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.

Use Takedown!

In the world of MMA or Mixed Martial Arts, the cage is unique. The regular octagon surrounded by rubber coated steel chain link fence is a formidable arena to stand in. However, several things make it unique, as I discovered watching the show "Fight Science." It's surface area makes it wide and open, but with no real corners, fighters cannot get, well, cornered. But what's really interesting is the fence. Because its chain linked, this allows it to bend and absorb energy. A fighter can ram his opponent into the fence and it will bend, sometimes up to 12 inches! But the thing that makes the cage so tactical is its ability to be used in offense or defense. When a fighter backs up against the fence, he's actually taking advantage of the rebound from the fence. If his opponent hits him, the force his transferred into the gate, but gets rebounded back out. A skilled fighter can use this energy and throw it back at his opponent, magnifying the force of his strike. However, going back to the ram, a fighter can also use this rebound to pull off an impressive take down. When both fighters lock get pushed into the fence, the force of the pair gets shot back out. The fighter nearer to the center can then crouch down and force the other fighter up. Then he twists and falls ontop of his opponent, slamming the opponent's back into the ground. Altogether, the combined weight of the pair, the rebound energy, and the surface area can create an impact of almost 2,400 lbs.! More than a ton!

The Bowling Ball is not Round!

Or at least the core of a bowling ball. Once again I gain amazingly useless but fascinating insight from that big box across from my couch that magically produces sound and images. This time the strange program was called "Some Assembly Required" and it was about different products and the science behind them. One segment talked about the bowling ball. I found out that the core of a bowling ball, especially custom made bowling balls are perfectly round. The reason has almost everything to do with mass and movement. I always wondered why professional bowlers could do that little curvy thing at the end of their bowls and get a strike, while my ball always seemed to just go straight...into the gutter. Objects that are round will always eventually roll along the axis that has the most mass. For example, when you roll an elliptical object, like an egg, except more perfectly elliptical, no matter where you start, as long the egg keeps rolling and no forces other than gravity and friction act on it, it will eventually roll perfectly centered. This also explains why perfect spheres can roll in any direction, because its uniform mass allows any axis to be the major axis. So bowling balls' cores are not spherical so that the little curve eventually takes over and the ball rolls in the desired angle to get a strike. In fact, some bowling ball cores look more like jacks than balls. The heaviest axis of rotation will eventually cause the ball to spin in a different direction. Balls with spherical cores always go in a straight line. So next time I go bowling, I know how to bowl a strike, or at least what I can blame for my pummeling the gutter.

Angels and Demons, Yin and Yang

I never really thought much of Dan Brown. after that whole Davinci Code controversy and book of lies, I didn't think that he was much of an author. But when I read his book Angels and Demons, I found that Dan Brown can do two things right: do research and make very interesting, convincing, and captivating lies. So in fact, he's a pretty cool writer! In fact, the one part in the book that interested me the most was his inclusion of an cannister that contained a quarter gram of antimatter. If I remember correctly, antimatter is the opposite of matter and as Dan Brown wrote in his book, when matter and antimatter collide, they cancel each other out in an annihilation. This creates large amounts of energy which makes it possibly the most productive energy source on the planet. Pretty cool. I'm pretty sure the most scientist have ever achieved in creating antimatter were tiny little blips of positrons. The highly unstable nature of the antimatter in the book meant that it had to be stored in a vacuum and was hovered in that vacuum by two powerful magnets opposite of each other. I'm not sure how well the magnets would work though. Heck, I'm not even sure how antimatter would react to an magnetic field. Anyway, the way the antimatter was created was by firing large amounts of energy in opposite directions through the world's largest particle accelerator. The energy crashed into each other and effectively reversed the equation E=mc^2, proving that matter could be created into energy as energy is created from matter in a nuclear reaction. so that means that a quarter gram of antimatter could effectively create... ((3.00e8)^2)0.0025 = 2.25e14 J?! or at least something along those lines. In the book it was somewhere along the lines of 5 kilotons. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 15 kilotons. What this means is that a little BB sized pellet of antimatter is 1/3 the strength of the bomb dropped on hiroshima. WOw. Dan Brown did do his research. Even if the whole satanic cult thing isn't real.

Fire Pistons?

Well i'm back. After a long and restful christmas break, I'm still not ready to go back to school. But whatever. Over the break i watched a bunch of TV. I mean seriously...A LOT! I probably averaged about 25 hours a day. Anyway, I saw this cool survival show and in it the guy used a tool that was called a fire piston. It was this hollow rod with a little notch in the bottom where you could put a little bit of wood in it. By taking the piston and jamming it down into the rod, the wood would ignite into a smoldering pile! i wondered, how is that possible? So i thought about it using gas laws. Obviously the wood was ignited by a large amount of energy, more than likely heat energy. The hollow rod was airtight, so that meant that by smashing the piston down into the rod, he was compressing the air. Therefore he was reducing the volume of the air. According to the gas laws, when volume goes down, pressure rises and when pressure rises, temperature also does too. So in the fire piston, if the air inside the piston is compressed to less than one fifteenth of its original size, as seen in this video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVCXZW4XFJ0), then the pressure would rise dramatically also resulting in a huge increase of temperature. I think that although the ignition temperature of woods vary, it takes a temperature of about 300 degress Farenheit to ignite your average piece of wood (Of course i could be completely wrong). So this cool little devious can probably produce temperature upwards of 300 degrees Farenheit, maybe even higher! Nice.