This cool thing at a bubble drink store

So yesterday I went to ala moana to eat dinner with my family at Go Ma Tei, this ramen place that has good char siu tan tan ramen. Before we went to dinner, we went to go walk around and get some bubble drinks. While I was waiting for my honeydew bubble drink, I saw this cool see-saw propped on a stand with Santa on one side and a reindeer on the other side, and the first thing that came to my mind was torque! I know we did torque a while ago, but I had to write about this cool seesaw. Well, according to this particular seesaw, the reindeer is heavier because they are both sitting an equal distance from the fulcrum of the seesaw. Since torque is equal to distance from the fulcrum times force and the reindeer is exerting more counterclockwise torque, it has a larger mass and thus a greater weight. Physics is everywhere!

Surfing and Wiping out

I remembered to write a blog this week! This weekend was a good one. The only junk part was that I had to take the SAT. Other than that, I got to relax, catch up on sleep, and go surfing at Diamondhead. To tell you the truth, I'm horrible at surfing since ive only gone a couple times, but yesterday was awesome cause I actually caught like 5 waves!!! (I counted.) They weren't exactly big waves cause I'm not good enough to drop in on them but I caught some smaller ones. This was a lot more fun than the last last time when I borrowed my friend's shortboard and didnt catch anything. That time, I basically spent all my energy paddling out and then I was super tired so I couldn't paddle hard enough to catch any waves, and it was quite depressing cause I just kept getting pummelled by huge waves (to my standards) that I couldnt get out of the way of. Then, finally when we decided to go in, it was almost sunset. I was so tired and i was paddling so slow that it was dark by the time I got to shore. It was actually kind of scary, but yeah, theres my story about my horrible time with a shortboard. Never gonna do that again until I get better.

ANYWAY, I realized that there's a lot of physics in surfing. Since the surfboard was less dense than the water, the surfboard floats and this is due to the buoyancy force pushing the board upwards. Also, the concept of torque is important in surfing. There was one wave where I was too far up on the surfboard so I caught the wave but then I nosedived and drank a good amount of tasty salt water. Ok, so this was a pretty big wave so I was suppeerrr happy that I caught it but then that all changed when I was falling head first into the water. It was very sad and embarrassing and ahahah, Doc, you would've probably laughed at me. So from this experience, I learned that I gotta arrange myself more towards the back so my center of mass provides more counterclockwise torque to balance out the force from the wave. Standing on the board also causes torque. Force is also an important concept. The force of the waves toss me all over the place.

Oh, and here's just a taste of what happened to me yesterday when I couldn't get out of the wave's way. chee