The Wonderland Board

The topic is "Gravitational and Magnetic Effects Of Mountains On People". Yeah, I should've chosen something less obscure. I love my non-standard thinking, but sometimes it just comes back to bite me in the... well, you know.

I can find some information, yes, but I can't find any sort of statistics. I need statistics, or else it won't be scientific enough to pass. I'm writing it for grade 11 in my school (there's 12 grades and every 11-grader needs to write a science paper!)

This needs to be done (or almost done) by Friday. I'm sick and at home. On one hand, it's almost a good thing, I have more time to do stuff... but on the other hand, my brain doesn't want to think AT ALL. My blood pressure and heart rate are evil bastards. Today I decided to measure it standing and sitting and the results were... wildly different, to say the least. (Standing was: pressure 144 by 81, heart rate 102 (the hell?!?) and sitting and waiting five minutes was: pressure 117 by 73, heart rate 73. Which is much better but it likes to jump back and forth, making me feel terrible.)

To make matters worse, I'm not doing it alone... I've got my friend involved. If I was doing it alone, I'd take the bad mark and swallow it... I can cover it up with other marks. After all, despite skipping school due to sickness quite often, I'm still one of the top students in the class. Except for Latvian language, but whatever. I'd have to write tons of assignments in time, but whatever... been there, done that. So I wouldn't bother, I'd just use the time I have to fix myself up and go to school as soon as possible.

BUT: my friend is an average student at best. HE won't be able to cover this bad mark up. Normally, I would ask him for help, since he is the healthy one right now... but he is lazy and even when he does try do something, the result is... illogical, to say the least. He is genuinely trying to help me, too, he values our friendship above his laziness... but the results are almost unusable due to stupidity. (I'm sorry, Arthur, but it's true.) His train of thought and speech manners make him sound like he's perpetually on drugs, even though he isn't.

So I'm pretty much alone, facing the need to save my friend's marks, my own marks, my brain's unwillingness to think about anything due to feeling terrible and an incredibly obscure topic that I, regretfully, have chosen way back when and there's no way I can do anything about it now.

To make a long story short: I. Need. Statistics. As many as you can find, as close to the topic as possible. Please. If anyone can help with anything here, I'm all ears. And yes, if someone comes up with something genuinely awesome, you'll be listed as a co-author.

I don't think your teacher would be happy with you getting help from people off of the internet, so I don't think it's the best idea to give people here credit.

Anyways, could you be more specific about what exactly you're writing about? Are you examining how a person's height on a mountain affects their weight, or are you trying to find out the magnitude of the force of gravity from the mountain itself?

Slightly off-topic: I also have a rather large physics lab report due this Friday, and I haven't started it yet. It's a curse!

Due to the large size... I mean whatever I can find. My original idea was about the sideways pull -- like any other massive object, mountains have their own gravitational pull -- BUT on top of the mountain the gravity is the same as on sea level. That's either due to isostasy (more likely) or due to one weird idea that I had recently. (less likely)

Anyway, that means that when you're near the mountain, there's an additional sideways gravitational pull, but as you climb it, it gradually disappears. Humans are all too sensitive to even slight changes of their environment. Temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure and all that jazz... why not gravity? Combined with all the other stuff that mountains can put you through, even a weak additional factor that potentially could distort our psychology and thinking is worthy of being considered.

But at this point I'm throwing in all ideas that can fit the topic in any way just to fit the size. And some that don't fit as "this is not what the work is about, I'm listing it here so that we don't make mistakes while narrowing stuff down" kind of stuff. I have really said everything I had prepared beforehand and it's not enough, I have to improvise stuff on the go now....

One of the problems is that I live in a pretty darn mountainless country and I don't have any so I don't have any way to do anything practical. So I'm forced to rely on outside information entirely, which is very bad from a scientific viewpoint.

Are you examining how a person's height on a mountain affects their weight

This is actually epic. However, I don't think I'll be able to find anything about this with enough speed to make it in time, so I'll have to quickly use generic information to make do with what I have...

Anyway, I just inserted a few new thoughts and some meaningless phrases and used some visual trickery to get myself from 5 Word pages to 7. That means I need 5 more. Something can be filled with images, but I do need more text and I need some logic in my results. Hopefully I can make it.

You have to write 12 pages?! I'll help as much as I can, but I'm not scientifically smart...

I don't know of anything that has data on the gravitational force due to mountains. This Wikipedia page might help you, though.

As for mountains pulling a person sideways with a miniscule force, I'd imagine that the person would get pulled towards the mountain's center of gravity, with the mountain's gravity increasing as the person gets closer to that point.

Here's something, you may have found this already, but if by chance you haven't, here it is.

It's about some people who decide to figure out where planets are by using, pendulums, mountains and math.

Awwww, yeah.

EDIT: They were finding out the mass of the planets I think maybe, I'm just skimming it so im not really sure, but it seems interesting.

You have to write 12 pages?!

I actually have to write 20. Let that sink in. It's just that 8 of them end up being wasted on design and other nonsense. Like an entire separate page for "list of sources" -- as soon as I have the content, I can have that made in a few minutes, it's not hard at all. Also we have slightly-bigger-than-average line breaks, that also helps...

But yes, I need 12 pages of pure content. I'm allowed to do multiple chapters, though, and I can end a chapter somewhere in the middle of a page and leave the rest blank, then go straight to the next page to start a new chapter. That trick plus a few added things got me from 5 pages to 7 in no time at all. But this kind of trickery won't get me to 12, so I have to add *some* content to get it to 12. Images are practically a help from God, but still... also I need to make this whole thing logical and conclusive, otherwise the "Conclusions" page won't make any sense.

You just don't know what our school wants to do. They want to prepare students for the university and stuff by making EVERY grade 11 student write a genuine science paper. We have 12 grades, so it's one grade before the last one. The last one has final exams and stuff, so there's no time for any such stuff, they pushed it in grade 11. Actually, it's really not that fair. When you're in university, you can focus on the paper entirely, when you're in school, you have all the homework plus the paper. That's just bad. Really bad.

To add insult to the injury, I already have one science paper that I wrote in grade 9 -- it was my English teacher's idea and she gave me the topic "The Role of Internet in learning English as a second language". It was fairly easy to write and well over the limit -- it's the EXACT way I had learned English. So I knew the subject like the back of my hand. The problem is that my friend is involved and he has nothing to cover himself up, so trying to stretch the rules and hide myself behind that paper just doesn't work.

Thanks for the links and information. I'll need it.

I found something else, this is about where it looks like a hill is not obeying gravity, but really its just an optical illusion, this is stretching it a bit (and by a bit I mean a lot), but maybe you could incorporate it somehow.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gravity_hills.

EDIT: Forgot link to copy the link, fixed now...

maxnick wrote:Here's something, you may have found this already, but if by chance you haven't, here it is.

It's about some people who decide to figure out where planets are by using, pendulums, mountains and math.

Awwww, yeah.

EDIT: They were finding out the mass of the planets I think maybe, I'm just skimming it so im not really sure, but it seems interesting.

The goal of the experiment is not what I wanted... but the experiment itself is pretty much THE EXACT SAME THING. Holy. Crap. Hopefully I'll be able to fix my thinking up soon, because... this is a serious boost. maxnick, you're awesome.

I don't think I can incorporate gravity hills in any way other than making a throwaway sentence. Of course I already have some throwaway sentences, so one more shouldn't hurt...

EDIT: OK, I just read up some stuff about this experiment and it was INTENSE. Pretty clever. Now I have two possible directions to go and I'll use both to fill my work and (hopefully) make some logic in the process. I should probably go to sleep now, it's late and tomorrow I'll need my brain in a good shape.

Glad I could help!

VirtLands wrote:<insert loads of links and data here>

Wow!

VirtLands wrote:Sure is an obscure and technical topic.
It would have been easier to do a report on outer space or
gravity/magnetism of other planets, but, you had to choose Earth.

I can't really find anything on mountains, but there are general
topics on gravity.

Here are some that I found>

Optional PDFs that I downloaded on the subjects of
magnetism, dirty electricity, and gravity:
( Klick on the Linc )
magnetism, gravity articles {Feb 08,2012}.zip

Gravity, Large and Small
http://www.seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/s ... small.html

Gravity--extrapolating effects on humans colonizing exoplanets
http://www.bautforum.com/showthread.php ... exoplanets

Gravity Hurts so Good
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/sc ... st02aug_1/


Effects of weightlessness on the human body { Wikipedia }
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weightlessness

Lumpy Earth---gravity's effects on us
http://ask.metafilter.com/32870/Lumpy-E ... ects-on-us

The Pull of HyperGravity
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/sc ... nggravity/

NASA's GRACE Mission - Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Re ... Experiment
http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace/
http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace/gravity/

ESA & GOCE - New insights into Earth's gravity
http://www.esa.int/esaLP/SEMY0FOZVAG_LPgoce_0.html
http://www.esa.int/esaLP/SEMY0FOZVAG_LPgoce_1.html
http://www.esa.int/images/GOCE-Geoidkar ... tten_H.jpg

Gravity of Earth { Wikipedia article }
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_of_Earth

Effects of Dirty Electricity and Magnetic Fields on the Human Body
http://tuberose.com/Electromagnetic_Fields.html

{ Listen to Coast-To-Coast AM talk-radio broadcasts on Dirty Electricity }
http://www.tuberose.com/Audio/MP3/DirtyElectricity1.mp3
http://www.tuberose.com/Audio/MP3/DirtyElectricity2.mp3
http://www.tuberose.com/Audio/MP3/DirtyElectricity3.mp3

International Gravimetric Bureau
http://bgi.omp.obs-mip.fr/index.php/eng

{ which links to: Land Gravity Data }
-- http://bgi.omp.obs-mip.fr/index.php/eng/Data-Products

{ which links to: California Gravity Data, and so on... }
-- http://bgi.omp.obs-mip.fr/index.php/eng ... avity-data

Online Gravity Dataset for the lower 48 states
http://research.utep.edu/Default.aspx?tabid=37229

(which links to:)
-- Gravity and Magnetic Dataset Repository
-- http://irpsrvgis00.utep.edu/repositorywebsite/

AGrav: Absolute Gravity Database - Meta-Data
http://agrav.bkg.bund.de/agrav-meta/

A few of those I could potentially use, though it's definitely more about gravity itself and it's hard to compare the more extreme conditions (such as zero-g) to the very small sideways force of a mountain.

That said, I do want everyone to look closer at the very first link -- it looks damn scientific at first, I was actually fooled by it... look at the bottom, it's from an RPG rulebook.

I just made a new thread. It's a poll. Those votes can figure as statistics along with the Schiehallion-related numerical data and other stuff. Please vote!

HOLY WONDERLAND I DID IT!!! Well, almost. I did the 12 pages of content. Time to rest for a little and do the design/layout stuff + the PowerPoint presentation. I can do this.

OK, so I *almost* did it. The PowerPoint presentation can be made later, as it turns out. So it's OK. But out of the design/layout/introduction-like-almost-unnecessary-but-still-required-stuff I need to write the annotation page. It's only one page, but I need to write it in a half hour.

SPEEDRUNNING LIFE.

EDIT: JUST IN TIME!!!! It's crazy. The PowerPoint presentation can wait until Monday, but the work itself is almost over now... we will probably be said to edit some things here and there until Monday and then we can work on it... but hoooooooly Wonderland I did this.

Muzozavr wrote:SPEEDRUNNING LIFE.

You are epic.