Happy Thanksgiving! This blog covers the week of and the week after Thanksgiving.

These Weeks in Physics
We will do  assignment 2, which covers friction, and our Friction Lab. There will be a formal lab report for the friction lab, and the due date will be one week after your class period completes the experiment. We will also take a quiz over friction (goal set 2) as announced. When announced please take notes on PODCAST 3: Elastic Force. We will do assignment 3 and take a quiz over elastic force (goal set 3) as announced and will likely also begin to cover PODCAST 4: Newton’s Laws of Motion – First Law (Inertia), so please take notes on that if announced. Looking ahead remember that semester exams are BEFORE winter break this year on December 18-20, so you might want to begin reviewing topics from earlier in the year to make your lives easier next month.

Cool Science of these Weeks
Meet the Balloonatics! This is the team of people who engineer the balloons for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, and believe it or not, they use PHYSICS…some of the same physics we’ve been learning, in fact! Here’s a short video from Science Friday that shows you how it’s done! Below the video I’ve included the science of cranberries, which I think is really cool.

The science of CRANBERRIES! I don’t know about you, but I LOVE to make homemade cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving. Did you know that cranberries are grown in BOGS? They’re grown on vines like strawberries, but they thrive if those vines are planted in wetlands. That’s cool. Also, 60% of our cranberries come from Wisconsin, while 25% come from Massachusetts, and if you have the chance to head out to those states, you can go to a cranberry farm (like we go to blueberry, raspberry, and strawberry farms here.) Here’s a little more information and a couple of awesome pictures.