Sunday, July 31, 2011

August at FCP: (1) If you drop an object, it accelerates downward with the free fall acceleration g. Are there situations where it could have a greater acceleration? Yes, including one in which you may have been the falling object. (2) Pub trick: crazy raisin dance in champagne. (3) Physics in art: rays of Buddha in an 1856 painting by Tomas Seddon. (4) Can you balance a baseball bat on its head by tossing the bat into the air? Can you balance upside down on two fingers? (5) My old article that relates the snapping of pencil points to the fracturing of falling chimneys. www.flyingcircusofphysics.com

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Tuesday, July 05, 2011



The latest video at the (public) Facebook FCP site is a news item I did for a television station in San Francisco about the shower-curtain effect. In this image from the video, I am showing the direction of the air flow by using a small candle. Perhaps surprisingly, the flow is into the shower, not outward.

The July stores at the main FCP site include: (1) visible shock waves in the ash plumes from a volcano and in clouds as a rocket climbs into the sky, (2) Tibetan singing bowls that not only sing but also produce water drops that are levitated above the water, (3) my old article about the mechanism by which such drops can be levitated, (4) pub tricks involving a hard-boiled egg, including how to separate it from the shell without peeling off the shell, (5) the first in a series of stories called "A Question of Balance."




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