Blog 3 - Does my Snowball Suffice?

I have a weak arm. This is usually no problem to my everyday life but when it comes to wintertime antics this is truly my downfall. As pesky older brothers notoriously do, Dino thought it would be fun to initiate a wholesome snowball fight in the freshly fallen, perfect-for-snowball snow. Like the devious conniver he is, Dino was hidden behind a tree pictured off camera and proceeded to peg me with snowballs. Eventually, I mustered up enough courage to defend myself, and to my luck, my mother caught this on camera. The following video looked like this:

Like I said. Weak arm. After review of this video, I came up with the interesting idea to plug it into Logger Pro, plot points, and analyze the graph resulting. After toying around with some of the functions and different kind of graphs I could conjure, I figured a simple distance vs. time graph with an integral captured the motion of my stellar toss.

y distance vs time

x distance vs time

By finding the integral of my x distance vs time graph, I was able to determine the velocity at which I tossed my snowball; a whopping 1.72 m/s, which is quite literally the speed of a turtle at full sprint. As seen in the video, my throw did not suffice in reaching Dino. I would have to project the snowball with twice the amount of force considering he was standing roughly 5 m away, and my snowball only reached about 2.5 m. But nevertheless, I am training for the next snow day.

(disclaimer: I'm not actually this weak)

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LSA E Mech 2017-18

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