Content is King

I have a passion for sailing. I sail on our high school sailing team and plan on sailing in college.

While not directly a blog, I am personally familiar with my father's method of promoting himself online as a sailing coach. As the Union Tribune excerpt suggests, he has his own url: sailwell.us.

I don't really see myself blogging but if I had to it would probably be a general blog about whatever I feel like talking about.

Love the Metric System

(l) distance - m
(t) time - s
(m) mass - kg
(a) area - m^2
(v) velocity - m/s
(rho) density - kg/m^3
(g) gravity - m/s^2
(F) force - kgm/s^2
(E) energy - kgm^2/s^2
(P) power - kgm^2/s^3

Tennis Ball

The challenge was to have the tennis ball be passed to everyone in our team as fast as possible.

Criteria changed, but included that it had to be in the air and had to touch each team member. The biggest constraint was we had to come up with a plan in about two minutes. We had a lot of different plans.

One was to make a star shape with our hands and have the ball just touch the tip of our fingers at once. We tried to make a ramp, but it was hard to coordinate. The last plan we went with was our hands in a vertical stack that the ball would go through them as fast as possible while still meeting the criteria that it had to be in the air in between changing members. Some of our plans worked out, but we couldn't quite get the ramp to work as well as the other group could.

I think our star shape idea was the most innovative and worked well. I liked how well we were working together and trying out any idea that anyone came up with.

One thing I would change is try to innovate the vertical stack idea more, by trying to create a tube with our hands that the ball still touches, but isn't slowed down much by. Our team won sometimes and lost sometimes. To make the game better, I would want to make almost an obstacle course that each person had to go through making the game longer and chances for problem solving at every obstacle.

SHIPWRECKED

We did a sorting activity with different items that would be prioritized if we were ever shipwrecked. The task was to assign an order, from one to fifteen, of a given list of items that would be most helpful while lost at sea.

My top three items were the radio, the rope, and the seat cushion. My groups top three items were the water, the army rations, and the radio. My group convinced me that the water was important for survival, which made sense to me. The army rations similarly made sense as a source of food. The reason I liked the radio is because you could hear ships coming and go to them. My last three items were the rum, shark repellant, and maps last.

Our teams last three items were the same but chocolate substituted rum. This makes sense because my group decided rum can be used as a fuel. I had a hard time choosing an order for the mosquito netting and the plastic sheeting because I thought they could serve a similar purpose. My group ranked the radio in the top three like me, but like I mentioned, they managed to convince me that water is necessary for survival.

Our choices were very different from the Coast Guard choices. One huge difference is they thought the radio wouldn't be helpful because it wouldn't be able to pick up signal from far off ships. I would put the expert advice first because they had very good reasons for their choices and research and years of expertise to back it up. They are, indeed, the professionals.