Go Forth and Measure by Bryan

Upon conferrring me my black belt, my sensei also handed me a ruler and said, “Go Forth and Measure.”

I never thought my secret ninja skills would come in handy until about a week ago when I scrambled to get a project done for one of my classes, 2.671, Measurement and Instrumentation.

Basically, the project was designed to have us develop some type of scientific question, and then use a measurement device to validate our hypothesis.

But of course, everything in science is easier said than done.

Now for my first trick:

Experiment #1: Testing the acceleration of a mountain bike on different gear settings

Basically, I used my old roomate as a test anti-dummy and had him pedal his heart out on different gear settings while I measured his acceleration.

Results: He’s no Lance Armstrong, and thus we had too much experimental noise to come to any intelligent conclusions.

In the words of the late Aaliyah, “If at first you don’t succeed, you can dust it off and try again.”

Experiment #2: Testing the whole “point mass” approximation of the pendulum equation

Results: Eh. Too eh.

Experiment #3: A block and an inclined plane

I think we all know this problem very well. Very simple analysis and surprisingly…

NON NONSENSICAL RESULTS – CA CHING

Score.

So that’s how I spent my last three day weekend.

Thanks everyone for the encouraging messages for my presentation. I think it went very well.