I recently tried my hand at throwing axes at a wall, courtesy of Whistle Punks in London. While this was a fun and satisfyingly macho activity, I noticed that the attendants were careful to position people at various distances from the target to increase their chances of success. This piqued my curiosity, so here I’ll have a look at why that might be.
A break from physics to show something which might be actually useful to some people. Normal service will resume shortly.
I wrote this blog post because I saw a woman throw a banana at Russell Brand. Bear with me on this one.
What does this title mean? What’s with the recent bus obsession? Is this post even about buses, or are they just being carelessly shoehorned into every post title from here on out? Excellent questions, thanks for asking. Allow me to explain.
As the old saying goes, you wait ages for a bus and then two come along at once (or more!). Is this true though? My own anecdotal evidence would suggest yes, every single bloody time. However, we love data and maths in this blog almost as much as we hate waiting for the bus, so let’s have a more thorough look at the issue.
Continuing on from my last post concerning optimisation and Lagrange multipliers, I came across a neat little paper on the arXiv here, which asks and answers the question: what shape should a planet be to maximise the gravitational force at a given position? This is a fun problem, solved using an extension of the techniques from the last post, namely the use of Lagrange multipliers to optimise a function given some constraint.
Almost looks like work 
