Blog 6: The Salsa Incident

So this weekend i actually had some time to sit down, relax, and catch up on Hawaii 5-0.  I had gotten nice cup of lemonade and some chips and salsa and was enjoying the show when my cat, Tony again, began to bother me.  So I started to reach for him to put him on the ground when he freaked out thinking my hand was something attacking him.  It was seriously one of the funniest things I had ever seen as he jumped two to three feet in the air, landed, and dashed off. Then I realized when he landed he created a bouncy collision with my salsa container sending it flying with some of his transferred kenetic energy and landed well at this point I didnt know where.  So i began to search all around for about three minutes when I had the thought that the salsa had landed in the chip bag... but no that could never happen.  Well guess what guys, it did! Sitting right side up in the bag was the salsa. As Tony pushed off the ground he had changed his momentum from zero to some positive kg*m/s and when he collide with the container lost some energy as both were sent in the positive direction again.

The Circle of Life

So these past few weeks we have been learning about energy, work, and power.  And of all places that i thought about physics was during Lip Sync.  This year the seniors did a clip from Lion King's The Circle of Life.  We came up with the funny idea of having one of the senior boys lifting a smaller senior boy resembling when Rafiki presented Simba to the animal kingdom.  So during lip sync, Keahi was able to successfully lift Marc in the air for about five seconds.  As Kehai did this, he had no net work because there was no change in kenetic energy due to gravity acting in an equal and opposite way, but he did increase Marc's potential energy.  And since there was not net work, there was no way to find Keahi's power.