I am playing a show this Saturday night in Cedar Falls, Iowa at the . Much thanks to local Cedar Falls band for inviting me to share the stage with them.
The show starts at 8:30 (I told a few people 8:00) and is free of charge. From what I can tell, Clockwork's shows are ; they have attracted a good-sized following. I know a few people are making the trip to see the show, but if you're one of the two people in Cedar Falls that reads this blog, y'all should consider coming.
I made a flyer that you can download and print if you feel so inclined. Just click below the picture on "flyer.doc". It's a pretty big file, so excercise some patience.
I'll be playing an acoustic set with Zach Booz, hand drummer extraordinaire, and Clockwork will follow. For those at Luther, I am playing for the BSU Talent Show on Friday night, and so is . It's like a mini northeastern Iowa tour, huh.
I must say one more thing about the plane and the conveyor belt.
Whether you think the plane will take off or not doesn't matter. I was talking with Shawn during lunch today about this little riddle, and we had the idea of submitting it to the television show .
Well, as it turns out, many people have already (, ), and it will be tested next season.
I can't wait to see the look on people's faces when the plane takes off. Although, I have no reason to believe I'll be watching the show with one person, let alone many.
I'll pretend . I'm not usually one for things like this, but what the heck. It's a .
Four jobs I've had:
1. Burger King
2. Iowa State Fair
3. Camp counselor
4. Youth ministry intern
Four movies I can watch over and over:
1. School of Rock
2. Rounders
3. National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation
4. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Four places I've lived:
1. Van Meter, IA
2. West Des Moines, IA
3. Decorah, IA
4. Dayton, IA
Four TV shows I love:
1. 24
2. Curb Your Enthusiasm
3. SportsCenter
4. Family Guy
Four highly regarded and recommended TV shows I haven't seen:
1. Lost
2. The Sopranos
3. Grey's Anatomy
4. Desperate Housewives
Four places I've vacationed:
1. Orlando, Florida
2. Ft. Collins, Colorado
3. Cedar Point, Ohio
4. Greece & Turkey
Four of my favorite dishes:
1. Pepperoni pizza
2. Buffalo wings/buffalo chicken sandwich
3. Almost any mexican dish
4. Ranch dressing
Four sites I visit daily:
1. relevantmagazine.com
2. flickr.com
3. digg.com
4. kottke.org
Four places I would rather be right now:
1. In bed
2. Hanging out with the youth at Valley Church
3. On stage
4. Greece
Four bloggers I am tagging:
1.
2.
3.
4.
This will hopefully be the last post on this, although it has certainly been fun.
Take a second to read this to kottke's , which is where i received the initial inspiration to pose the question here. He cites from a guy with a Ph.d in Physics from MIT.
The guy takes the time to reply to all of the comments that were left, and on one of his , he says:
As an exercise, take a billiards ball and roll it very slowly across a piece of paper. Then try to get the billiards ball to stay in place by pulling the paper out from under it in the opposite direction. The friction is insufficient to overcome the inertia of the heavy ball.
Like I said, I did a bunch of reading about this riddle after I thought about it for a while. My brain ended up hurting pretty badly, but a few key quotes helped me significantly. One of the best (and, ironically, simplest) explainations was by a commentor named on . He says:
The point of the riddle is that the motion of the wheels exerts only a minor frictional force opposing the forward movement of the plane. The major force being supplied is from the plane engine, and that force is a forward force. The net force is equal to the forward force minus the negligible frictional force. This obviously produces a net forward force. Therefore, the plane moves forward, regardless of how much the wheels are spinning. The plane is not remaining stationary on the conveyor belt becasue there is a force acting on the plane that is not dependent on the motion of the conveyor belt.
Another good explaination of why the plane will take off can be found . An excerpt:
The difference between a car and a grounded airplane is that a car uses its wheels to propel itself forward, and an airplane moves itself forward by moving air. They assume that the runway moving backwards would move the plane backwards. This is what would happen with a car (that is in gear), so why not for an airplane? Well, because an airplane’s wheels are free rolling. There is obviously some friction, so there would be some small backwards force, but it would be infinitely small as compared to the forward thrust of the airplane.
Yet explains why the plane will take off, although it would initially seem otherwise:
A thought experiment commonly cited in discussions of this question is to imagine you're standing on a health-club treadmill in rollerblades while holding a rope attached to the wall in front of you. The treadmill starts; simultaneously you begin to haul in the rope. Although you'll have to overcome some initial friction tugging you backward, in short order you'll be able to pull yourself forward easily.
I saw this on and I've been thinking/reading about it since. Here's the question:
A plane is standing on a runway that can move (some sort of band conveyer). The plane moves in one direction, while the conveyer moves in the opposite direction. This conveyer has a control system that tracks the plane speed and tunes the speed of the conveyer to be exactly the same (but in the opposite direction). Can the plane take off?
I talked about it with a couple of people at dinner and I've been reading other people's thoughts on it, and I've concluded that the plane will take off (my initial reaction was of course it won't take off, you idiot). I'll follow up tomorrow with how I reached this conclusion.
JakeBouma.com is a weblog maintained since 2005 by Jake Bouma, an ecclesial junkie and (imprudently) aspiring polymath who was recently diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma.
