Recent content by GlenLaRocca

You can pick your weights more carefully. Did you try it yourself? Maybe 10 minutes isn't enough for the current population of students to master the hand-eye coordination required. I'd record their results and give them another 10 minutes and make it an experiment about how fast they...

At the simple end of mechanical "experiments", are: 1) A demonstration of precession by holding the front wheel of a bicycle in your hands at arms length and get a friend to really get the wheel spinning, then your try to keep your hands level while you turn to the left or right. 2)...

Coriolis, acting on the plane, is so small compared to the force of the winds and Coriolis is also driving the winds.

I apologize that I did not have the whole solution when I first posted. I made some misstatements because I left off part of the solution.

I am sorry that I did leave off one part of the solution. You should drop off the second person on the bicycle at a y2 prior to arrival at the center and have them walk such that they arrive at the same time as when the bike gets back.

Average speed will always be D/T. Here D is fixed and T is total time to cover the course by both bike and walk. If you want, work it out the way I said, then work it out for going half way at a time. You will get the same answer. If that is the same it implies all strategies are the...

That will result in the same average speed. Just a lot more complicated math.

The bicycle will get there in time tb = y/v2. Then the bicycle has to go back and get the walker at a point we will call y1. It will take until time t1 = tb + (y-y1)/v2 for the bicycle to get to the walker. We also know y1 = t1*v1 is how far the walker went until the bicycle made it back...

Yes I wouldn't say that though. Think of putting one end of a thin glass tube into the flow and measuring the pressure at the other end of the tube. If you oriented the tube along the direction of flow, you would measure the total pressure. You would feel all the pressure of the fluid...

Even though the fluid is moving, you a measuring the pressure in such a way that the fluid is not moving towards your measurement device. Thus your measurement does not see (is not impacted by) the momentum of the moving fluid. Think of it a measuring the pressure at right angles to the...

Understood. In the ladder problem the stated objective was to estimate the slope. The calculations that I described give nonbiased optimal estimate of the slope using the knowledge one end was constrained and the ladder was absolutely linear. I would assert that if you have an optimal...

I considered the leaning ladder problem because it was a simple way for me to gain insight into a LSF problem where you know one point. I have now gained that insight. I was able to get a much more accurate estimate of the slope than a straight LSF could. That was because I knew (with...

This is not doing a straight least squares fit. It is another estimation method altogether that is optimal in a least squares sense. The leaning ladder can be cast as a trivial Kalman filtering problem. The Kalman filter is unbiased optimal estimator (in the least squares sense) for a...

I had friends in the band, and I got to sit right behind the goal against the glass for every game. I loved and appreciated it but didn't realize for a long time how lucky I was. I saw a lot of awesome hockey, which is my favorite spectator sport.

Given one or more measurements of the leaning ladder, there is an unbiased optimal in the least squares sense estimate of the slope that can be calculated based on knowledge of the origin. What is being minimized in the least squares sense is not the original measurements but (in Kalman filter...