Mits' Pool Party

This weekend was the first weekend I did not have to worry about art so I'll talk about something other than art. I went to Mitsuo's house to play in his pool with Todd and Maxx. Mitsuo did not swim with us and his mom was mad. I don't know why. However, we still played in his pool. While playing in his pool, we did flips and stuff. I noticed that to flip you need torque to pull you through to your feet. When doing a front flip, I had to pull my arms down and tuck forward so that I stuck the landed before gravity pulled me into the water. For backflipping, although I might have not landed it very well if it were on land, I had to pull my arms up but in a circular motion and throw my head back to get the torque. When I tried a half moon, which I could not do, I had to kick really hard up and to the side and throw my head back to get the torque. Torque is force x lever arm by the way. I also was not able to get a picture but I'll try to take a picture of Mits' pool tomorrow.

Abstract

This weekend I did the same exact thing as every weekend since winterbreak. I had to paint for art. I am also happy that it is the last weekend ever that I will have to paint in my entire life because our portfolios are due soon.
One of the paintings that struck my mind when I was in physics class was my abstract since there isn't much form in it. The color is what brings it out. Thankfully I didn't have to make every color from magenta, cyan, and yellow. I did however, mix the whole opaque background with different colors that came from the tubes of paint. The translucent colors, however, are pretty much the raw colors that came out of the tubes of paint. What really matters is that I finished it, but I have like 10 more paintings to finish up.

Bass

Today I was fooling around with my bass guitar. It made notes thats were very low and would have made very long sound waves. I can't really play anything on it, but I noticed that when its not plugged into the amp, it made the same note as when it is plugged into the amp. This shows that volume has no effect on frequency, and since frequency is inversely related to period, volume will also not have an effect on the length of the wave. On the graphs that we did in the lab, I noticed that volume was represented by amplitude, and frequency and period were represented by the wavelength. This means that although the amplitude must be a lot taller with the amp, the period and frequency were the same.
I also noticed how my mom could easily hear me playing with or without the amp. I'm not sure if it was just because it was loud but I'm sure part of it was because of the resonance the low notes of the bass made with the walls of my house.

Great Weekend

Yesterday was great because I wasted my time driving to the track meet at Punahou and not being allowed to run for reasons that made no sense at all. Therefore, I only did one thing this weekend and that was ART (and homeowork)! So I was trying to make this hand made out of nails and screws and stuff but it wasnt working because of some basic physics principles. First of all, the nails didn't stand up by itself nicely because their center of mass wasn't under them the way I wanted them to stand. When I tried to glue them together with superglue, the glue was really bad and falsely advertised its 15 second drying time. I even tried soddering the nails together but the sodder thing must have falsely advertised as well because it still wasn't sticking within an hour of cooling off. The inclines I needed the nails to be made it really hard for the glue and nails to stick together. When we made our FBDs in class, the box would slide down the incline when the mg or the angle of inclination got too high because the force would exceed the amount of friction holding it up. The nails were smooth, by the way, so already their mew was pretty small. Nails are also pretty heavy for glue so that also made them not stick. Some angles I needed the nails to be were really steep so I sometimes had to settle on smaller angles. At the end of the day, however, I got smart and it worked!

Fun

This past school week was pretty tiring, and I think its going to be like that until the rest of the school year. Out of the five weeknights, I pulled off three near-overnighters in a row (Tuesday-Thursday). I had to wonder what my electric bill would be (since I do homework with the lights on and most times my computer, too). I looked at my electric bill from 12/17 to 1/17 and it said my current reading was 20,134 kWh. This made me pay $192.79. However, this next bill and probably the bills after until school is over will be monsters since my lights have been on all night doing homework. I expect to pay at least $200. All that wasted money could have bought me food. The picture is of the lights I normally use to do homework.

Charge

This past week we've been talking about charges and stuff. This made me remember this past summer when I went to Washington to look at colleges. Although it was summer, it was still a little cold. This meant that if the humidity was lower, it would have been a great place to get shocked from static electricity. Charges seem to build up better when its cold and dry like Las Vegas. I don't remember if I ever got shocked during that trip but I remember riding the plane on the way back home. Planes have lightning rods on the wings so that the charge that gets built up by friction (since the plane is in constant contact with the sky), can escape to keep the plane safe. This happens because charges like to build up at sharper points and they'll eventually fall off back into the atmosphere so the plane won't attract something like a lightning strike.

Dupont

Two Saturdays ago, I hiked with my friends on Dupont (the one that goes up Mt. Kaala from the Waialua side). It was very long and steep. This made it very difficult to climb, but pretty much made it harder to go down. We had to travel up and down places that were almost vertical, and it made me wonder about those free-body diagrams, because obviously the amount of friction that kept us from sliding down was not big enough sometimes. If it weren't for those ropes on the trail, I probably, along with a couple of my friends, would be dead right now.
However, because it was so steep, making the mgsin# greater than the opposing frictional force, it got me back into the physics mode again after that small break from school that had "high winds."