Catching and Arrow

I am obligated to warn any viewers to never attempt this trick at home or any other place. It is real and legitimate and done by trained professionals. Please do not attempt to replicate in any way, shape, or form.


Recently I watched the movie "Blade: Trinity" and in one part of the movie, a character spins around and catches an arrow...bare-handed. Okay so maybe it didn't count because the character was actually a supervillain vampire and was in his demon-like form, but it was still really cool. Upon seeing this feat, I remembered a clip I once saw of a man really catching an arrow with his bare hand. According to the information I could glean off the clip, the archer was standing 75 feet away and said that the arrow was traveling at a velocity of a little over 100 mph. That means that it took approximately half a second for the arrow to reach the target. More incredible is that fact that Terry (the man catching the arrow) actually did...catch the arrow! Now he says that he uses the sound of the arrow leaving the bow string in order to catch it because he cannot see it. Using the speed of sound in air as being 1130 ft/s that means that he had only .44 seconds to react to the release of the bow string during the part when he catches it blindfolded. By any standards, this is an amazing feat.

I feel that I am obligated to once again warn that this was done by a professional and should not be attempted at home or anywhere else.

Chinese Yo-Yo's

So today, I went to a celebration of sorts for chinese culture and language at the student center. One of the booths that they had was to try your hand at playing with the chinese yoyo. I noticed that it was a rather peculiar object to be working with. The goal was to take a string connected to two sticks and place it in between the two large parts of the yoyo. The center was made of smooth metal so that the string could slide easily between it. With a quick roll on the ground to get it spinning, you had to lift it up and begin whipping your hands back and forth in order to keep it spinning. Much easier said than done. Not only did you have to whip it, but you had to keep it balanced on that one point where the string came in contact with the yoyo. I immediately noticed that this was very odd. In order for the yoyo to spin smoothly, the center had to have low friction. But in order for it to spin at all it needed to have relatively high friction. This interesting conundrum made the yoyo hard to handle. However, the trained performers could even build enough friction so that the yoyo could climb up the string nearly vertically. I on the other hand, couldn't even manage to get it spinning. Oh well.

Mirage thingy...

The way this interesting device works it by using the two nearly identical mirrors placed on top one another. The position of the focal points of the mirrors are very important. For the top mirror, the focal point is near the bottom and the middle of the bottom mirror. For the bottom mirror, the focal point is hovering right in the hole of the top mirror. That way the light emanating from the object goes out in all directions and reflects off of the top mirror. These rays then reflect directly downward and hit the bottom mirror. From there, these rays are reflected up towards the hole in the top mirror and converge. One interesting thing to note is that the mirrors end up inverting the image as pointed out by the reversed direction of the arrow in my diagram.

To infinity and BEYOND!!!!

Ok well, apparently the blog I did on the weekend did not get posted, so here I go again.
Today's topic is about space travel and another documentary I saw on TV. It talked about the huge expanse of space and different ways in order to more efficiently get people into space and beyond. Currently, we use billions of dollars in order to turn stored energy into heat energy and do work through chemical reactions. But there could be other methods of getting people into space using some physics, some imagination, and some imaginary particles. The first idea would be to create a giant space elevator connected to the ground. This way all we would need to do is use electricity to pull up a giant room of people into space. We are getting closer to developing cords that are strong enough to withstand the velocities of a rotating planet and the space elevator would be perpendicular to the planet to reduce tension. Another idea is to create a space ship with huge sails, like thousands of miles in area, and using laser batteries on the moon to push the ship through space. Photons from the light actually can exert a force onto an object in space and a huge sail could collect this force and translate it into forward movement. Another idea is to use the idea that because super dense materials bend space-time, we can create a super dense material to pull one part of space closer to the ship and therefore reduce the time it would take to travel such a distance. This is somewhat analogous to instead of walking to a chair, using a lasso and pulling the chair closer to you. Instead of traveling faster to the chair, you are reducing the space between you and the chair. The fourth way to increase space travel dramatically would be through the use of an imaginary particle called tachyons. Tachyons are particles that work sort of opposite to normal particles. According to Einstein's equations and theorems, in order for an object to reach the speed of light, it would need infinite mass. However, tachyons have what's called "invisible mass", so instead of the speed of light being a maximum speed limit, it's actually a minimum. If we could turn a space ship into a tachyon like object, it would effectively become invisible to space time in terms of mass and travel at speeds faster than the speed of light. It's just too bad that tachyons violate the laws of conservation of energy, causality, and almost every other physics law known. Hahahaha, a man can dream can't he?

We Fly High, No Lie

IF YOU ARE READING THIS PLEASE GO SEE THE WIZ THIS THURSDAY THROUGH SATURDAY! Well, now that I got that out of my system, onto the blog. This week, I got to experience working what's called the fly rail in theater. It's not exactly the cat walk, that's the top level, but its about halfway in between. In Hawaii Theater, this is where we pull on ropes in order to fly (hence the name fly rail) things in and out of the stage above the actors' heads. The way it works is by a system of pulleys that run up and down the whole height of the building. Normally, this whole job wouldn't be much of a problem, however, some of the pieces are extremely heavy. For example, the cyclorama, the large piece of cloth in the back, weighs a couple hundred pounds. Now granted, I can heft my fair share of weight, but I'm nothing compared to a couple hundred pounds of cloth. There is no way my, comparatively speaking, tiny little body is going to be able to apply enough downward force in order to counter the weight of the cyclorama. So systems were put in place to help people like me. For one, the rope-pulley system has several locks in place so if I happen to let go, the piece won't go falling down and costing Iolani school ten thousands dollars. Thank God. The second thing is a bunch of weights attached to the rope and connected in order to balance out the weight of the cyclorama. That way, the weights help me both lift and lower the cyclorama, making my job and the show run much smoother. GO SEE THE WIZ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Making Magnets

Yay for more TV info! Once again, I was watching the science channel and the show "How It's Made". On today's segment they covered magnets! I always wondered how they created magnets, because I've always wondered why more things aren't magnetic. As it turns out, the reason why is because in order to make a magnet, a very strong electric ...ummm....machine...electric difference...thing is needed...yeah. I'll explain it more later. But anyway, a compressed sand mold is made and a soup of different elements and metals including iron, sulphur, cadmium, etc. are poured into the mold. Once the metals have cooled, they form the nice shapes shown in the picture. However, they are still unmagnetized. These metal shapes are taken to a large machine that produces a very high difference of charges, one side positive, the other negative. By placing the positive and negative ends of the magnet on the opposite sides (In other words, the eventually positive side goes on the negative part of the machine and vice versa) and turning the machine on, the charge aligns the opposite charge to the different poles of the magnet. The side connected to the negative part of the machine becomes highly positive and vice versa. The same thing basically occurs when you put a magnet into a re-magnetizer. Though its odd that something would need to be re-magnetized considering that magnets last for about 300 years...according to the movie "Wild Wild West" with Will Smith.

Carnival Madness

So "celebrating" my birthday at the carnival was loads of fun. OF course I ate too much, lost a slipper or two in the mud, went on some intense rides, but was overall, plenty of fun. The one ride that I really enjoyed though, was this one, the spinner if I recall. It basically was a large hydraulic arm the lifted and rotated a ring of riders on nearly every axis and direction: up, down, horizontal, vertical. While on the ride, I could barely discern the huge motor in the background through all the screaming. I got to thinking afterwards how much force it would require to perform all those actions. If on average, every person weighs about 100-150 pounds, and there were 20 riders, we were looking at around...2000 to 3000 pounds of people. Also the hydraulics would have to be strong enough to support not only the weight of the people, but also the steel structure itself. In order to toss that much weight around in circles on multiple axes and to run the lights and secure the safety systems, etc. I could tell that that one rig would require a bunch of energy to consume. However, the rig did manage to help itself out by continuing in the same motion. Because the rig only rotated in one direction, it could use its own momentum and force to continue throwing riders in rotations. Saves energy, work, and strain, though not necessarily people's stomachs.