track season!

ah, it is such a "beautiful" time for the season of track to start. It's rainy, it's cold, it's miserable. But track has started, nonetheless, and it's time to get those spikes out of the closet. Everyone runs crazy fast; it's easy to forget that everyone starts off at a velocity of zero. Yes, velocity is the topic for today's blog.

Being a long jumper myself, I video-taped some of my fellow jumper's strutting their stuff. All long jumpers must start at the velocity of zero. Then, they accelerate as fast as they can, and at the end of the jump, they have reached the highest velocity possible so that they can jump as far as they can.

For the most effective jumps, the long jumper must try and stay consistent with each run. Each runner has a mark where they start from. Right before they jump, they lower their center of mass so that they can jump higher into the air for maximum results. Gravity pulls them down, but in my opinion, they look like they're flying for a brief moment.

I may be biased, but I really do believe that long jumping is the most interesting event in track!

house wiring

After my older brother was whisked off to the whimsical world of college, my parents have had a lot of free times on their hands (no more football games to attend, no more high school graduation to worry about for another year). So, with all that free time, they went out and bought a humongous amount of plants. Now that they spend so much time in the garden, my parents were in need to install a few lights here and there for seeing at nighttime. My dad, being a handy man and liking hands-on experiments, installed the lights by himself. He used parallel circuits, using Step by Step Guide Book on Home Wiring. That book has such great diagrams on how to do home wiring. So, using these diagrams, my dad used parallel circuits to make a few lights hang by the plants that he needs to take care of. It's a good thing, too, because if he used series circuit wiring, if one light went off, then all the lights would go off, and then it would be hard to find out which bulb was the one that is not working anymore. Parallel circuits really are great, but they use up more energy, unfortunately. Well, that's it. Signing off, in 5, 4, 3, 2 . . .