10. Just because your friends are in AP B, this doesn’t mean that they can remember how to help you.

9. Don’t forget your calculator, for fear of being called stupid.

8. Firewire cords are very important for video projects.

7. Projects which shouldn’t be pushed to the very end.

6. The popcorn and hot cocoa are located in the cabinet to the left of the door.

5. Physics is better than chemistry because you can actually see what you’re doing. However, I’m still best at biology.

4. You don’t really need to pass quizzes to get by. Tests yes, but blogs cover for the failed quizzes.

3. The term “back row” tends to have a negative connotation. Our back row may have lacked common sense, but there was definitely some brain power present.

2. Physics seriously is everywhere. Seriously. We learned about force, work, torque, lenses, electricity, and rainbows. This pretty much covers everything that happens in the world.

1. doc! (Do I really need to say anything else?)

Thanks doc, for an…interesting year of physics.

Doing my worksheet over the weekend, the really important things about current electricity are: V = IR and P = IV. Calculating resistance of a whole circuit depends on the way that the resistors are connected. If the resistors are connected in series, the individual resistance is added. The resistors need to have the same current running through them. If the resistors are connected in parallel, the reciprocal of each resistor is added and the reciprocal of the answer is the total resistance. The resistors need to have the same voltage.

Real world application of these concepts can be found right now, as my laptop draws current from the wall. I think a very important thing to understand is the amount of current that certain devices draw, in order to avoid a blown fuse.

She is nearsighted, which means that the can see things near, but needs assistance in viewing objects far away. The lenses on her eyes allow light to form an image in front of the retina, making far away objects look fuzzy. To correct this problem, a diverging lens is placed in front of the eye, so that light refracts away from the normal after the lens, but then refracts toward the normal when hitting the lens of the eye, creating an image on the retina.

Farsighted people have the opposite problem: near objects appear fuzzy. In their eyes, light converges behind the retina. So, a converging lens is used to form an image on the retina.

It’s pretty interesting to see how the human eye works (no pun intended). The lens of the eye focuses on objects by changing its shape to either let more light in or to shut light out. This changes the focal length of the lens. Light passes through the cornea, aqueous humor, lens, then the vitreous humor. The real image is projected onto the retina. However, real images are inverted, but the brain is able to reverse the orientation of the images, so they appear right side up.

The image gets to the brain via electrical signals sent by the rods and cones lining the retina. Light triggers the rods and cones, and the electrical signals travel through the optic nerve at the back of the eye. The human eye is actually pretty amazing.

This is a pretty Easter egg my sister made a few weeks ago. Easter eggs are dyed using pigments diluted with water. All colors of pigment can be made using the subtractive primary colors: magenta, cyan, and yellow. Green pigments are made by mixing cyan and yellow; red pigments are made by mixing magenta and yellow.

On the other hand, the additive primary colors are red, blue, and green. When colors of light are mixed, the additive primary colors can combine to make all colors. This is why printers use cyan, magenta, and yellow to print in color, and also explains why the comic page of the newspaper has those little cyan, magenta, and yellow dots on the bottom. These three colors can make any color of pigment. Red, blue, and green, can’t be used to make any color of pigment, but are more useful in dealing with light. What we learned in elementary school, that red, blue, and yellow, are the primary colors, is wrong.

Here’s a picture of my electric toothbrush and its reflection in my bathroom mirror. The real toothbrush is called the object, and the reflection is called the image. This is just a regular planar mirror, so it functions like the mirrors we used in the lab.

In order to find the point of the image, we extrapolated lines that extended from points on the sides of the object straight through the image. The distance from the mirror line to both the image and the object are equal. Likewise, the angle of incidence and the angle of reflection are equal. These angles are determined by drawing a normal, which is a line perpendicular to the mirror line. The angle of incidence is the angle between the line where light waves head toward the mirror and the normal. The angle of reflection is the angle b

But at home, I found a good example of a transformer. Transformers either step up or step down potential difference, aka voltage. In this case, the little black box is stepping down the voltage from the wall and providing a charge for my cell phone. The current from the wall is in the form of AC, alternating current, which means that the current is moving in opposite directions, but at a very fast rate. The cell phone takes DC current, which only moves in one direction constantly. To make AC into DC, something called a diode essentially stops the flow of one direction of current, so the current is only traveling in one direction…to my cell phone!

Anyhow, let’s get this physics blog post rolling. We have a test on magnetism on Thursday, and one of the things we haven’t talked about yet is what I think is the most common form of magnet in everyday life: the refrigerator magnet.

Fridge magnets are weak magnets; they do not exert a very strong magnetic field on the fridge itself. Of the two attracted items, neither the magnet or the fridge is magnetized, otherwise the fridge/magnet would be attracting every metal object around. In this case, the magnet makes the fridge a temporary magnet. This occurs because the random domains of the fridge become aligned when the magnet is brought near them, just like a bar magnet near a pin. The domains become aligned, so the magnet can then stick to the fridge. Refrigerator magnets are “soft” because they are temporary magnets. “Hard” magnets are called such because they are magnetized, such as an iron bar magnet.

First off, I went to watch the dance show at Ala Moana on Saturday night. Dancers have to create a lot of torque to propel themselves multiple times with only one take-off. In fuete turns, they use their non-standing leg to create this torque. I wish I could turn like that.

You’d be surprised at how much torque my sister can create with her body.

But even more excitingly, I am learning how to drive. (I know, yikes!) But more than half a mile from my house, there’s a mean curve. I was driving on it a little too quickly, and I felt a considerable amount of force on me. My dad also noticed this, and I proceeded to tell him about torque = mv^2/r. Since velocity is squared in this equation, it affects the value of torque even more. So in order to keep torque to a minimum, I should really drive slower on those curves.

Anyhows, our kitchen remodel is turning out to be a great source of blog material. It’s kind of cool to think that I actually sort of understand what’s really going on here. The electrician needed to rewire a bunch of things because the appliances are all moving to different spots in the kitchen. So this is a picture of one of the newly rewired light switches. The wires are hooked up to something, but I’m not sure what yet. The following equations could all be applied to the wiring and the resistor in our kitchen.

Quick review of equations: V = IR…very helpful, especially when you know the voltage doesn’t change in an appliance.  P = IV…power is directly related to brightness of lightbulbs, once again voltage is a very helpful variable. Resistors in series: add the resistances of each resistor…but resistors in parallel: add the reciprocals of each resistor.

Things in series have the same current, things in parallel have the same potential difference!