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Tag archives for vpython
Pouring tea in a plane – upside down
Posted by Rhett Allain on August 17, 2010 Let me start with the video. Here is a guy flying a plane in a barrel roll and pouring some tea at the same time. Talk about multitasking. How can he pour upside down? Well, there are two ways to look at this. First, I can look at this in the frame of the plane.…
Basketball shot – real or fake?
Posted by Rhett Allain on August 7, 2010 I have seen several videos similar to this. Real? Fake? How many tries did this take? Let the analysis begin. Before I do any analysis, let me state that I think this is not fake. I do not know that for sure, just my first guess. How would I tell if it is real or…
Visual and MatplotLib – holding hands at last
Posted by Rhett Allain on July 19, 2010 (alternate title: how to make pretty graphs in vpython) I am happy. Finally, I can use the visual module in python (vPython.org) and plotting with Matplotlib. Maybe this isn’t such a big deal for many of you, but for me, it never worked until now. In the past, I blogged about plotting in vpython vs.…
Right Turn and Zombies
Posted by Rhett Allain on July 8, 2010 In my last zombie post, I looked at a human moving in a circle to avoid a zombie (if they are stuck in a room). What if I build a zombie evading robot that always moves perpendicular to the path of the zombie? Would this work? This shouldn’t be too difficult to model. I can…
Chased by a Zombie
Posted by Rhett Allain on July 1, 2010 Title: Chased by zombies When I heard word about the ScienceBlogs Zombie Day, I knew I wanted to participate with a post – but I had no idea what to do. My first thought was to somehow talk about living off the electric grid in the case of a zombipocolypse – you know, like how…
Why would I think that?
Posted by Rhett Allain on May 31, 2010 So suppose you saw something that looked like this: This is a ball shot out of a shooter device. Well, it is a vypthon animation of a ball. What would you do if you came to see this video? If I had not made it, I would say it is an unrealistic video. It does…
How do you represent vectors?
Posted by Rhett Allain on February 4, 2010 Recently, I was talking about vectors. At that time, I had to stop and recall how I had been representing vectors. Ideally, I should stick with the same notation I used in Basics: Vectors and Vector Addition. But let me go over the different ways you could represent a vector. Graphical Maybe this is too…
RP 6: Throwing a fooball, Part II
Posted by Rhett Allain on December 27, 2009 In part I of this post, I talked about the basics of projectile motion with no air resistance. Also in that post, I showed that (without air resistance) the angle to throw a ball for maximum range is 45 degrees. When throwing a football, there is some air resistance this means that 45 degree is…
Pendulum – a third way
Posted by Rhett Allain on December 6, 2009 Looking back at part I of this idea, I don’t think I did a very good job. Let me summarize the key things I wanted to say: Normally, there are two ways of modeling the motion of an object: Calculating the forces on the object and using the momentum principle or Newton’s second law (which…
Tides. Why are they so hard?
Posted by Rhett Allain on August 3, 2009 Every introductory astronomy text and most intro physics texts talk about tides. The usual explanation is something along the lines of: The moon exerts a gravitational force on the Earth and all the stuff on the Earth. This force decreases with distance (1/r2). Thus the moon pulls greater on one side of the Earth than…