I was at Troy Todd's house on Friday and we played Halo 3. Besides being the sensation that's sweeping the nation, Halo 3 is also filled with physics. I ran toward Nick (teh pretty pwny) as i shot him with my assault rifle. When i was near enough, i pressed B and beat him down. In Halo, beat downs are incredibly strong. You can shoot someone in the face with a machine gun for a long time and they won't die. However, if you hit them in the back with your gun, they will die instantly. Anyway, when i hit Nick with my gun his dead body flew across the map. I thought to myself, 'wow, with the mass of the gun being so small compared to the mass of his body, the gun must have been moving incredibly fast to fly Nick's massive body across the map'. Momentum conservation is fun!

Today i watched as my dog ran around in the yard. When i opened the door to let her in the house, she ran in and wanted to play. She was jumping around and barking, but i wanted to watch tv so i told her to go away. Then she turned around and ran straight into a chair. I have no idea why. Anyway, she was running really fast and she knocked over the chair. After i stopped laughing at her, i realized that if friction could be ignored, momentum would be conserved in this collision. The momentum of Kimi before the collision and the sum of momentums of the chair and Kimi after the collision would be equal.

This weekend the soccer team played a preseason game against Kalani. I was playing very poorly so coach benched me. As i sat on the bench and watched the game, i thought about physics and how i could turn soccer into yet another physics journal. When i got back into the game, it hit me. Literally. A ball bounced over my head and as i turned around to chase it, a Kalani forward hit me in the back. I fell forward and he landed on me. At first i was angry, but then i thought, "sticky collision!" When the kalani player hit me, i was standing still, facing the same direction as him. He had mass and velocity (and therefore momentum) which was transfered into me during the collision. After the collision, we both moved forward with the same velocity because he was on my back. Momentum is conserved in this (and every) collision, and this can be modeled in the equation: m1v1 + m2v2 = v(m1 + m2).