You close your eyes and jump. You feel yourself in free fall, hurtling toward Earth, open your eyes and see the ground slowly getting closer. You seem to be picking up speed as you fall and soon you hit terminal velocity. It is the velocity at which you stop accelerating. It describes a physical reality based upon Newton's First Law of Motion.
When an object falls freely through a medium, such as water or air, the force of gravity pulls it toward Earth. As the object falls, its velocity increases as it accelerates toward Earth.
Gravity is not the only force working on the object. Air molecules collide with the falling object, pushing it upward against gravity. Scientists call this force air resistance. As the velocity of the falling object increases, so does air resistance.
Eventually, air resistance will equal the weight of the object in free fall. When this occurs, the object reaches terminal velocity. This means the falling object has reached its maximum velocity. The object will continue to fall at the same speed (terminal velocity) for the remainder of its free fall, until it hits Earth or a parachute opens.
Terminal velocity can be affected by a few different factors. For example, a heavier object will generally have a higher terminal velocity and a smaller surface area will have a higher terminal velocity than a larger surface area.
Most skydivers reach a terminal velocity of about 125 miles per hour. Experienced skydivers who streamline their bodies during free fall have reached speeds of over 200 miles per hour.
During October, 2012, Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner jumped from a helium balloon in the stratosphere, twenty four miles above Earth. Because the atmosphere at that height is so thin, there is next to no air resistance at the beginning of the free fall. This allows the skydiver to reach a much higher terminal velocity before encountering Earth's normal atmosphere far below.
On Baumgartner's skydive, he reached an estimated top speed of approximately 843.6 miles per hour.
If you worry about What Was or What Will Be, you miss What Is.
Get up and decide What Is is time to celebrate a Happy
Friday!
A total solar eclipse is happening on August 21, 2017, and
for the first time in nearly a hundred years, it will be visible
from much of the continental US. In the US, the eclipse will
appear to move across the country from West to East, with the
best view starting around 9:05 a.m. PDT in Lincoln Beach,
Oregon, according to NASA, and moving southeast throughout the
day to end around Charleston, South Carolina at 2:48 pm EDT.
It is true that you
should not look directly at it with your naked eyes, because the
sun delivers more power than our eyes are designed to handle,
and it will damage your retinas. Not likely to make you blind,
but could cause serious ongoing problems.
In Dallas, the Partial
Eclipse begins Aug 21 at 11:40 am. The moon touches the Sun's
edge Maximum Eclipse at 1:09 pm. The moon is closest to the
center of the Sun. The Partial Eclipse ends at 2:39 pm.
When the moon passes
between Earth and the sun, and scores a bull’s eye by completely
blotting out the sunlight, that is a total solar eclipse. The
moon casts a shadow on our planet. The total eclipse will last
up to 2 minutes and 40 seconds in places. A partial eclipse will
be visible along the periphery.
Below are site links to
see the eclipse online. In addition to the links below, you can
check YouTube, which also promises live viewing.
August 21 is National Spumoni Day in the United
States. Go out and eat some great Spumoni ice cream while
watching the eclipse. It will make you happy.
Ostriches are the largest flightless bird
living today, and also happen to lay the largest eggs of any
living bird in existence today. In fact, the Guinness World
Record for the largest egg laid by a bird was achieved during
2008 on a farm in Sweden – the egg weighed 5 pounds and 11.36
ounces. A typical ostrich egg is equivalent to about two dozen
chicken eggs.
The shells of ostrich eggs are so thick that most people
recommend getting into them by boring in with an electric drill.
They usually take about two hours to cook, due to the thickness
of the shell.
Ostriches sleep standing up. Ostriches are the fastest
two-legged creature in the world. An ostrich when pushed or in
danger can achieve speeds of up to 43 miles per hour, and can
steadily keep up a pace of about 30 miles per hour for 10 miles
at a time without needing to slow down or rest.
Ostriches are found
naturally in Africa, but many are also found in southern
Australia and some are farmed in the US.
Ostriches do not stick their head in sand
when startled or threatened. They dig shallow holes in the
dirt to use as nests for their eggs. Several times a day, a
bird puts her head down and turns the eggs. It just looks like
she is burying her head in the sand.
There is an
interesting web site called thisTothat LINK It has
two boxes and you choose a material to put in each, such wood,
glass, leather, or whatever and it offers suggestions of the
best glue for the project. Very handy.
Peruse has a controversial double
meaning due to common misuse. Even dictionaries do not all agree
on the meaning of the word.
The primary meaning for the word peruse is
to read or look at carefully or thoroughly. Its original
meaning is synonymous with words like examine or inspect. The
new definition addressing the misuse cropped up rather recently,
sometime late in the last century.
The new meaning for the word is to skim, to look through in a
casual or selective manner. These definitions have one
suggesting a thorough examination and the other a few simple
glances.
A word with two
potential, opposite meanings is called a contronym, an
autoantonym, or a Janus word. Others include: “To bolt” can mean “to run
away,” but it can also mean “to hold in place.” “Sanction” can
mean “to approve” or “to boycott.”
Elsie is the name of the cow used as the
symbol on Elmer's products. She is the spouse of Elmer, the bull
(male cow) who the company is named after.
Keyboard function keys really do have
functions and some are quite handy. Function keys are usually on
the top row and have an F followed by a number, such as F1, F2,
etc.
The most universal is F1, press it and you get help for almost
every program you happen to be using.
F3 is handy for doing searches. For instance, if you are in a
document or on a long web page, just press F3 and a search bar
appears on the bottom of your screen. (You can also open a
search box by holding down the CTRL key and hitting the letter
f.)
F6 is handy if you are using a browser. It jumps the cursor to
the address bar so you can type a new address in it.
Obviously there are more, but some are used by specific
programs, such as F7 while in Microsoft Word checks for
spelling. Try them, you may be surprised at how much time you
can save.
Warner Brothers’ Tweety
Bird, was told to put some clothes on. In his first cartoon,
Tweety was pink, but censors said he looked naked, so animator
Bob Clampett said he was repainted yellow, so he appeared to
have feathers.
Life
happens, whether you take advantage of it or not.
Take advantage of celebrating a Happy Friday!
According to a study conducted by the Detroit
Medical Center, bacon can quickly and effectively treat a
nosebleed by serving as a nasal tampon. For this bizarre method
to work, one must plug the bleeding nostril with a piece of
cured uncooked pork.
The team tested their
bacon hypothesis on a girl who had Glanzmann thrombasthenia, a
rare hereditary disease that causes prolonged bleeding. After
sticking a piece of cured pork inside the girl’s bloody nose,
the bleeding stopped immediately.
The results of this
scientific research were published in the Annals of Otology,
Rhinology, and Laryngology. The researchers acknowledged that
doctors had used cured pork to treat nosebleeds in the past.
However, the practice was discontinued.
The researchers
speculated that the high risk of acquiring parasitic and
bacterial complications from stuffing one’s nose with cured pork
caused the unconventional treatment to be abandoned.
John Milton, author of Paradise Lost came up
with many new words. One of them is the word terrific, but it
had a different meaning for Milton. He used the word terrific to
mean something that was terrifying, as in terrif fic.
In the United States, which contains eight percent of the
world's forests, there are more trees than there were a hundred
years ago. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization,
"Forest growth nationally has exceeded harvest since the 1940s.
By 1997, forest growth exceeded harvest by 42 percent and the
volume of forest growth was 380 percent greater than it had been
in 1920."
The U.S. had 319
million people in 2014 and 228 billion trees. The greatest gains
have been seen on the East Coast, with average volumes of wood
per acre almost doubling since the 1950s. Over 75 percent of the
productive commercial forest land in the United States is
privately owned.
In a study released
during 2015 in Nature, a team of 38 scientists found that the
planet is home to 3.04 trillion trees, far surpassing the
previously estimate of 400 billion. The researchers estimated
there are 422 trees for every person on Earth.
Incidentally, the US
federal government owns 28% of all US land.
