Re: long and short

[Hugh Haskell <haskell@ODIE.NCSSM.EDU>]

I don't have time to work it out now and I didn't notice the item in
my issue of Sci Am, but it sounds like another of our poorly
structured problems. Just how are the persons falling? Are they just
crumpling straight down? Or are they falling like a telephone pole,
in which case they would have rotational as well as translational KE?
Or is it something in between? And as Tim has pointed out, just what
does 210% mean? I hope that the editors of Sci Am din't take his
result at face value, because if they did, they could end up with egg
on theirs.

Hugh

> In the November Scientific American on p. 28, Thomas Samaras is
> referenced as claiming
> that a person 20% taller than another, in falling over will hit the
> ground with 210% more
> kinetic energy than the shorter person.
>
> Samaras is supposed to have calculated this result in a paper
> recently published in Acta
> Pediatrica.
>
> To get that result, it would have to be quite a bit different than
> energy conservation, I
> would say.
>
> --
> Mike
>
>
> Mike Moloney, Dept of Physics & Applied Optics, Rose-Hulman
> Institute of Technology
>
> (812) 877 8302    http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~moloney


Hugh Haskell
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>

Let's face it. People use a Mac because they want to, Windows because they
have to..
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