Blog 29

I figured that since I had some spare time today I would knock out a blog a week in advance, just to keep me on the right track. Since there is nothing that I can talk about that we have done in class, instead I will write my blog on the terrible weather that was/is occuring yesterday and today. Unfortunately, at least 5 people were killed Saturday due to over 4 dozen tornados that occured Saturday afternoon, Saturday evening, and Sunday morning. The worst is not yet over however. The storms are expected to increase in intensity as they move East Sunday. By the time this blog is read and the grade is entered, I expect that we will see the full damage and magnitude of the storms. I've always wondered why certain areas in the United States see worse storms than others. My biggest question was why Austin seems to always be right on the very last outside edge of the storms, and we never seem to get bad tornados or anything near as severe as Dallas or other northern cities in Texas. Luckily for me, Mr. Goertz told me why its much rarer for tornados to strike here. It has to do with the hills and the other terrain around the part of Austin where we are located. Apparently, tornados are sentient and prefer to have an easier job of destroying things rather than working hard to do their job. Thats fortunate.

Blog 28-awesome music

Well this blog is slightly off the beaten path, in terms of content, but since we do listen to at least one song per day in class so I figured this blog was close enough content-wise to count for a good grade. My musical tastes seperate into two main categories, normal music, and epic music. Most normal music I listen to is pretty mainstream, such as country, rock, and thats honestly about it. But what I enjoy listening to most is a genre of music called "epic" rock. These are the really cool songs that make it into trailers for movies and games. This style of music turns anything you are doing into something 200 million times more awesome. These kind of songs make you feel like you can do anything, and if you're studying, you are studying to save the world. If you are walking the dog, it makes you feel like if you do not do the best possible job walking that dog then something terrible will happen, so you walk that dog epically. These kind of songs are my favorite sport pump up and workout songs because they don't have words and are not particularly strong or hardcore songs, they just make you feel like you can do anything in the world.

Instead of pictures, here are some links to my favorites.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYKUeZQbMF0&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASj81daun5Q&feature=related

Blog 26 (resubmission)

This week, my physics blog is about something that we have been doing in class, because I can’t find anything cool, weird or supernatural to write about. This week and for the past 2 or so weeks, we have been building circuits. By far it has been the most enjoyable thing for me to learn about, not only because it will give me 2+ free lab grades. For me, mechanical and hands on things are by far the most enjoyable and easy for me to learn from. I have a good group to do, although recently NaBuilding tali joined our group because Cameron and Anthony drove her away out of her own group, which I found kind of interesting. The hardest circuit to build the first time was definitely the black box circuit, but now that we have built it a second time it makes it a little bit easier, although it would have been easier not to take it apart in the first place and just skip the other builds and come back. Building the not complex small circuits in this class have made me appreciate just how complex some circuit builds must be to complete the their tasks. Especially computer circuits. We have a few spare computers lying around the hosue and after we began working on these circuits I looked inside of the computer and saw just how complex the circuits are. Very tricky. But very fun.

Blog 27-Lightning

Lightning will be the topic of this weeks blog. I'm pretty sure that we mentioned it in class and if not, here is my train of thought that proves that this blog is related to class. Circuits-->electricity-->badass things-->ball lightning-->lightning.

The first thing I would like to discuss is clearly ball lightning. Ball lightning has fascinated me since I was a young child. When I first saw video/pictures of it, I thought it was a UFO, but upon further investigation, turns out to be the coolest form of lightning EVER. Unfortunately, ball lightning is very rare, although up to 5% of the population of the United States report having seen ball lightning. However, many people may get this confused with St. Elmo's fire, so the real number is likely much smaller than that. Since ball lightning has never been able to be "conjured" or a sample taken in a scientific setting, there have been many theories and experiments to try and conclusively prove what it is. My favorite hypothesis however, was put forth back in 1999. An Irish scientist, whose name I cannot remember at this time, believed that ball lightning was caled when microscopic primordial black holes came into contact with Earth. I have no idea how lightning and black holes have anything to do with one another, but it is very cool and very amusing nonetheless.