Aerodynamics of Bicycles - The highly technical side of biking, aimed at the designer as well as the truly serious rider. There are in-depth explanations of frictional drag and pressure drag, with links to discussions of fluid viscosity for clarification. The differences between streamlined bodies and bluff bodies are pointed out, illustrated by graphs of flow patterns. Most of the text links work, but disappointingly, the promising links section has not been updated in some time. Perhaps little of this information will go through your (hopefully) helmeted head as you breeze through your favorite bike paths and trails. But someone does ponder these points, and they had to digest the Reynolds numbers too, and know the finer points of laminar flow as opposed to turbulent flow. (7 July 2001) AD
http://www.princeton.edu/~asmits/Bicycle_web/...
Animal Olympics - A wonderfully conceived and executed site that imagines what an animal olympics might be like, and invites you to be the judge of the winner in each category Night Warriors, Competitive Instincts, Field and Stream, Pick Your Poison, Winged Victory, and Sea-cathlon. The event and venue are announced ( 'most effective venom' and 'rainforest' in Pick Your Poison) and the three contenders introduced, with a photograph and information on them. After reading about their respective talents in the event (or maybe just on the basis of which one you most like the look of), you choose the winner and proceed to the judge's stand to cast your vote (and see how it matches up with the voting so far). The writing is humorous and colloquial 'As the ants can testify, the forest floor is no picnic either: One minute you're working, the next you're plastered to the long, sticky tongue of the pesky anteater' and the creatures have streetwise nicknames like 'The Disembowler', 'Baby Face Killah' and 'Greased Lightning clearly aiming for yoof-appeal, but the site is guaranteed to be fun and informative for anyone with an interest in animals (especially the weird and wonderful varieties). (17 March 2001) DD
http://animal.discovery.com/animalolympics/an...
Baseball: The Game and Beyond - An interesting series of exercises in physics theory that's presumably geared to baseball enthusiasts, The Batting Cage brings visitors out of the bleachers and into the pitching field of applied science. The three main sections are the path and range of a baseball, bats, and swinging. Each features treatments geared to people with different levels of physics background, ranging from 'little league' (i.e., next to none) to 'major league.' In the first section, for example, 'How Far Will a Ball Travel' throws out equations that will be daunting to the unversed, while 'Range of a Baseball Applet' lets just about anyone play around with different values of velocity and angle and then watch the results in a simple simulator. The site strikes out in some areas, unfortunately. A scroll-down list at the top of the page lists such promising destinations as Stadium, Dugout, Announcers Booth, and Bullpen yet leads only to 'the requested URL was not found.' There's also no treatment anywhere of the renowned curve ball. Perhaps even contemporary physics hasn't cracked that mystery. (17 March 2001) MN
http://library.thinkquest.org/11902/physics/b...
International Sports Engineering Association - This is an organisation which apparently aims to "encourage the public and academia understanding of science through the applications of engineering and science disciplines to sport". The site is quite specialist and the navigation is poor, so much of it probably won't appeal to those outside the discipline. What makes it worth a visit, however, is the searchable archive of the sports engineering discussion list (click "discussion" from the home page). From this page, you can either join the list (if you have a serious enough interest in sports engineering), search for information on a specific topic, such as tennis rackets, or just browse through the latest discussions. The organisation adopted the term "sports engineering", by the way, to "emphasise the quantitative engineering aspects of the knowledge and skills employed in the design, manufacture and use of high-performance equipment", in contrast with the more
established terms ³sports science² and ³sports medicine² which tend to concentrate on biomedical
aspects of athletic performance. (21 September 2000) KN
http://www.sports-engineering.co.uk/
Tennis Sport Science - In honour of the Olympic Games, another site related to the science of sport. This time, it's tennis. In their own words, the
Aerodynamics in Sports Technology is "an interactive study of sports designed to help students understand aerodynamics, physics, and mathematics, as part of NASA's educational outreach mission via the World Wide Web.
The project team is recording data from professional tennis and some of the top players in the world, focusing on how the tennis ball flies: its speed, how it spins, what happens when the ball hits the court, how it moves through the air, and the strokes of the players that generate this flight. ". And so on. You can find out more about the project and follow its progress at this UC Davis site. (18 September 2000) KN
http://muttley.ucdavis.edu/Tennis/
