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Wednesday, 01 June 2011 13:19

The Physics of a Triple Back Flip on a Bike

Here is the video. Check it out. (Jed Mildon)

There are two important things in this jump (other than not crashing): time and rotation rate.

Time in the air

You need to be in the air long enough for the bike person to make three complete rotations. How do you do that? Go fast, and go high. The higher you go, the longer you are in the air. Suppose you launch straight up with an initial velocity v0, how long would it take for you to get back to the same height? Here is your basic kinematic equation.

If the bike lands at the same starting height, then:

Notice that this is just the vertical velocity....

Eric Schmidt and Larry PAgeGoogle chairman Eric Schmidt took responsibility for the search titan’s failure to counter Facebook’s explosive growth, saying he saw the threat coming but failed to counter it.

Speaking at the D9 tech conference outside of Los Angeles Tuesday evening, Schmidt said that for five years, he’s been aware of the competitive threat posed by upstart social networking websites like Facebook and LinkedIn. Schmidt even wrote internal memos about the threat, he said, but was so focused on running Google’s day-to-day operations that he didn’t give the issue the necessary attention.

In an interview with...

Wednesday, 01 June 2011 13:00

Mystery of the Canadian Whisky Fungus

A scanning electron microscope image (500X) of the mold found outside the Hiram Walker Distillery.
Photo: Caren Alpert

The air outside a distillery warehouse smells like witch hazel and spices, with notes of candied fruit and vanilla—warm and tangy- mellow. It’s the aroma of fresh cookies cooling in the kitchen while a fancy cocktail party gets out of hand in the living room.

James Scott encountered that scent for the first time a decade ago in a town called Lakeshore, Ontario. Just across the river from Detroit, Lakeshore is where barrels of Canadian Club whiskey age in blocky, windowless...

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