Missing Mary Road

A physicist carefully examined the way R2D2 flies in Attack of the Clones, and has come to a startling discovery. Examining the thrust of R2′s flight, then adding in gravity and resistance, he discerned that R2 is lighter than styrofoam.

Rhett Alain, a physicist at Southeastern Louisiana University, first turns R2′s flight into a free body diagram, pictured here. Then he solves for F-thrust, assuming Earth gravity and some atmospheric resistance (you can see all his equations here). Then he reaches the fun part, which is figuring out R2′s mass.

Writes Allain, as he solves his equation for mass:
* rho = 1.2 kg/m3
* Area: Wookieepedia says that R2 is 0.96 meters tall. Using tracker video on an image of R2, I am going to approximate it as a rectangle that is 0.42 meters by 0.62 meters for an area of 0.26 m2
* Wikipedia lists the drag coefficient for a smooth sphere as 0.1. It has a smooth brick with a coefficient of 2.1. A skier has a coefficient of 1.0. Wikipedia does not list the drag coefficient for R2, but a value of around 1.0 seems reasonable.
* For the velocity, I took it a little far. I was just going to ballpark guess at his speed, but I didn’t. I used Tracker to look at R2′s motion in Clone Wars where he flies to rescue Padme. From this, I get a speed of 2.3 m/s.
* I already said I would assume Earth-like gravity. So, g will be 9.8 N/kg
* Theta is about 35 degrees (although it could be as high as 45 degrees).
Using these values, the mass of R2 is 0.1 kg. Yes, 100 grams. How do I know I am correct? I know because Wookieepedia doesn’t list R2′s mass or weight. They know it is silly, so they left it off.
If this mass is so low, I think R2 doesn’t even need thrusters. He would just float (which would actually change my calculations above – I left off the buoyancy force). By my estimations, R2 is about .42 meters in diameter. This would put its volume at about 0.1 m3 and R2′s density would be this:

I was originally thinking that maybe R2 was made of styrofoam – but that has a density of about 40 kg/m3. So there.

So basically R2 doesn’t need thrusters, and is made of spiderwebs. Makes perfect sense!

Kids growing up these days will probably be exposed to “Star Wars” films as they stumble upon them airing on different cable channels. This will be very, very confusing for them. Therefore, in an effort to help them figure out which of the films they’re watching, Maxim made this handy flowchart for the person who’s never seen a single “Star Wars.”

remember the old useless fact about cats urine glowing in the dark under black lights? well it’s not the only pee that does so.

the idiot’s guide to ramadan by the bbc.

everyone reading this needs to go buy the box set for firefly, then watch serenity and then go watch dollhouse. immediately. stat. why? cuz joss whedon will make you a happy person or else gremlins will come out and haunt  you while you’re dreaming of elves and unicorns. oh by the way, after all of this, why don’t you come join in on the sing-a-long blog by dr. horrible.

Last year the National Debt Clock in New York City ran out of digits. The billboard-size electronic counter, mounted on a wall near Times Square, overflowed when the public debt reached $10 trillion, or 1013 dollars. The crisis was resolved by squeezing another digit into the space occupied by the dollar sign. Now a new clock is on order, with room for growth; it won’t fill up until the debt reaches a quadrillion (1015) dollars.

The incident of the Debt Clock brings to mind a comment made by Richard Feynman in the 1980s—back when mere billions still had the power to impress:

There are 1011 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.

The important point here is not that high finance is catching up with the sciences; it’s that the numbers we encounter everywhere in daily life are growing steadily larger. Computer technology is another area of rapid numeric inflation. Data storage capacity has gone from kilobytes to megabytes to gigabytes, and the latest disk drives hold a terabyte (1012 bytes). In the world of supercomputers, the current state of the art is called petascale computing (1015 operations per second), and there is talk of a coming transition to exascale (1018). After that, we can await the arrival of zettascale (1021) and yottascale (1024) machines—and then we run out of prefixes!

i love google’s hidden sense of humour. try googling recursion. (un-nerds may not get it).

so my namesake and i have come up with the idea that kids today don’t know much about anything anymore. so we’ve decided to try and educate them about it one step at a time. read all about it at http://abbasbytwo.wordpress.com

Extreme economic problems require extreme solutions, and Wells Fargo Bank has come up with a good one. They have decided to sue themselves. Wells Fargo holds the first and second mortgages on a condominium that is going into foreclosure. As holder of the first, they are suing all other lien holders, including the holder of the second, which is Wells Fargo. It gets better. The company has hired a lawyer to defend itself against its own lawsuit. The defense lawyer even filed this answer to the complaint, “Defendant admits that it is the owner and holder of a mortgage encumbering the subject real property. All other allegations of the complaint are denied.” On the website The Consumer Warning Network, Angie Moreschi wrote: “We’ve apparently reached the perfect storm for complete and utter idiocy by some banks trying to foreclose on homes.

i knew microsoft was getting pretty bad with all the different brands that they keep coming out with but this…!?

from dell.

the pakistan cricket board has decided to remove shoaib akhtar from the 15 man squad for next month’s twenty 20 cricket championship for reasons best read yourself.

The PCB has withdrawn Shoaib Akhtar from the 15-man squad for next month’s World Twenty20, saying – in an unusually revealing statement – that he had been diagnosed with genital viral warts. Rao Iftikhar Anjum’s name has been sent to the ICC’s technical committee by the PCB as a replacement.

Shoaib’s participation had been in doubt after Intikhab Alam, Pakistan’s coach, said yesterday he hadn’t recovered sufficiently from a skin infection to play the three practice games the Pakistan squad is playing in Lahore.

“Shoaib Akhtar has been withdrawn from the World Twenty20 squad and Rao’s name has been sent to the ICC as a replacement,” a board spokesman said on Thursday.

The PCB’s unusually graphic press release said that a three-member medical panel appointed by the PCB had found that Shoaib was suffering from “genital viral warts and electrofulgration [a surgical procedure] was done on May 12, 2009.”

The panel added that “his wound though healing needs further care and treatment for another minimum ten days for the purpose of healing and to achieve skin cover. The Medical Board further recommended his re-assessment after 10 days.
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