Last Blog!

Wow, I still can't believe that AP physics has come to an end. This year has passed so fast, its ridiculous! I still remember buying the book and thinking to myself...how are we gonna finish more than 1200 pages in less than a school year?! but we have now reached the end of our long journey of suffering and despair after failing our fair share of tests and quizzes. But yet, I do feel pretty accomplished because I did learn a whole lot about physics, and at times, class was actually pretty fun. Since its my last blog, I wanted to make a small list of memorable moments over the course of the year..

1) "You guys are crazy to be here...You guys are gonna suffer" (something along those lines) - Doc, on the first day of school
2) The massive ice crunching sounds I hear everyday
3) Making beats and singing songs with my buddy Adam in class (96 degrees in the shade, I do my thing, cool down, billionaire, replay)
4) Me and clint trying to harmonize even though it wouldn't work most of the time
5) Adam's ridiculous Kelly and Meatloaf jokes...example: "Do you like to eat meat loaf?"
6) Faceboard...A drawing of Meatloaf with guns, but not even close to the size of clint's biceps
7) Clint punching Adam in the face after a fight that I taped in the courtyard...Adam got licked, which was evident through his black eye (Kelli believed my whole story too)
8) Clint almost killing Elliot for taking his lucky seat
9) Adam and his recorder...playing the same songs over and over again...doc complaining of sound pollution
10) "Check the band spacing!" -Adam (seeing Adam sitting on the side doing nothing during labs)
11) "Can you invite me to your wedding when you and Cassie get married?!" -Kelli
12) Clint's blog: "Colin Tseng joined the group: Too Chinese fo Skoo"
13) Jamie and her supposedly huge flock of guys: Jon Wong, Jordan Tottori, Matt Lum, Adrian Catalan
14) Daniel's analogy of hanging mass and tension to represent the forces on Jamie
15) The scheduled fights: Elliot vs. Tara, Daniel vs. Jamie, etc.
16) Kelli responding to Adam's, "What did you do on Sunday?" with, "What did YOU do on Sunday? KENDRA?!"
17) Going to the snack bar whenever
18) Last but not least!...me and doc's fist bump at the orchestra concert.

There's a probably a lot more stuff but I can't remember right now. Good luck on the AP exam everyone!



Ash, Dyl, Ian, and me's intense study sesh at kahala.

2nd to last physics blog?!

Since we had an orchestra concert this weekend, I wanted to talk about sound waves and accoustics. We rented out Mamiya theater for our concert because it had better accoustics than lower gym or seto hall. Engineers specifically design these concert halls to direct the most crisp sound to the audience. In some places, the sound may seem distorted or muffled, which is caused by destructive interference of sound. Anyway, I can't believe it is already the last week of physics class. It's crazy how fast this year has passed. It felt like yesterday writing my first blog and thinking that I could never survive this class cause I started with a 75 or something on my first kinematics test that everyone thought was one of the easiest tests of the year. But yet, here I am, preparing for the AP test, and failing 3 out of every 4 quizzes that I take. I've actually been studying, but it doesn't seem to help that much. Ahh, well, good times this weekend. Got a fist bump from doc on saturday at the orchestra concert. That officially makes yesterday, may 1st, 2010, the best day of my life.

Snoop Dog, Baby

Snoop Dog, Baby. It's a good song by Reel Big Fish. Crazy game last night. Umlauft is so beast. It felt like everything came on one day. There was kokua festival, the UH game, my brother's birthday, and our vball game against punahou. I really don't know what I'm gonna write about, but hopefully i'll find something by the end of this blog. I'm listening to some pepper right now. I wish I couldve gone to their concert on friday at UH when they played with tribal seeds. I'ts a nice day today. nice and sunny. Maybe I'll go play some tennis with my brother. Oh, I can't wait till summer. That reminds me. I get to fly to new york to see my sister's graduation. There, I got something to talk about. The physics of airplanes. The reason it is able to fly and get off the ground is because of a concept called lift. Due to the Coanda effect, which is the tendency of a fluid to stick to a surface that it is flowing over, the air follows the surface of the wing of the plane as it bends downwards, which causes a lower pressure zone above the wing. To bend the air downward, the wing has to exert a force on the air. This is Newton's first law. And because of Newton's third law, this causes an equal opposite reaction and thus, the air exerts an upward force on the wing. This causes lift. The more the wing is tilted, the more lift results.

Mahna Mahna

Mahna mahna. It's a good song by cake. check it out. It's been a pretty crazy weekend. I'm pretty exhausted from working for the food committee and then working for the malasada booth yesterday. I got last shift so I had to wash all these trays and dishes with some other cool people until almost midnight. All I remember was that daniel was having too much fun with the water spray. Anyway, it was pretty fun making malasada jams with Jaren and Kaitlyn. We used a couple cool songs and changed the lyrics to make malasada jams. Heres one of them from the song "I like big butts that cannot lie, you other brothas can't deny," except we changed it to,
I like malasadas and I cannot lie, you other brothas can't deny,
WIth the cinnamon buns and the sugary crumbs,
You can put two thumbs, UP!
Oh man, that's so beast. we did some a milli remixes and one day remixes too.
Other than that, just wanted to say thanks to doc who saved me 15 dollars. I was insulted by his comment though because he doesn't think that I will even touch the review sheet. I'll show him! Junk thing is that I still need to find a way to get myself to start...So onto some physics. I was playing baseball with a couple friends using this plastic ball and a huge inflatable bat. My friend hit the ball onto the roof and that reminded me of one of those baseball problems that we did for projectile motion. In fact, I found it. It's homework problem number 14.5 in chapter 4. To solve this problem, you use vectors and solve for the speed of the ball at contact with the bat by solving for the time in the x direction and then substituting t into the equation delta(y)=Vt-1/2gt^2. Ooo man, I just started my review! Baseball problems also use concepts such as impulse and the change in momentum of collisions.

magnifying glasses

Yo! I know we've been doing photoelectric effect and all that quantum physics stuff, but I'm gonna talk about magnifying glasses cause I finally really understand how they work. Magnifying glasses use a convex lens or a converging lens to make the virtual image that you see. In lenses, the virtual image is on the same side as the object, and in a convex lens, if the distance from the object to the lens is less than the distance from the lens to its focus, a virtual image that is larger than the object is formed. As a result, you see a magnification of the words that you may be reading. However, if the distance from the object to the lens is more than the distance from the lens to its focus, a smaller, inverted, real image is formed. That explains why you have to hold the magnifying glass at a certain distance for its desired effect.

Bubbles

Hey everyone, hows the weekend going? Hope everyone had a good good friday. I sure did. Played some ping pong and some tennis. Ok, so the other day, I helped my brother wash his car. Ever since I was little, I've always wondered why I saw such an assortment of colors on those thin bubbles from soap. After this chapter about interference, I now know why. Since the thin bubble is an example of thin-film, I can talk about thin-film interference. Some light reflects off the surface of the bubble, and other light rays reflect off the inside of the bubble. Since the light ray is entering a heavier medium with a larger index of refraction, it causes the light ray to experience a 180 degree phase change. As a result, when the light rays interfere at this area, there is destructive interference, and I see dark spots. However, at other places, when the phase difference of the light waves are zero or multiples of 360 degrees, the troughs and crests of each light wave match with the troughs and crests of other waves, causing constructive interference. Thus, I see bright spots on the bubble. At these brights spots, I can see an assortment of colors because it depends on the fringe number. At different fringe numbers, the light waves have different wavelengths, so I could see many different colors on the bubble.

Mean da optics!

Ok, so I am doing my blog now because I figured that I would forget to do my blog when I come back home from San Diego on a secret mission to save the president with my boy clint. Unfortunately, we can't tell you what our mission is because we are supposed to keep it on the DL. But anyway, yeah, this blog is for this weekend. I'm not writing this just for fun on a random wednesday. Ok, so we have been doing optics and lenses these couple days and the past week so I figured that I'll talk about glasses and contacts. I am near-sighted and I can't see the board (without glasses, I squint, which makes people tell me to open my eyes) so I went to the doctor to get a prescription so I can get glasses or contacts to avoid some humiliation. The other day, when I was putting my contacts on, I noticed that the contacts are shaped like a concave lens, which allows light rays to pass through and travel through the focus point. The focus point would then be aligned with my retina so that I can now see farther objects clearly.



whoooaa check out these color contancts!

Transformers

So i just woke up from a nap, and I figured that I should do my blog before I forgot. I don't know if it's just me, but this weekend seemed to pass a lot faster than other weekends. Congrats to the basketball team! It was a crazy game. Bummers adam didn't get to play, but I saw that bad boy in the honolulu advertiser today. lucky dawg. Ok well, after doing a lab about transformers, and after hearing doc ramble about transformers even though everyone basically had their head down and was falling asleep, I realized that transformers were everywhere around my house. My phone charger is a transformer, and a lot of appliances used transformers to operate. Transformers either lower or raise the potential differences of an alternating current, but the ones in my house lower the voltage. These transformers use secondary and primary windings of coil around magnetic core like iron, and since alternating current runs through the primary coil, it creates a changing magnetic field in the secondary windings. This change in magnetic flux induces a current in the second wire, and the emf is changed to match a resistor of some sort to cause an emf and a current that is desired.

I can't believe my phone snapped in half

Hello everyone. How was the weekend? Saturday was pretty nuts with the tsunami and all. Even though it was pretty anticlimactic, it was good that nothing came so no one got hurt. I gotta admit though that it was pretty much a waste of time staring at the tv at home waiting for something to happen. What made me laugh was watching the guy that went out surfing when the tsunami was supposed to hit. He's my hero. Other than that, I went to watch the musical on saturday night, and it was pretty good. And also, my phone broke in half because my brother sat on it. This is an example of a force of mg and some torque exerted on the phone to make it break.



Anyway, on saturday, I actually made some time to practice my violin and playing it reminded me of many physics concepts. First of all, it reminded me of friction because without the use of rosin to make the bow stick to the strings, the quality of sound would be horrible. The rosin allows the bowhairs to create friction and extract a rich sound from thing strings. In addition, this reminded me of the idea that if you half the length of the string, it creates a note an octave higher since it doubles the frequency. Last but not least, when I was tuning, I try to hear for any beats, which show that the two strings that I am playing aren't perfect fifths.


oh and I saw this picture somewhere on the internet. Thats some pretty mean photoshopping.

Circuits in da house

Out of the past 17 hours, I was sleeping for 13 hours. Speaking of sleeping, I just woke up from a three hour nap and I know that I'm going to forget to do a blog so I figured that I'll do one now. I don't really know what to write about, but we just did some electricity circuit stuff, so I wanted to talk about the circuits around my house. When I flick a switch, it closes the circuit and allows current, which is the flow of charge, through the wires to turn the light on. Almost every light in my house is in a parallel circuit, so that it is unaffected by other switches. Therefore, when I turn one light off, the rest of the lights still remain on. Likewise, I can turn on one light at a time. I found a meter outside my house that measures the amount of electricity that we use and I found that it was measured in kilowatt-hours, just like what we said in class. Also, I noticed that our christmas lights are all in parallel because although a couple are broken, the rest of the lights still work since each bulb is on a different path. Alright writing this blog made me kinda tired. I think I might go take another nap before dinner.

Super Bowl Sunday

I KNEW THE SAINTS WOULD WIN! Ahhh I knew I shouldve bet some people for lunch because everyone thought that the colts would win. Anyway, I never wrote a blog about physics concepts in football yet so i will now. First, there's the obvious concept of projectile motion. The quarterback releases the ball with some initial velocity and it travels to the receiver as the football is under the effect of gravity. Another concept is momentum. When a linebacker comes and sacks a quarterback, momentum is conserved before and after the collision. However, this is an inelastic collision since the linebacker and the quarterback together with the same velocity. Finally, if there was some wind in the stadium, there could have been hints of air resistance, a non-conservative force going against the direction that the football is traveling. All right, hope everyones had a good weekend.

Stupid toy cellphones

Hello. So the other night, I was having a good night's sleep cause I was really tired, when all of a sudden, in the middle of the night at 3AM, this high-pitched noise wakes me up. It was one of the most irritating sounds ive heard in my life (it definitely passes the test for it to be a alarm sound), so I thought it was perhaps my neighbor's alarm...but then I thought to myself, why in the world would he wake himself at 3 in the morning?! But then I was yeah whatever, and I tried to go back to sleep, but this THING just kept on ringing, OVER and OVER again! And you know when you hear something repeat over and over again, you go crazy right?! OH, I got the PERFECT analogy for you DOC!. Just imagine you were having a perfect night's sleep and someone suddenly walked into your room with that casio piano that we used for the fundamental frequency labs and pressed the demo button on full blast...and left it on for a good five minutes AND danced to the music for good measure. The anger and irritation that you would have felt inside might have totaled to a half of my irritation. I was seriously going insane listening to this sound, so I decided to put matters into my own hands. I charged around the house and searched for the sound and I came upon this box of toys that I played with when I was young (maybe about 10 years ago). I dug through the box, and finally, on the bottom, I find the source of the high-pitched irritating sound that was driving me crazy....A TOY CELLPHONE. I was like WHAT?! I haven't touched this toy in ages! It's been in this box in my closet for the longest time. But I didn't care about those things cause i just wanted to turn the thing off once and for all. PLUS, when I took it out of the box, it was even more high pitched and irritating than I remembered.

This reminds me of the Doppler's effect that we learned about a few chapters ago. About how when a moving object gets closer to you, you hear a higher frequency of sound since the waves are closer to you. However, when the moving object travels away from you, you hear a lower pitched sound. In this case, on a smaller scale, I was the moving object, so when I got closer and closer, I heard a progressively higher pitch. So anyway, I took the toy cellphone and I pressed the fake buttons and I tried taking out the battery only to notice that the battery was unreachable because I would have to use a screwdriver to take all of the tiny screws out of the compartment that held the battery. I was already frustrated enough, so I tossed it with some good force on the carpet floor. This brings in the topic of gravity and projectile motion. I threw it straight downwards with a certain initial velocity, so if I knew the time it took to reach the floor I wouldve been able to calculate its final velocity when it got smashed into the ground (not like I cared about calculating its final velocity at the time). This worked (thank god) and it stopped making noise finally. I was VERY relieved. I was still very angry, but somehow I went back to sleep. I slept a good hour when of course, the cellphone goes off......AGAIN. My eyes shot open and I literally jumped out of my bed on a mission to break that cellphone. Unfortunately, this time, nothing worked, after a couple cracks, so I was forced to think of something before I went nuts. I ended up wrapping it in some clothes and putting it in a bag far from my room. Pretty smart idea, eh? Ahhh, so I finally got to go back to bed with some peace and quiet, but the next day I was really tired.

Well, that's the end of my story. Hope it was entertaining. Looking back on it now, I find it kind of funny, but it certainly was not funny that night. There's actually more to this story, but I'll probably write about some of it in the next blog. Shoots.



The evil cellphone looked similar to this, but it was light green. I would've taken a picture of the real thing, but I donated it already. I wanted to get rid of that thing.

Ice Cubes

Ok, so I had a feeling that I was going to forget to do my blog this week, so I decided to do it now. Last week, when we had that barbeque, I remember filling up this container with ice for everyone. However, by the end of the night, a lot of it melted to water since it was just left out on the table. This reminded me of dakine thermodynamics that we did last chapter. The ice gained heat while it was sitting there on the counter, and this caused it to change states into a liquid. The heat gained by the ice is quantified by the formula Q=cm(delta T). Haha, does anyone know how to write a delta on a computer? Anyway, the change is state also factors into the heat as an extra amount of heat is needed for it to change state. This is known by using the equation Q=LM. This gives you the latent heat for fusion. Oh, and one more example of heat gainage is when I just went to go eat yogurt mama in kailua. (The lychee and the mango are the best flavors, with some mochi balls on the top). The yogurt was really good. Ok, so when the yogurt came out of the machine, it was nice and cold and in solid form, but when i was eating it, it was constantly melting. This was due to the gain in heat since the surroundings were warmer than the cold yogurt. YOGURT MAMA.
TRY IT!



Mmmm. See. Even this guy got lychee and mochi balls!

Garden Hose

Hello. It feels really good to be done with finals, and its pretty nuts that second semester is just couple days away. This weekend's been by far the best weekend yet of this 2010 year. Anyway, my family hosted a barbeque this weekend, so we had to do a lot of housecleaning and tidying up the house for the guests. I had to help take out our 8 foot christmas tree, which meant that I did a lot of work, and then we cut it up. I then had to clean these plastic chairs that we have in our backyard since they were all pretty disgusting. I used the closest hose only to find out that it had no nozzle on it, so it was just water flowing out of a small hole. The pressure at which the water was coming out of the hose was really small, so it was no use using this to clean the chairs. However, this reminded me of the formula force times surface area (initial) equal force times surface area (final). If I put my finger to block some of the hole, the water flows out with more pressure, since area and pressure are inversely related. All right, hope everyone's having a good weekend.

Wakeboarding

So during winter break, I went wakeboarding because my friend's friend owned a boat at a club in kaneohe. It was a cloudy day but it was still really nice because the water in the lake was nice and it was cool to chill on a boat and just relax. The only junk thing was that it was freezing cold. Ok, so there were some other people that came too and they already had experience with wakeboarding, so I watched them first and it seemed pretty easy. Then it came my turn. They told me some words of advice and after that I was in the water in a fetal position holding on to the line in back of the boat. I gave them the thumbs up and the boat jumped ahead. I was expecting to go fast, but the boat jerked me way more than I thought. Hahah so basically, I ended up eating it really hard in the water cause the boat pulled me forward, and I kinda hung on to the rope so I was like dragging my face on top the water, if you can picture that. Yeah....it was pretty embarrassing. I actually didnt get to stand up although I was really close, but the engine started acting up so we had to go in a put the boat back. When we were back at the mini harbor, we used this pulley to bring the boat up to the dock. Then, while looking up at the pulley, I IMMEDIATELY thought "PHYSICS!" The concept of force was a while back, but I imagined two free-body diagrams since there were two ropes. Each rope had tension going upwards and the weight of the boat downwards. Then, I thought tension must be mg/2! Haha thats pretty much it. Physics follows me everywhere I go!





This wasn't exactly the pulley that I was talking about, but it is similar. And this was the position I started in for wakeboarding but I ended up just falling forward once the boat starts moving.

All I needed to know about globalization and a lot more

EY! It's the first blog of the year! So I read Friedman's The World is Flat book over the break and I gotta admit it was pretty interesting, but some parts were too long and went into very great detail. It was pretty good overall, though, cause I learned a lot. Here's my reflection:

I cannot explain the newfound awareness that I experienced from reading this book by Thomas Friedman. I learned so much about economics in the world today including the topic of globalization and its effects on the world today as well as its effects on the future. I find it amazing that all of the new technology has allowed almost any country around the world to participate in the world economy. Throughout the book, Friedman continuously mentions the phrase, “The playing field is being leveled,” and I would choose these words as the best way to sum up the book. The phrase shows the whole idea of equal economic opportunity that today, more people than ever before can collaborate and compete with other people on so many different kinds of work from different places around the world.

From “Globalization 1.0” to “Globalization 3.0,” I find it amazing how much the world has developed and “flattened.” I was astonished to learn that outsourcing was so prevalent in the United States, as Friedman states so many examples, one including U.S. tax returns and call centers being done in India. I didn’t even realize that Japan outsourced to China, and that so many countries outsourced to other places. It is scary for me to learn that a growing number of people in China and India will take American jobs in the future because they can do the same jobs for much cheaper wages. Friedman also addresses the fierce competition that will occur in the upcoming years to determine the top economies of the world.

In the book, Mayor Xia elaborates on how U.S. is currently the designers and that the many people in developing countries are employed by the United States. However, he claims that the Chinese can only learn from these experiences, and one day, the Chinese will be the “architects.” I found Mayor Xia’s words very symbolic of the developing countries’ fierce attitudes to learn more about the economy and how to become successful. Friedman also touches on how technology including computers, e-mail, and fiber-optic networks has allowed individuals and groups to communicate and do business all over the world.

In addition, I was very interested reading about how the UPS as the main example of “insourcing.” I learned that when one orders a pair of Nike shoes from its website, Nike.com, the order is actually routed to UPS, and is picked, inspected, packed, and delivered from a warehouse managed by the UPS. Furthermore, contrary to my old beliefs, UPS doesn’t just pick up and deliver the laptop that you shipped to Toshiba to repair. UPS actually repairs the computer in its own workshop dedicated to computer repairs and sends it back to you. Thus, this whole idea of “insourcing” allows UPS to manage and improve company’s whole global supply chain, while at the same time helping small businesses to go global.

However, what struck me the most was the realization that I, as an American, have to work even harder and become the best I can be in order to compete against the upcoming Chinese, Indians, or Brazilians for jobs. This is due to globalization and the idea that future jobs will go to the best, smartest, most productive, and cheapest works, wherever he or she resides. But most importantly, in the future, the most valuable people will be the people who know how to use their right brains. In other words, the most creative people with innovative ideas will succeed the most because the people with menial or tedious jobs that do not require higher levels of education will most likely lose their jobs to other people around the world who can do that same job for cheaper wages. This is a bit daunting.