I was going to write another physics journal about soccer, but right now im watching South Park on Comedy Central and i've had an inspiration. This past week we learned about Newton's Laws of Motion, the first of which is the law of inertia. Inertia is an objects ability and tendency to resist change in velocity, and the more mass an object has, the more inertia. In tonight's episode, Starvin Marvin, a poor famished boy from Ethiopia, steals a space ship from an alien. He then flies the ship to America and picks up Stan, Kyle, Kenny, and Cartman. He asks them in his own language to help him stop the US CIA from moving all of his people to Australia. Anyway, as i was watching the space ship lift up the group of kids, i could not help but notice that the space ship must be working much harder to lift Cartman than to lift Starvin Marvin. Cartman is slightly overweight, and therefore has a lot of mass. This large amount of mass means that Cartman has a lot of inertia, and therefore a high resistance to change in velocity. This can be shown in the equation a=F/m. In order to keep the acceleration of the space ship, the force needs to be much higher in order to make up for the large mass in the denominator. This is different from Starvin Marvin, who has a very low mass. Subsequently, the space ship can exert a lesser force on Starvin Marvin and still have the same acceleration.
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5 comments:
wow! i am impressed. this kind of reminded me of the time in class where christian said that katie had the most inertia...lol.
p.s. did you take that picture or cartman yourself?? lol.
what a clever example of physics, paul [:
good detail here in your analysis.
the picture used is fine in this case, as taking a picture of the TV set, while it would be following the rules, is not what the spirit of the rule is trying to prevent. does that make sense?
i'm glad you made that comment, darcy, even if it was just a joke!
tata
HAHAHAH. i was watching south park too!
ahaha
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