real or fake
rallain | May 14, 2009Last night was Wednesday, so of course I watched Mythbusters. You never know when a good blogging opportunity will come up. I could talk about the kinetic energy of arrows, but instead let me talk about their episode for next week. I only caught a glimpse of it in the preview. It looks like they are doing something about jumping on a see-saw and launching the other person. It could be this video they are looking at:
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From my analysis of this video, I found that the likely outcome was a broken board (if it were not fake). Also, if the…
rallain | May 5, 2009I just realized that something has been bothering me. It is this KillaCycle - the electric zoom-fast motorcycle that I posted about previously. It clearly is super fast. However there are two claims that seem iffy.
It can be recharged in 4 minutes.
It is recharged by wind power.
It may be possible that these individually could be true - but could it be recharged in 4 minutes by the wind? I am not sure. Let me do some estimations to see if this is possible. What am I starting with:
From the review on gas2.org, uses cordless drill batteries.
Uses 1200 batteries
Produces 500 bhp - not…
rallain | April 30, 2009ZapperZ already beat me to this, but if it is worth doing once it is worth doing again. Here is a video of an electric motorcycle that can apparently go from 0 to 60 mph in 1 second.
What acceleration would this have? If you want, you can look at my stuff on kinematics, but this case is pretty straight forward. Really, as straight forward as one could get. Let me start with the definition of acceleration: (in the x-direction since this is a 1-d problem)
I know both the change in speed and the time, so this is easy. I can make it even easier using google. The acceleration is 60 mph/s.…
rallain | February 2, 2009I enjoyed the super bowl commercials for the most part. You have to be careful not to have too high of expectations, or you will set yourself up for a big letdown. Here is a quick analysis of one of the commercials. This is a Bud Light commercial where at the end they throw a guy out of an office window because he suggests they save money by not buying beer. Are there any actual office meetings that serve beer? (Sorry if I spoiled the ending for you)
I am going to analyze the motion of the guy going out the window. Just because.
At some point in the future, I am going to make a short…
rallain | January 27, 2009We have all seen the Kobe Bryant video of him jumping over an Aston Martin - this keeps coming up on the Internet. There has been vast discussions of whether this is real or fake. I will do my best to examine the evidence. In short (in case you don't want to read the whole thing) Kobe can most likely really jump that high, it is possible that there was some perspective trickery involved. Here is the video in case you are brand new to the WWW:
Oh - don't forget I already analyzed Kobe Bryant jumping over a pool of snakes. I voted that was real.
First, let me give a personal note to Kobe and…
rallain | January 10, 2009So, here is a video (from break.com - so you know it is likely fake).
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If for some reason, you can not view this video, here is the plot.
Guy wears parachute and brings a portable thing like a see-saw.
Guy approaches large crane dropping a large mass repeatedly (I assume to flatten a dirt road)
Guy sneaks up an puts the see-saw under the area that the mass drops on and then stands on the other end of the see-saw.
Mass drops, guy shoots up and parachutes down.
So, why is it fake? I think the best thing is to give an analysis of the see-saw. To start this…
rallain | January 7, 2009I saw this video posted on Physics and Physicists:
It reminded me that I had at one point tried to analyze this. I had actually posted something about this on the first generation of my blog (which no longer exists). I have found the analysis, and here it is from the archives. Thanks ZZ for reminding me.
Could this be true, or is it fake? I started to do an analysis of the trajectory, but I found the following frames:
Look at the guy's back. His back starts moving before the water bottle rockets. It must be some type of cable pulling him. If the rockets were propelling him, the rockets…
rallain | November 24, 2008This is an old video, but still interesting. In this video clip, Kobe Bryant jumps over a pool of snakes.
You are probably thinking what I thought when I see that - this doesn't look real. Really, it must be fake. Why would Kobe jump over a pool of snakes? Isn't that dangerous (even if there were no snakes in there he could hurt himself). Video analysis is needed. Is this fake or is it real?
Start with my favorite video analysis tool (tracker). Use this to get position time data.
Step 1: Get the movie. I used Mpeg Streamclip to get the movie in quicktime format from the flash video…
rallain | November 18, 2008Big trucks are not as popular as they used to be, but gas prices are going down so maybe this commercial for the ford F-150 will start showing up again:
They say its a real demonstration, but it has seemed odd to me. (they also say this is a professional driver on a closed course and don't try this at home - damn! I was SO going to do that this weekend). Here is my analysis:
Here is the important data I have gathered from the Internets.
The truck (a Ford F-150) stops a plane C-123 Provider
The curb weight of the F-150 is around 5,000 lbs - depending on options and stuff.
The empty weight…
rallain | November 14, 2008Here is a video of a guy jumping 35 feet into a pool of water only 1 foot deep.
UPDATE: Apparently, that video went away. Here is another version.
How does this work?
I don't think I even need to do a video analysis of this motion, all the important info is given. I will assume that air resistance did not play a signficant role (and that is a good assumption - or good enough - see this for example: motion of a falling tennis ball). So, here is the situation.
Part 1: guy falls 35 feet 5 inches (10.8 meters).
. Maybe it could be a Ford F-150 that has a known length. Something!
4Include the mass and height of all people involved.
5Use high…
rallain | September 6, 2008Here is the video in question:
Looks too incredible to be real for me. That is when I start to question things. Is this fake or not? To answer this, I took a clip that showed a person launching a grocery item over the isle. This was a good shot to look at because it was *mostly* perpendicular to the camera view. I then used [Tracker video analysis (free) tool](http://www.cabrillo.edu/~dbrown/tracker/) to get x-y-time data for the flying projectile grocery. The scale was difficult, so I just guessed that the guy on the left was 5 foot 10 inches. Here is the vertical position data for…