Extra-Credit Assignment: The World Is Flat

When I first started reading this book, I thought it was going to be really boring. At certain times during the book, I was right. However, I am glad that I read it because the interesting and important points in this book make it worth reading. In addition, I learned a lot about how different our world is today compared to the 19th century thanks to technology. As Friedman says, we are now in the period Globalization 3.0, which is much different from Globalization 2.0 and 1.0. This new period of globalization is making our world flatter because of several contributing factors such as the internet, outsourcing, insourcing, and supply-chaining. What Friedman means when he says that the world is getting flatter is that the playing field is being leveled so that more and more people all over the world can compete in the global economy.
I found Friedman’s explanation about how the world’s economy can sustain itself very important. He said that if the world does go flat, America will have to create more new jobs as more and more simple jobs get outsourced to China, and therefore, more jobs in China will eventually get outsourced to another country, and etc. This means that as the world gets flatter, Americans are going to have to think more carefully about choosing jobs that won’t get outsourced or get replaced by technology, and a good solution to this problem is to think up new jobs that fit in those two categories. So in a “flat world”, its important for Americans to find a passion for something that they are good at because kids in India and China will be able to replace them in the global economy as the playing field is leveled. Lastly, we all need to be flexible to change because in a flat world, jobs are constantly being changed or outsourced, so how we learn is an important quality.
In the chapter called the “Quiet Crisis”, Friedman emphasizes that America is slowly slipping in the economy because more and more countries are becoming more competitive while we are becoming more and more lazy. While many Asian countries are stressing education, we are becoming more geared towards having fun. And if less and less Americans receive a lower education than other parts of the world, our standard of living can certainly drop. I thought this was slightly depressing because since America is at the top of the world right now, we should fight to stay at the top rather than ease our way along and drop down in the global economy.
Another chapter I thought was important is called “The Unflat World”. This chapter talks about the people who aren’t a part of the flat world yet. One of the most interesting parts of this chapter was when Friedman was talking about why the Arab-Muslim world is having trouble. First of all, many Arab-Muslim countries in the Middle-East are authoritarian and their rulers are able to stay in power because of the importance of oil to the economy rather than the importance of people to the economy. Friedman explains that countries with less natural resources tend to rely on the people to keep their economy going, but if this is not the case, then leaders won’t think about what the people want. Many Muslims are frustrated by their lack of freedom, so terrorism easily developed. Al-Qaeda was able to function well with the quiet support of many Arabs and Muslims because many Arabs and Muslims felt humiliated by America and the rest of the world for being so far ahead of them. However, the only way they can catch up with the rest of the world is to change, which many Middle-Eastern countries are reluctant to do.
Last of all, to sum up the book, Friedman explains that we need to use our imaginations in a good way and get more people to think innovatively for the good of the world rather than think of how to destroy the world.

"Waves" in Tennis

After a tennis lesson on Friday, I realized that the quickness drill I had to do has a lot to do with Physics. As shown in the picture above, the drill I did involved moving laterally (side to side). I had to start in the middle of the service box and go side to side from the middle line to the alley line. It seemed like I was moving in simple harmonic motion because each time I go from one line to the middle, I complete the amplitude of my motion and I do it again when I go to the next line because I’m moving the same distance each time. My speed doesn’t change much either, so it can be considered simple harmonic motion. My coach made me keep doing this drill until I was able to touch 22 lines in 30 seconds. That made me think about the period I had to complete to go from the middle to one line, to the other line, and then back to the first line. I would have to move the equivalent of 10.5 waves in 30 seconds, so the period of one “wave” would have to be about 2.86 seconds. On my first and second trials I only touched 21 and 20 lines, but on my last trial, I touched 22 lines and reached the goal of having a period of 2.86 seconds.

Water Falling from a Faucet

Often I’ve wondered why it feels like the force of water is stronger, the lower you put your hand under a faucet. This time, when I put my hand under the kitchen sink’s faucet, I was able to explain this “phenomena”. Because of what we just finished learning about it physics, fluid mechanics, it was easy to understand what was going on. Using the formula V1A1=V2A2, I realized that since the cross-sectional area of the falling water is smaller at a lower point under the faucet, the volume of water passing through this lower point has to be greater than the volume passing through a higher point. This helped to explain why it feels like a there’s a greater force on my hand when I put it under the lower point than under the higher point. Because there’s a bigger volume of water, or a larger amount of water, passing through the lower point, the force feels higher at this lower point than it does at the higher point. This is because the volume flow rate of a fluid has to be the same at any point; so if there’s a smaller cross-sectional area, there must be more volume, and vice versa.

A Fallen Plant

Today when I was doing homework, it was really windy outside and the windows were rattling. I was worried that something might fall over, and sure enough, I heard a loud “thud” because our bamboo plant in the living room had fallen off the table. It was a pretty strange accident, so I thought about the physics that could have caused the accident. First of all, it was evident that the wind provided a really strong force to push the plant off the table. In addition, when I examined the plant, it was already tilting away from the wind, causing its center of gravity to be too much to the side. With its center of gravity, or center of mass, shifted, it was easier for the plant to fall over. There wasn’t any other force on the other side of the plant, such as a support, keeping its center of gravity/mass in the right place. Therefore, because the plants weight was shifted away from the wind and the wind provided another force in the same direction, the plant had no choice but to fall over, due to physics.

Speed Skating

I was watching TV last weekend, and when I was flipping through the channels, I saw speed skating on one channel. Speed skating made me think of physics once again. In speed skating, there is a lot of physics involved. There’s momentum, uniform circular motion, a pivot point, and air resistance. At the start of the race, the skaters pump their arms back and forth in order to get some momentum going. The momentum helps them to build up their speed. Once they are going pretty fast, it is easy to see that they are moving in uniform rotational motion. However, they are skating around an ellipse, not a circle. Therefore, they have a constant speed while their velocity is changing when they go around the turns. Their velocity stays the same when they are skating the straight a ways. I noticed that when they make a turn, they stick out their inside hand toward the center of the ellipse so that it is easier to turn. I realized that their hand can be a pivot point as they rotate around the turn. In addition, they also keep their hands behind their backs as much as possible in order to make sure that they experience less air resistance. They also keep low when they go around the turns to cut down air resistance. With less air resistance, they can skate at higher speeds. All together, the strategies of winning a speed skating race have a lot to do with physics.

Physics in Jet Skiing

When I went jet skiing for the first time this past Wednesday, I had to figure out the physics involved in it before I could get the hang of it. Some of the concepts involved in this activity are force, acceleration, and rotational motion. For example, you have to apply a constant force on the throttle if you want the jet ski to go at a constant speed. If you vary the amount of force applied on the throttle, the jet ski will end up accelerating and decelerating pretty often. It’s much harder to control the jet ski when its constantly speeding up and slowing down. After I learned how to apply a constant force to it, I had to figure out how much force I should put on the throttle without going too fast. Next, there is also rotational motion involved because there was a three-buoy course set up that we had to follow, and we couldn’t go past twenty feet from the buoys. Therefore, when I turned around the buoys, I had to make sure there was a twenty-foot radius and that my speed was constant so that I stayed in uniform circular motion. By keeping in uniform circular motion, I didn’t make too sharp turns or too wide turns. Finally, I learned how to jet ski based on some concepts I learned in physics.

Physics in the SAT!?

Even when taking a test such as the SAT, there is physics involved. I took the SAT today and I found out that there actually was some physics involved when you write with a number two pencil. For example, when you fill in the bubbles with your pencil, you are creating rotational motion, or uniform circular motion. This means that the speed while you are circling in the answers is constant. There is also a centripetal acceleration force directed inwards at all times that is equal to (mv^2)/r, the radius being the radius of the bubble. Another thing I realized is that there is also pressure involved. Pressure is equal to the force per unit area that is perpendicular to the surface of an object. When you exert a bigger force on the paper with your pencil and your pencil is perpendicular to paper, the mark on the paper will be dark. If you don't press as hard with your pencil and slant it so that it goes down at an angle less than 90 degrees, the mark on the paper will be lighter. So even when test taking, you can think of physics to make sure that you fill in the bubbles as dark as you can and as fast as you can without going out of the bubble.

Air Resistance

I chose this picture of a sailboat that I took this past summer in Sweden for my blog because it’s the perfect example of what air resistance can do. If the wind is against the sailboat, air resistance prevents it from moving any further and vice versa if the wind is with the sailboat. However, the event I want to talk about took place a few days ago. I was walking with my friends, and it was really windy and the wind was against us. Yet again, physics popped into my head. It seemed like it was taking us a long time to walk to Jamba Juice because of the strong winds. Because the winds were so strong, it created a lot of air resistance, otherwise known as “drag”, which was keeping us from going very fast. On the way back, I noticed that it seemed like a shorter walk even though we walked the same distance as we did on the way there. This was because we weren’t experiencing as much air resistance since the wind was with us on the way back. This experience helped me to realize the effects of air resistance. I figured out that air resistance is basically the force that opposes the motion of an object. In this case, the air resistance was caused by the wind, so the wind was creating a force on my friends and me. We were having trouble walking as fast as we normally do because of the drag force acting against us, or air resistance.

Physics in a handstand

I’ve done a blog on the physics involved in doing a shoulder freeze before, but this time I’m going to talk about the physics involved in doing a handstand. In both break dancing moves, you kick your legs up into the air and have to balance by keeping them as perpendicular to the ground as possible. When I was learning how to do a handstand this past Tuesday in break dancing class, physics popped into my head when the teacher was explaining something to me. When you do a handstand you kick up one leg and then the other, and similarly, when you go back down, you put one leg back down and then the other. One time, I made the mistake of kicking both legs back down at the same time, and my teacher told me to make sure I put them down one after the other because it gives you more balance and less impact on the ground. That made me think of the concepts of momentum and impulse. If you kicked both legs back down at the same time, that would produce a much greater force than if you put them down separately. Force is equal to mass times acceleration, so when you put two legs down at the same time, your mass and acceleration are bigger, yielding a greater force. With a greater force comes a bigger impulse and more momentum too since impulse is equal to momentum.

Energy in a Waterfall

When I was looking through pictures on my computer, this picture that I took from Yellowstone two summers ago caught my eye. Most people think of waterfalls as magnificent, but they don't even know why. Waterfalls are cool to look at because of the transfer of potential energy to kinetic energy and the force of weight that acts on the water. As the water falls over the edge, its weight pulls it down to the bottom. At the top, the water has both potential and kinetic energy, but at the bottom, its potential energy is zero since the potential energy that it had was converted into kinetic energy. Its kinetic energy of the waterfall is what makes it spray off the surface of the water at the bottom, as seen in the picture. Therefore, the higher up the waterfall is, the more kinetic energy it will have at the bottom, so that's why the water shoots back up pretty high at the bottom. Although the waterfall in my picture doesn't look very tall, it was extremely tall, which is why you see a significant amount of mist made by it and a rainbow.

Physics in snowboarding/skiing

Because balance is such an important thing in snowboarding and skiing, they both involve some physics in them. For example, when you are snowboarding down an inclined hill, you have to lean your body towards the hill both when you are facing it and when you are facing downhill. You always lean towards the hill in order to keep your board balanced and not leaning downwards, otherwise you will fall downhill. As soon as you turn, your board is going directly downhill and starts accelerating. You don't want it to go too fast downhill if you aren't an expert, so you have to make sure you turn your hips as soon as you can to get the board to slow down. Skiing is different from snowboarding, but there is still a lot of similar physics involved in it. When you ski, you are never facing directly uphill, but if you are a beginner, you face sidewards a lot of the time. When skiing across a hill, you always want to keep your weight on the leg that is more uphill to keep your balance. If you are going straight downhill, you need to keep turning your hips so that you don't go too fast downhill. So if you are a beginner at either skiing or snowboarding, you will always have to think about the physics involved in these activities so that you don't hurt yourself on the mountain.

Break Dancing Freezes

There is a lot of physics involved in different break dancing moves that are on the ground. This specific freeze that I'm doing in the picture involves several things that are related to physics. For example, your shoulder and head are the main things holding you up in the air to counter the force of your weight, so you have to exert a pretty strong force on the ground to stay up. To get up in the air in the first place, you need to build up lots of momentum by sitting in the criss-cross leg position without actually crossing your legs and swaying back and forth several times. Once you have enough momentum, you can swing yourself down to one shoulder and put your head down after that. The momentum going towards that shoulder is what boosts you up into the air. But once you are in the air, you need to keep your legs straight and as perpendicular to the ground as possible so that you don't fall to one side. Break dancing moves definitely involve forces, momentum, and balance in them, so there are lots of physics-related things to think about while doing them.

Physics in tennis

When I had a tennis lesson last weekend, I learned something really cool and important. My coach made me do a drill in which I had to stay low to the ground with my knees bent and stay like that while I hit many balls. It turned out that this helped more balls to stay in because it was easier to rotate and hit the ball when already in a low position. By staying low for the entire drill, I felt the burn in my legs, but it also helped to shorten my recovery time, and then shorten the time it took to get to the next ball. I figured out that staying low, but still in a somewhat comfortable position, makes it faster for you to move to the next ball because you are already in a position in which you can push off from the ground right away to go to the next ball. If you were standing upright, you would have to bend your legs to push off really quickly to be able to get to the next ball in a short amount of time. If you don’t push off fast enough, which is often the case, it takes longer to build up the momentum and your acceleration to get to the ball, therefore, it would take longer to get to the ball. In tennis, it’s important that you get to the ball as fast as you can and recover as fast as you can because it’s all about timing the ball and getting into position quickly so that you can hit an aggressive shot.

First Impressions

Somehow, what I wrote for the first blog didn't come out. So I guess I have to rewrite it. I expected this course to be hard, but not quite as hard as it turned out to be. I'm not used to reading everything and then learning it all on my own. I wasn't expecting for there to be so little lectures and so many labs. I also find the homework kind of challenging, and it can take a while to figure out some of the more difficult problems. I'm starting to adjust and will have to if I want to continue this course. I'm a bit anxious about how difficult it's going to get, especially if the pace of the course gets faster. I'm also worried about how hard the tests will be, since they are worth 60% of our grade, so it's important to do well on them. However, I'm excited to see if I can survive this course and learn Physics at a very high level. It is also cool when you figure out a problem that is tough and doesn't involve only plugging and chuggin equations. I hope to survive this course and be able to work through it the entire year. I hope that I will be able to continue it despite how rigorous it is because I'm always up for a challenge.

First Impressions

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