Monday, February 14, 2011

My wife is injured by Mythbusters

Eryn got a Mythbusters' explorer kit for some holiday in the past, the Forces of Flight kit.  On the left you can see Jaime and Adam preparing to defy danger with a rocket pack and a beret.  The kit comes with a number of experiments, including a pull-string, plastic toy helicopter.  To launch the helicopter, you mount it on its stick, yank the pull string, and it takes off across the room (or yard), demonstrating how rotors work.  That's what should happen.  But usually what happens is all the blades go flinging off in different directions, and you have to listen very carefully to hear where they land so you can retrieve them from under the refrigerator, behind the cupboards, under the recycling, etc.  Unless they hit your wife in the head.  Then they're really easy to find, because they're right there, on the floor, under the red welt.  The truism that all good science experiments can benefit from safety glasses holds with experiments around torque and Bernoulli's Principle.

I'm not sure how obvious it is in this picture, but it was incredibly obvious in person.

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