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We’ve probably all been at the point where we wondered if it would be faster to walk to someone’s house with a flash drive rather than send them a file over the internet. If you haven’t, bear with me, because I sure have. As movies and games grow in size with each resolution or graphics upgrade, while internet speeds don’t always keep up, it’s easy to feel stuck as you watch a loading bar crawl across the screen. For some large commercial data transfers (think server farm backups for big corporations), it is entirely unreasonable to use a portion of their bandwidth (the amount of data that can be transferred via a given internet connection, also referred to as the connection speed or maximum data transfer rate), to handle this. In fact, it’s often faster to load it onto hard drives and ship it by truck.

The Rutgers Men’s Basketball team no doubt had a breakout season in 2019-20. Projected to make the March Madness tournament for the first time since 1991, they were a sure contender for a decent seed had the season not ended early. With an astonishing home record of 18 wins and 1 loss, one of the best in the nation, there is no doubt that the Rutgers Athletic Center played host to some incredible games. Some opponents named the RAC as one of the toughest places to play college basketball. I was fortunate enough, along with the Rutgers Society of Physics Students, to take a firsthand look at what made the RAC so special: its sound.

If you Google the world’s fastest animal, you will find that the peregrine falcon is considered to top the speed charts. According to National Geographic, it can hit maximum speeds of 200 miles per hour while diving. However, if we are using the metric of the fastest an animal can go in free fall, why not take it to the extreme?

Welcome to my new blog! The topics covered here will span physics, mathematics, and computing (among other things), with everything from processor design and DIY tutorials to calculations of the maximum terminal velocity of whales.