- Exercise: find a name such that when you sing The Name Game (“banana fana fo …”) all three words you get are insults.
- The Northwestern Women’s Lacrosse team has won the NCAA championship like every year but two in the past decade. The two losses make the overall dynasty more impressive. Discuss.
- Why do fat people slide farther when they reach the bottom of a water slide?
- When hiking in a group, if an accurate measure of (changes in) elevation is unavailable but you have a watch and a GPS it’s better to share the work of carrying the backpack by dividing the time rather than the distance.
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September 17, 2013 at 11:58 pm
Evan
2. It probably makes the feat of the players more impressive. It probably makes the feat of the management less impressive.
September 18, 2013 at 12:03 am
Anonymous
Seems like the losing in #2 means there is actual competition, and that it’s not just one extremely overpowered team rolling clearly inadequate competition.
September 18, 2013 at 12:14 am
Philip
#3 is (deceptively?) simple. A more massive object has more energy. (More potential energy at the top, more kinetic energy at the bottom.) It took more work for fat people to climb to the top; they have stronger leg muscles to accommodate. So friction has to do more work to counteract the added energy.
Larger people have more surface area, so friction has a larger space to work with. But as mass increases, the area for friction increases much slower than energy does. So the heavier you are, the more time it takes for friction to stop you.
September 18, 2013 at 2:19 am
Alex F
“Friction”… Are we talking about water resistance through a pool, or surface friction on land? Everything you say is true for water resistance and false for surface friction.
September 18, 2013 at 11:06 am
Evan
Is the fat person travelling faster at the bottom? And if so, how does this square with the “two balls of equal size but different mass fall at the same speed” thing?
September 19, 2013 at 9:40 pm
enrique
You mean “Questions left lying around”