the effects of different g's on your body go away. The larger the radial distance or the faster the speed the more centripetal and centrifugal force there would be. Centripetal force are the forces that keep an object in a circular motion and centrifugal force is a sensation or feeling of an outward force because of the inertia or natural tendencies of your bodies motion. It's pretty cool that artificial gravity could be created in outter space and the method is something that I actually understand. Science fiction is pretty cool.

Inaccurate Lyrics

The other day I was listening to the radio and I heard some lyrics that were inaccurate, physically speaking. The words were "the work I've done trying to move this immovable wall..."

These words are incorrect according to equation work=force x distance. No work is being done on the wall if it does not move any amount of distance. While work may be done with the person's muscles, no work is being done to the wall if the wall does not move even if he is pushing with all the force in the world. It is pretty amazing that I am hearing physics in music I listen to. I never thought I would think about school things when listening to music. That shows you anything is possible. I think I will try not to write anything physically inaccurate in my songs unless it gives another dimension to my music and I recognize it.

Ball Bounced Off His Face!

Well it's volleyball season now. It is quite different from basketball but at least I get to pound volleyballs into opponents faces. That is always fun. Actually that's what I want to talk about. The force at which a ball bounces off a person's face is greater than if a ball just hit someone's face and fell to the ground. If I were to bounce a ball off a person's face the mass of the ball times the speed of the ball hit plus the speed of the ball after it bounces is the momentum. A ball that just stops would only be the speed the ball was hit plus zero because the ball came to a stop. The ball that bounces has a greater change in momentum which also equates to a larger impulse. So if you see a ball bounce off someone's face you know that hurt way more than if a guy stopped a ball with his face.

Hmm Momentum...

So this has been a tough weekend/week for me. I was starting to get sick before the Basketball State Tournament but it has gotten worse since then. I may have also cracked a bone in my right foot and oh we lost to Kahuku in the semi-finals of the State Tournament. Now I want to talk a little about momentum because momentum was a key factor in our loss to Kahuku. The equation m1v1+m2v2=m1v1f+m2v2f is the equation that will explain the charging call I got against me as I went up for the shot that would tie the game. No momentum is lost in a system because what one object gains the other objects loses. So basically the overall change in momentum in a system should be zero. Now the system in our basketball game was me and the opponent. As I was driving into the basket I saw my opponent come over to take a charge against me so I came to a jump stop. His mass being more than mine as well as my decreaing speed was not enough to knock him over in my opinion. His advantage in weight and speed should have resulted in my movement going backwards instead of his. So what is the explaination to his falling down backwards. I might have to say he "flopped." I'm sure if I had the exact mathematics I could prove that I did not hit him with enough force to knock him backwards like the way he fell. If only the referee knew physics he might not have costed us the game.

The Ball Pushes Me Back?

Ok well I have been playing basketball for quite some time now and not once have I ever thought the ball was pushing me back with the same force that I was pushing it at. Seriously, this concept is super strange. Newton's Third Law of Motion states that when one objects applies a force on a second object, the second object applies an equal and opposite force on the first object. Well I can see how this law works with guns with its recoil but a basketball pushing me back is kind of far-fetched. My skeptisism is easily answered with the concept of action and reaction forces relative to mass. Since the mass of the ball compared to my body mass is so small my body will not accelerate backwards as fast as the ball will accelerate foward. So basically even though the ball is pushing back at me with the same force that I pushed it at, my mass being much greater, my acceleration goes unnoticed, while the acceleration of the ball is noticable as it cleanly swishes through the basket for the game winning shot.

Bartenders, Drinks, and Inertia

Ah back to writing journals again. A new semester, a new journey to embark on and learn how this world really works. It's like a new season of your favorite show. Now down to business.
The other night I was performing music at a restaurant/bar. You know the music was awesome with me singing and playing some crazy guitar licks and the drummer laying down some sick hip-hop and rock beats. During one of the breaks we were thirsty, so we go over to the bar to get some drinks. We are underage so we order water and orange juice, of course. The bartender sends my orange juice flying at me across the bar and I stop it with my hand. At this point in the year my brain is set to notice anything physics the instant it happens. This hurts my brain sometimes because everything that is going on is always physics. But anyway...my brain tuned into the property of inertia and the forces that act upon objects to keep them in or out of equilibrium. First off the pitcher of orange juice that was flying at me needed a force to act upon it in order to move from its state of rest. The bartenders thrust took care of that. When the pitcher was moving, according to the property of inertia, it would keep going until a forced acted upon it to stop it. In this case it was mostly my hand and some friction that stopped the pitcher. There were also other forces like gravity and the support force of the counter. When I stopped the pitcher with my hand, the orange kept moving in the direction the pitcher was thrown because my hand stopped the pitcher not the orange juice. This shows the property of inertia in action. If there were no forces to act upon the pitcher and the juice it could have gone on forever like it would in a vacuum. I did not have a camera handy when the bartender slide my O.J. toward me so I had to recreate at home but the picture shows the concepts talked about in this blog.

Christmas and Basketball

Wow what a great Christmas. I love the feeling that Christmas brings. It makes me forget about all the pressures of the world especially school and that is exactly what I did. I did not think about school an ounce this Christmas which I hope the rest of you all did too. What did I think about then? Well first and foremost I thought about having fun but that ties into basketball which is pretty much what my whole winter break comprised of. Our iolani varsity team entered three different basketball tournaments this break and we won the championship two out of the three times. The tournament we lost was the Iolani Classic which has some of the best teams in the nation in it so it was a little harder to win than the other two local tournaments. I'm glad to say that I made All-Tournament Team for all three tournaments which is a great honor to me because I love basketball so much and work very hard at it. I had a great time this break and too bad it has to end because I was just getting used to waking up at noon and not having anything to think about except basketball and friends. Well I say bring it on school, I'll take you one on one!!

Reflections about Reflections

Colored Television!!!

Television is a wonderful invention. Not only does it allow people to watch their favorite television shows but it connects us to the rest of the world with news and sports coverage. Color television is even better because we can see the distinctions and details of everything as if we were at the location of whatever we are watching. Now then how do all of these different colors reach our eyes since there are so many. You may think that all the colors are in the television ready to appear where and when that color is needed as I thought it worked. Well in actuality all the colors are in the television but not as you think. Under the screen there are many, many little pixels made up of the colors red, green, and blue. The intensity of each color determines what color will be shown on the screen. The combination of these different colors to make other colors is known as color by addition because you are adding colors together to create other ones. Whether the different colored pixels are bright, dim, or off will determine the color. For example if all the pixels are bright you will get a white screen because red, blue, and green make white light; or if all the pixels are off, which is the lack of color, the screen will be black. It is a pretty simple process but if you did not know how it worked it is pretty surprising that there are only three different colored pixels that make up all the colors we see on the tele. Also the size of the pixels determines how good the quality will be. The smaller the pixels the better the definition will be.

Sunglasses At Night

So I'm driving along on a Friday night and I'm trying to drive safely because there are a lot of crazy drivers on the road. The traffic is heavy and I'm driving in a heavily lighted area. The lights from cars and the street lamps are all bothering me and I can not see because the glare is overbearing. I had an idea. At the time the people in the car thought I was crazy. They thought I would not be able to see well enough to drive. Well I was bold enough to put those sunglasses on and guess what. The sunglasses did not help much. The people in my car laughed at me. And here I went into a mindstate of physics to figure out what went wrong. I thought about how the light from the street lamps and the cars were unpolarized light. This means that there is no preferred vibrational direction for the accelerating electrons emmiting the light. Basically the electrons are not vibrating only vertically or only horizontally but rather combinations of both in a lot of directions. I then focused on the concept of glare. I thought glare happens because light comes off on a horizontal plane from horizontal surfaces and vertical from vertical surfaces. That's when it clicked. Even though my polarized sunglasses were acting as polarizers the filters in them were probably vertical. This would block out the glare from the horizontal surfaces but it would not block the glare from the vertical surfaces as the vertically traveling waves still can move easily through a vertical filter. This means whenever I looked at anything through my shades from a vertical surface there was still glare. I took off my shades happy with my conclusion and drove off into the night.

Guitars Not Metal Detectors

So our physics class had a test on magnets, electromagnets, and how they work to make a lot of things function in this world. One of the questions on the test was how a metal detector in an airport works. At the time of the test, I had no idea how it worked but later as I stared at my beautiful epiphone wildcat electric guitar I realized basically the same ideas are involved. Too bad I could not figure that out then; I had a total mind blank on that test. So how the guitar works is based off the idea of electromagnetic induction. A totally simple process that consist of permanent magnets, strings, and coil wrap around those magnets. A solid body or even a semi-hallow bodied electric guitar consists of these materials so it can be heard out of an amplifier so you can rock out with jimi, stevie ray, morello, synyster gates, or any other ill guitar player that has every existed. The pick ups on the guitar are the permanent magnets and under the surface of the guitar the magnets are wrapped in tightly wound coil. When a string is plucked or picked the magnetic field from the permanent magnet in the pick up beneath that string is felt by the vibrating string and induces a current into the string because the moving string feels a changing magnetic field as it is vibrating. In turn the string, now being a magnet, has a magnetic field of its own and the wrapped coil beneath the surface of the guitar gains a current by induction from the vibrating string of the same frequency and flows out through the guitar wire into the amp and is heard by all out of the speakers of the amp (wow that was a long sentence). Guitars are way cooler than metal detectors!

The Flying Monkey and The Compass

As my assitant and I were out in the great wilderness this weekend searching for the legendary flying monkey which only comes out at night, we somehow got lost and did know how to get out the lushes forest we were in (we were not really lost. we just wanted to construct a compass.) Luckily with my knowledge of physics and my assitants abundance in supplies we were able to construct a compass. I knew that if I had a pretty strong permanent magnet and some kind of small pin of iron I could align the domains in the pin and have the pin become magnetized.

Step 1: I take apart my assitant's high quality bose headphones and remove its permanent magnet which has the magnetic force equivalent to say a bar magnet.

Step 2: I removed the sewing needle from the sweater that my assitant was making for her grandmother and stroke it in one direction along the permanent magnet. This step aligned the domains within the the needle, making the needle now magnetized.

Step 3: Since it had just rained there were a few puddles around. I found a leaf and stuck the needle through it so the needle would float in the puddle. The needle roamed around for a little while until it pointed in one direction.

This is where it gets tricky. We did not know whether we stroked the needle on the north or south pole of the permanent magnet so we still not know what direction we were facing. Luckily we were not actually lost so we just packed up our stuff and went home.

A Tribute To Physics

I could write an epic essay on how I have learned much in physics but instead I will, for the readers benefit, write a blog length forum. Physics is a super fun subject and I am beginning to put together that everything has a relation to physics in some way. I really enjoy the various labs and experiments we do in class because it really connects me to a physical sense of what is going on instead of just words explaining it to me. My goal in physics class is just to gain a better grasp on the world around me. It is easy to be ignorant and not fully understand the complications of the world but I would like to comprehend the underlying roots of reason. I feel that I had a good first quarter. My homework, quizzes, tests, journals, and projects all came together to give me a better understanding of the subject. I could improve on my labs with certain questions. Sometimes I do not at first fully comprehend the relevance of a question and it catches me off guard. I'm sure if I just more thoroughly thought about the question I could figure out an answer for it. I truly find physics a fun class and I have learned a lot about various topics like waves, forms of energy, and different kind of forces. But those things have only scratched the surface and I am, just like Jables and Kage from Tenacios D, going after the P.O.D (Pick of Destiny) or in my case Physics On Demand. Keep up the great work Mr. Kohara. Experiments Rule!!!!

I Tried to Break My Battery

In another exciting day of Pablo's life, I am trying to do homework on a Sunday with little success. I am typing my 3 page English paper up when my laptop decides that it wants to run out of energy to provide for my computer and shuts off. Of course I didn't save because that's just how life is (and there was no back up save). So I took out the battery and tried to break it. After I cooled down and hoped that my battery wasn't broken because I still needed it obviously, I looked for my adapter. At this moment I wonder what this adapter is for. At first I think it is just to charge my computer battery, which is right, but then I think a little deeper, I think into the world of science...physics. I realize that a battery produces direct current meaning it travels in one direction, repelling from the negative terminal and travels toward the positive terminal. I also know that an outlet in the wall produces an alternating current forcing the electrons in the circuit to travel first one way then back the opposite direction. Since a laptop is portable it does not plug into the wall and a battery has a different type of current than a wall outlet. I came to the conclusion that the adapter allows me to plug into a wall outlet and transfer energy from the outlet into the battery so once more I can have a portable computer. I'm glad it is called an AC adapter. Made my conclusion more persuasive.

Christmas in October

On a fine Saturday in the beginning of October, as usual, I am setting up for Christmas even before I set up for Halloween. As I struggle to untangle the wires of my cheap and somewhat retro Christmas lights I started to think about my physics journal and wondered what exciting topic I could talk about this week. Simultaneously thinking about physics I was also plugging in the Christmas lights. I began to admire my untangled, beautiful Christmas lights when all of a sudden I hear one of the miniature bulbs blow up and the rest of the lights lose there glow as well. Of course I am devastated because I spent so much time untangling those wires but I am also pleased because I realized that it was "physics in action." The cause of all the lights going out was either a short circuit or the lights are something called a "series circuit." The theory of a short circuit I easily canceled out because nothing else was plugged in or was on that would enable a blowout that would break the circuit. My Christmas lights are a series circuit which means that a continuous connection between all my lights has to be in effect in order for the current to flow. When one of my light's filament broke this caused a break in connection that is required for a series circuit to work. Since in a series circuit there is only a single pathway any break in the path would stop the flow of electrons and all the Christmas lights would go out. I did not want to find the broken bulb so I just hid the Christmas lights in the trash can. Shhhhh!

Outlets! Forks! Wood!

Well one day this past week I just happened to be by an outlet and I just so happened to have a chop stick and a fork. I always wondered what would happen if I stuck a fork into an outlet because I heard that it could shock you. Since this week in physics I have been learning about conductors and insulators, I learned that metal is a very good conductor of electrical currents and I also read that wood is a good insulator. No one was around so I was about to stick the fork into the outlet when my mom came in and said, "Stop!, metal is a good conductor and that could shock you" and for some reason also took a picture of the dumb thing i was about to do. I said, "Hey that picture will be perfect for my physics journal this week." I also got a picture of me sticking a chop stick in the outlet. Well the reason that metal, like the material my fork is made out of, is such a good conductor is because the electrons in the the outer shell of the atoms are loose and are free to wander. If the electrons were not loose and instead tightly bound and held by their atoms then no movement could occur through an object to create good electrical movement and currents. An insulator is the opposite of a conductor and do not conduct electricity well. The electrons in an insulator are tightly bound and belong to that particular object not wanting to create flow.

Waves That Rock

Sound waves are a beautiful thing.

As I was playing melodious vibrations on my guitar in both a spacious room and a hallway I suddenly thought of physics-particularly the resonance and acoustics of the instrument and amp.

First resonance: As I was tuning the last two strings of the instrument their frequencies began matching and I noticed as I hit one string the other string began to vibrate as well. The two strings had a resounding effect that made the two strings sound more full than if they were each played separately. I took this to be resonance because the forced vibration I placed on the first string matched up with the natural frequency of the next string and they both began to vibrate creating larger amplitudes.

Second acoustics: As I mentioned earlier, I played in both a hallway and a spacious room. In the spacious room there was absorbent materials such as a couch and carpet on the far wall across from me. These two absorbent objects made the music I was making lesser in volume. On the contrary, in the hallway there were only walls and a hardwood floor which made the sound reflect a lot more and because of all those reflections it created reverberations. I will admit the guitar sounded way cooler in the hallway than in the room because of the acoustics.