Friction!

This weekend, I had to move a couple of these big boxes from my living room into the office.  My living room floor is covered in carpet.  The boxes were way to heavy to carry by myself, so I decided to push them.  Although I am not exactly sure what the precise amount of the forces acting upon the boxes was, I do know that the forces that were acting upon it was weight (mg), normal force, the force I used to push the boxes, and also friction.  There was friction because the boxes were on top of the carpet, causing an opposing motion to my force exerted on the boxes.  Many times in the past I have pushed objects across floors, but I never really thought of why it was harder to push things across certain types of surfaces.  I now know that friction is an important part of motion.

Force

In Physics, we learned about force.  A force is a push or a pull.  This week we learned  about how forces affect objects.  In learning this, we used free body diagrams.  In the picture above, there is my contact solution box resting on my dresser.  This box can stay at rest because it is balanced and no outside forces are acting upon it.  The forces which make this object balanced are its own weight (mg) pushing down and the normal force (N) pushing up.  These two forces equally pushing against each other is what makes the object balanced.  Right next to my picture of the box at rest on the dresser, there is my free body diagram.  Free body diagrams (FBD) helps us to see the forces and how they are affecting the object.  There are two arrows in my FBD, which are the weight and the normal force.  This is another way of explaining how the object is balanced.

Newton's 1st Law of Motion

This week, we learned about forces and motions.  One thing I remembered the most from this week's lesson was Newton's 1st Law of Motion.  This law states that "objects in motion [at rest] will tend to stay in motion [at rest] unless acted upon by an outside, unbalanced force".  This weekend I went to support our football boys at their game against Punahou.  When the quarterback threw the ball in the air, it reminded me of the Newton's 1st Law of Motion.  After watching the ball being thrown, seconds later, it landed in another players' hands.  Seeing this, I thought to myself, "Wait a second...objects in motion don't always tend to stay in motion!" Instead of the ball staying in motion in the air forever, it dropped.  Confused, I rethought the situation over.  I then realized my mistake...I had forgotten about the outside, unbalanced force and how it affects objects in motion.  So, it was because of gravity that the ball dropped and eventually stop moving.  Gravity is an example of an outside, unbalanced force mentioned in Newton's 1st Law of Motion.  After the game on Saturday night, I was glad that I was able to incorporate some Physics into the game because I know that when I can relate things to real life situations, I tend to learn better.
...by the way, Congrats on the win Warriors! :)

Extra Credit

This is proof that my dad viewed my blog. :)

2-Dimensional Kinematics

In class, Mr. Blake taught us the BUREKU Technique.  Mr. Blake doesn't like diagonal lines, so in order to find the velocity of the diagonal line he must...wataaaaa!...break the diagonal line into a horizontal and vertical line.  The BUREKU Technique makes life much, much easier.  We also learned about SOH-CAH-TOA this week.  SOH-CAH-TOA is used to find the hypotenuse, opposite, or adjacent variables of a triangle.  As you can see on my picture, there is a triangle with the labeled parts.  The hypotenuse is the diagonal line of the triangle, the adjacent line is the line that is inline with the angle given (marked with a curved line), and the opposite line is the line opposite of this same angle.  To figure out lengths of these lines, we are given 3 different equations:
SOH- Sin = Opposite/Hypotenuse
CAH- Cos = Adjacent/Hypotenuse
TOA- Tan = Opposite/Adjacent
You must plug in the right equations to fit the situation to find your values.  These are some ways to solve for 2-Dimensional Kinematics!