Physics

Today we went over circular motion and I realized a couple of things:

- "Need for speed" is a misleading phrase. Speeding up is exhilarating, yes, but for the same reason I always wanted to ride on the outside of the merry-go-round as a kid: it's the g's, man, the g's. Speeding along at constant velocity has no thrill; it's a "need for acceleration."

- When you talk about centrifugal force, all you're doing is using a non-inertial reference frame. This means you can't apply Newton's laws to it and it's therefore kind of useless as a physics concept, but speaking relative to the edge of the circle, it does make a certain kind of sense to talk about centrifugal force.

(Note: xkcd tackles this issue here: http://www.xkcd.com/123/ . But I'm pretty sure you CAN'T use Newton's laws in a rotating system because of the inertial reference frame thing. Then again maybe that's the geeky joke secondary to the Bond punchline... Note 2: What the dude will actually be crushed by is the normal force.)