Word: bernoulli
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...pitch so often is that he is blessed with an unusually strong arm. Marshall, though, has a scholar's explanation. It is all related to kinesiology, says the budding professor, "the study of the principles of mechanics and anatomy in relation to human movement." Dropping names like Daniel Bernoulli (the Swiss mathematician and physicist who developed a key principle of hydrodynamics) and Hans Selye (a leading expert on stress), Marshall goes on to explain: "The secret of pitching every day is proper training. The key to that is specificity, which means understanding structural and mechanical analysis, physiology and baseball...
...toddlers on the beach with a short history of fortification for older brothers and parents. This time, with pen, ink and wash pictures and accompanying text, he has produced a handsome small primer on sailing that is also a model of brevity, clarity and simplicity. Starting with the Bernoulli effect (which explains how sailboats move to windward), the book ends with anchoring, having passed through everything from knots to points of sail, from rigging to docking, from man-overboard drills to the rough-weather practice of heaving to. On small craftsmanship and sheer draftsmanship Adkins is hard to beat...
Kline, 42, credits his very ignorance for the discovery. ''Anybody who knew anything about aerodynamics would have said, 'Forget it, it won't work,' " he grins. "Me, I never even heard of Bernoulli's principle." That dictum, upon which all conventional airfoils are based, says that the faster a gas or fluid flows, the less pressure it exerts. As an aircraft wing is thrust forward, the flow of air over the curved upper surface is faster than the flow past the flat underside. Thus there is more push from beneath the wing than...
Paper-plane builder Kline is sure that he has somehow violated Bernoulli's principle. "Sorry, Bernoulli," he says, "but our airfoil just doesn't work that way." But Aerodynamicist Nicolaides gently points out that there is still a pressure differential between the top and bottom of the wing caused by differences in air flow, although he is not yet sure how this is achieved...
Whistles and Whips. Most of Xenakis' ear-jarring music is an extension in sound of the calculus of probability, one of whose basic concepts is Bernoulli's law of large numbers. It says, in effect, that the occurrence of any chance event-the roll of a seven in dice, for example, or the random collision of stray molecules in the atmosphere-is more likely to conform to the prescribed statistical odds with each successive attempt. To Xenakis, this mathematical absolute has profound philosophical meaning: it implies that the changing structure of certain events in life, including the sounds...