Week 1: Cleaning my room. Kinda.

That was the longest first week of school I have ever had. I was completely knocked out on Friday night--I am so ashamed of myself because I didn't even touch my homework until Saturday morning. (Yes, I'm a nerd.)

But, first, let's talk about something that must be on your mind. The jellybeans in the background. Well, simply put, when I read the quote above from Professor Guralnik of Brown University, I immediately thought of jellybeans. Because you never really know what the flavor of a bean is until you bite it. And some of them taste good, some of them taste bad. You never really know until you try.

AP Physics B, so far, has been...ok, to be honest, it's cool. At first, I thought I liked the class because it wasn't Chemistry. But I actually understand the concepts we've covered so far and I enjoyed both labs in class, so, I guess I do like Physics. This week's jellybean tasted good.

But on to a more pressing topic!

Today, I vacuumed my room.

Okay, that was a lie. I watched my dad vacuum my room (but I helped to move stuff out of the way!)

Anyway, as I lounged around on my bed watching my dad move the vacuum cleaner--back and forth, back and forth--against the wall, I realized that the vacuum cleaner's movement could be plotted on a position-vs-time graph.

Then I realized that I was thinking about normal things in a Physics-ish way and I mentally slapped myself for letting Physics get into my head this early in the game.

But then, a thought struck me: PHYSICS BLOG TOPIC. So I grabbed the camera and took pics.

Let's say that the wall is the origin. When the vacuum cleaner moves towards the wall at a constant speed, the line on a position-vs-time graph has a negative slope. It slopes downward because the distance between the wall and the vacuum cleaner decreases.

When the vacuum cleaner reaches the wall, the line is at zero. Let's say that my dad decides to leave it against the wall for a couple of seconds to make sure he gets all those despicable dust bunnies. The graph shows a horizontal line at y = 0 for 2 seconds because the vacuum cleaner is stationary.

When my father pulls the vacuum cleaner back towards him and away from the wall, but at a faster pace than when he pushed it towards the wall, the graph then has a positive slope because the distance between the vacuum cleaner and the wall increases. At the same time, because the vacuum cleaner is moving away from the wall at a faster rate, this part of the graph would be steeper in comparison to the first downward-sloping line (really, the absolute value of the upward-sloping line would be greater than that of the downward-sloping line).

In a velocity-vs-time graph, the line would be horizontal at a negative value (when it moves towards the wall at a constant speed), stays at 0mph for two seconds (when it hits the wall and stays there), then becomes a horizontal line at a positive value (when it moves away from the wall at a greater speed).

And, voila, the Physics of vacuum cleaning.