Shopping and Torque

This past weekend, I went to Walmart to get a midnight snack. Before I left my house, my mom asked me to pick up conditioner. When I got there, I purchased some Cheetoes, a few bottles of conditioner and a drink. My friend carried the bags to the car, so it wasn't until I got to my house that I realized the physics that can be found with shopping. When I was carrying the bags up the stairs to get into my house, I had a bag in my left hand containing the bag of Cheetoes and in my right hand, there was the bag holding the several bottles of conditioner along with my drink. The bag in my right hand was clearly much heavier than my midnight snack so right as I pulled the bags out of the car and started walking, I immediately felt my body lean to the left side to compensate for the extra weight (and additional torque) caused by the heavy bottles of conditioner in my right hand. The two grocery bags exerted a torque on my arms. As we learned in the seesaw lab, in order to balance the system, the two torques need to be equal. Because the two weights are not equal, the lever arm needs to increase on the side with the lighter bag, or more torque must increase on the lighter side so that the two sides cancel each other out and achieve equilibrium. Obviously, I cannot increase the length of my arms. My leaning towards the left however, increased the torque on the side with my Cheetoes and equaled the torque on the opposite side. Although I don't have a picture from Saturday night, here is a picture of the something similar to the seesaw lab. The fulcrum represents my body and the torque arm represents my arms. The force causing the torque were the two shopping bags.

Ancient Physics

This past week in school has been exhausting. When I'm tired, my brain is barely functioning properly so I sadly didn't notice any new concepts in physics this weekend. I did see something that was related one of the first concepts we learned; waves. On Saturday, I went to the Lil Wayne concert. Some people were doing the "wave." This can take place at many different events including sports games, concerts, etc. We learned about two kinds of waves at the beginning of the school year, transverse and longitudinal waves. When a crowd does the "wave," it is an example of a transverse wave. A transverse wave is a wave which moves from left to right as the objects (in this case, concert goers) move up and down. Although I did not notice anything we have been learning about recently, this weekend was a good refresher, reminding me about previous concepts.