Blog 2: Fetch

      Today I was playing fetch with my dogs, their favorite type of daily exercise and realized once again that physics was involved. When I threw the ball for my dogs, I was performing a projectile motion. Once the ball left my hand, it had a horizontal velocity, the x component, and a vertical velocity, the y component. As the ball left my hand the vertical velocity decreased until it reached the peak and then began increasing velocity until it hit the ground, or on a good day my dog caught it. But as the vertical velocity changed, the horizontal velocity stayed the same through out the whole throw because it was not accelerating in the horizontal direction. Now if I had the actual horizontal and vertical velocity, I could take those numbers and then find out the vector and the angle of my throw. But maybe today we just play and save the experiment for another day.

Playing Cats

Today while I was waking up after a nice long sleep my cats got the bright idea to start running around the room playing chase.  Just as they started to run the accelerated from resting rate of zero to a faster acceleration.  Many times their acceleration would change because the were about to run into something or decided changing directions to trick the other cat. But at times while the acceleration changed, their velocity would stay the same because neither the time or distance changed. At one point they got truly into the game and jumped my stomach.  From the point they left the ground to the point when they landed on me, gravity acted upon them making their acceleration -9.8m/s^2. The distance from the ground to the peak was a larger length than from the peak to my stomach there for the time was larger for the first half.  As the cat fell, from the peak it also experienced another change in direction as my stomach sank from the fall and then bounced back to its original position giving the cat a final velocity of 0m/s.