Cartoon Laws of Physics | Hacker News Reader

Cartoon Laws of Physics

dgp.toronto.edu

153 pointsdavesailer52 comments

> familiar principle of 32 feet per second per second takes over.

I took high school and college physics courses (in the US) and have spent 15+ years developing physics-related software and I don't recall ever hearing gravity expressed in ft/sec^2. I can't gauge whether this "familiar" principle is itself a joke or if there are places where gravity is taught as 32 ft/sec^2 rather than 9.8 m/sec^2...

Where did you get taught? I've heard it as 32 ft/sec^2 since I was a kid...

Same here, and in fact I'm tutoring someone whose physics book is right here...

It's all labeled in ft/sec^2

Strange. Since high school, I've always heard m/s^2. United States, mid Atlantic region.

US East, North Atlantic, for comparison. As I said in grandparent, ft/s^2.

US, high school in the south, 9.81 m/s^2 for life! I have never heard any physics in feet...

Ft in high school, m in college ...

You youngin's arguing about where you were taught ignore that more important might be when you were taught. Your high school years might have been when I was already working on my second marriage and buying a house. And therefore, ft/second^2, bitches.

...I'm still in highschool, and I'm on ft/sec^2.

I find that to be...disappointing. I mean, is there a U. S. high schooler today that couldn't handle a metric measurement? When I was in high school we were trying to get there with dual measurement road signs (km/miles) and metric soft drink bottles. Then Reagen got into office, viewed the metric system as some sort of communist plot, and axed the Bureau of Metric Whatever back in the 80s. So we had an excuse.

These days I'd think it almost unconscionable to teach kids scientific measurements in anything but metric.

I dunno. We've used metric in other sciences, and I've only encountered acceleration in passing as of yet.

Maybe we'll get metric units in Physics.

For your sake, I hope you do.

I prefer miles, feet, and farenheight for every day use, but for science metric is king.

Same, I've only ever heard it in metric. And I went to school in the rural Midwest. I thought we would have been one of the last holdouts.

As far as I can tell no college uses ft/sec^2, but I've heard mixed things from people who went to different high schools (in the US).

My high school used ft/sec^2

I've heard both a lot.

It's expressed as convenient to the problem.

For example, muzzle velocity is always given in ft/s in the US. So for ballistics problems (faster than a speeding bullet...), ft/sec^2 would probably be used.

There is also always this gem of a paper on applying cartoon physics to user interfaces:

http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2009/cs4470_fall/readings...

Reminds me of the puff of smoke that used to animate the removal of objects from the OS X dock. In a blatant violation of cartoon law this animation was sadly removed from current OS versions.

Great article! Makes me wonder if there are any cases of user interfaces having animation smears [1] as motion blurs.

[1] http://animationsmears.tumblr.com

Old Macs weren't powerful enough to draw fancy zoom effects. Instead, classic Mac OS, at least through System 7, would draw a series of rectangles[1] (third and fourth pictures) from the icon you double-clicked to the location of the window to show it opening.

[1]: http://toastytech.com/guis/macos1.html

A favourite of mine is Pasquale D'Silva on using animation principles to add meaning to user interfaces: https://medium.com/@pasql/transitional-interfaces-926eb80d64...

If you've got a spare 50 minutes he discusses it at length: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMe0WnkF1Lc

The link states "Authorship Unknown," however the author is Mark O'Donnell, this was originally published in a 1980 issue of Esquire magazine.

Yet another classic example of Internet humor at work. In this case, the classic formula of describing something decidedly non-intellectual in an intellectual manner. Never gets old.

It's more general than internet humor.

In general, people in community A talking about disparate community B in the language of community A will find it funny.

For example, programmers at a baseball game talking about baseball in terms of programming, like calling one team emacs and the other vi or one Linux and the other Windows, and then following where it goes.

I think security analyst baseball commentary could go somewhere: you'll never see an MITM attack the same way again.

Indeed. I found myself reminded of reading Ignition.

Does a copy exist that's not a mangled PDF of an OCR of a scan that someone reassembled from a shredder's output bin?

Not that i know of.

I read the PDF version that is floating around the net and it wasn't mangled. What problem did you have with it?

Hm, copying and pasting text, it seems that it does work fine - it just looks weird: http://imgur.com/6IB5cwb

Ask your search engine:

    "ignition" filetype:pdf

Old-school internet humor. Writing-based (as opposed to visual), and with a lot of in-depth thought and time going into it. That you used to find on BBS and the like. Where can you find it today?

Through miscellanious old sites and The GNU Humor collection. It's hard to find new material: it's out there, but the signal:noise on the internet sucks, so you have to be really lucky.

Oh, and BOFH is still going strong. So go read that if you haven't yet. The official archives are down, but there are mirrors, of you want to read '95-'99.

Even as a kid I always wondered why the heck Acme Inc. seemed to offer lines of credit to just about anyone, including homeless coyotes living in the desert.

Their sheer range of product offerings was also astounding, as was their apparent complete lack of after sales support and user training for said products.

They also seemed to have an incredible logistics team able to get huge and complex items out to the middle of nowhere in record time. Never once did the coyote have to wait a long time for delivery, or have to converse with shipping support reps to see why his package was never delivered.

So Amazon is just Acme with good customer support and less credit?

LOL - I was looking for a corollary between Acme Inc. and Amazon but couldn't find one. You nailed it! :)

Those who enjoyed this may also enjoy Chuck Jones' 9 (or 11) Rules for Writing Road Runner cartoons:

http://mentalfloss.com/article/62035/chuck-jones-rules-writi...

Excerpt:

1. The Road Runner cannot harm the Coyote except by going "meep, meep."

2. No outside force can harm the Coyote -- only his own ineptitude or the failure of Acme products.

Reminds me of the Steve Jackson RPG Toon

http://www.sjgames.com/toon/

Dynamix's computer game Sid and Al's Incredible Toons [1] [2] is a wonderful cartoon-physics based game, the sequel to The Incredible Machine [3] [4], a Rube-Goldbergesque game like Mouse Trap [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_%26_Al%27s_Incredible_Toon...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-7LgrEUOL4

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incredible_Machine_(series...

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dl1LvFDgCio

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_Trap_(game)

WARNING: This product warps space and time in its vicinity.

WARNING: This product attracts every other piece of matter in the universe, including the products of other manufacturers, with a force proportional to the product of the masses and inversely proportional to the distance between them.

CAUTION: The mass of this product contains the energy equivalent of 85 million tons of TNT per net ounce of weight.

HANDLE WITH EXTREME CARE: This product contains minute electrically charged particles moving at velocities in excess of five hundred million miles per hour.

CONSUMER NOTICE: Because of the "uncertainty principle," it is impossible for the consumer to find out at the same time both precisely where this product is and how fast it is moving.

ADVISORY: There is an extremely small but nonzero chance that, through a process known as "tunneling," this product may spontaneously disappear from its present location and reappear at any random place in the universe, including your neighbor's domicile. The manufacturer will not be responsible for any damages or inconveniences that may result.

READ THIS BEFORE OPENING PACKAGE: According to certain suggested versions of the Grand Unified Theory, the primary particles constituting this product may decay to nothingness within the next four hundred million years.

THIS IS A 100% MATTER PRODUCT: In the unlikely event that this merchandise should contact antimatter in any form, a catastrophic explosion will result.

PUBLIC NOTICE AS REQUIRED BY LAW: Any use of this product, in any manner whatsoever, will increase the amount of disorder in the universe. Although no liability is implied herein, the consumer is warned that this process will ultimately lead to the heat death of the universe.

NOTE: The most fundamental particles in this product are held together by a "gluing" force about which little is currently known and whose adhesive power can therefore not be permanently guaranteed.

ATTENTION: Despite any other listing of product contents found hereon, the consumer is advised that, in actuality, this product consists of 99.9999999999% empty space.

NEW GRAND UNIFIED THEORY DISCLAIMER: The manufacturer may technically be entitled to claim that this product is ten-dimensional. However, the consumer is reminded that this confers no legal rights above and beyond those applicable to three-dimensional objects, since the seven new dimensions are "rolled up" into such a small "area" that they cannot be detected.

PLEASE NOTE: Some quantum physics theories suggest that when the consumer is not directly observing this product, it may cease to exist or will exist only in a vague and undetermined state.

COMPONENT EQUIVALENCY NOTICE: The subatomic particles (electrons, protons, etc.) comprising this product are exactly the same in every measurable respect as those used in the products of other manufacturers, and no claim to the contrary may legitimately be expressed or implied.

HEALTH WARNING: Care should be taken when lifting this product, since its mass, and thus its weight, is dependent on its velocity relative to the user.

IMPORTANT NOTICE TO PURCHASERS: The entire physical universe, including this product, may one day collapse back into an infinitesimally small space. Should another universe subsequently re-emerge, the existence of this product in that universe cannot be guaranteed.

I always attributed VI to be that the movement during the fight exceeded the speed of sight.

For some reason this reminded me of Discworld's Ambiguous Puzuma:

A big cat with a unique black and white check coat, the ambiguous puzuma is the Disc's fastest animal. Due to the Disc's standing magical field, which slows down light to approximately the speed of sound, the puzuma can actually achieve near-light-speed. Therefore, seeing a puzuma in motion means it isn't there. Puzumas commonly die from complications caused by Sangrit Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle; they lose concentration because they cannot simultaneously know who they are and where they are, frequently causing them to crash into an obstacle. Many males also die from ankle failure caused by excessively running after females who aren't present.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flora_and_fauna_of_the_Discwor...

"As speed increases, objects can be in several places at once."

Neatly explains why ninjas in anime are able to create shadow copies of themselves by moving really fast.

All of these are the sort of thing traded frequently in email and USENET in the 90s.

This article should have a warning sign. I almost fell out of my chair with laughter. Insta-add to my Instapaper.

Loved it — just wished there were links to YouTube clips with examples from classic cartoons.

> The threat of skunks or matrimony often catalyzes this reaction.

Gave me a good laugh.

Duh. So unfunny and uninsightful, at least for anybody who did watch the old cartoons.

I'm sorry I've attempted to read it. Now I need a dose of Loony Tunes to wash the feeling away.

i wish i could express just how much i disagree with your sentiment. i think it's a rather elegant attempt at conveying the humorous laws of reality in a classic cartoon existence. But hey, I guess not everyone can find it funny.

As I've first read Murphy's law and some other humorous "laws", there was an impression of the author making an insight and then formulating it in a minimalistic way typical for the real scientific laws, which is what makes the laws interesting and funny on two levels at once: there's an "a-ha" moment and the "similarity" to the "real" laws.

As I've seen enough cartoons, for me this list appears just to be a clumsy description of some gags. It fails on the appearance of insight and it fails on the appearance of the real-law minimalism. That's why it's not funny. YMMV, I see there are people who like it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com