Physics in the Shower

“Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.” — R. P. Feynman

Raise the Curtain

While I was showering, I experienced an interesting physics phenomenon where the hot water caused the nearby air to heat up and created a density gradient where the cold air from the outside of the curtain began to flow inside.

I tried to push the curtain down, but it didn’t work until I decided to turn the showerhead at the curtain and the curtain became heavier and dropped.

This would be a pretty good physics problem involving torques, tensions, and maybe some calculus worked in if you add details about the temperature gradient. Or, treat the curtain as a thin rod in 2-D and have some force field acting on the curtain at each point on the rod.

Physics in the Mosh Pit

At Ricketts Interhouse (Dinohouse), a group of friends and I decided to go in the mosh pit together for a few minutes and I learned that it’s similar to how fluids behave.

In the mosh pit, if you are not constantly trying to get into the middle, you will be forced out eventually.

I wanted to draw an analogy between the behavior of air in water because air is mostly non-interacting with water, I think. But I looked up what happens when and astronaut blows air into water in space, it actually doesn’t escape like the mosh pit model shows.

Readjusting

So, it could mean a few things about my model:

1. I was not in a sufficiently large mosh pit (I think it was only about 20 people in diameter)

2. The attraction to the center in the sample mosh pit does not accurately represent hydrogen bonding on a large scale.

3. The ISS example is not an open system because there are surrounding air molecules which affects the water.

4. Tracking the path of a single molecule is insufficient for predicting the overall behavior.

I think all of these depend on each other because if you were in a really large mosh pit, then it would probably look a lot more like the actual behavior of air and water.

Also, if you look at the mosh pit as if it were just a single kind of fluid instead of a combination of water and air, then it probably makes sense that people would just diffuse to areas of low density.

So, I think there’s no parallel between the two situations I mentioned originally, but it was still fun to think about.

Wipe Out

The relationship between SURF students and SURF mentors is a lot like an open relationship. There is no commitment until the proposal and you’ll probably never talk again after trying it out.

Lower your expectations ¹

In my SURF-finding experience, I first reached out to some AI folks, but they were too good for me.

A lot

Next, I looked for AI-adjacent fields like astronomy and found a relatively interesting project, but it was given away.

Never settle for less

Immediately after, I found a very basic project that could be done in a few days probably where the prof didn’t really know AI at all.

Give up

Finally, I found someone long-distance where there was a lot of mutual interest, but they turned out to be unavailable for logistic reasons.

Footnotes

1. Bo Burnham - Lower Your Expectations ↩