Acceleration of Google's Newton's Apple

This is great. Many people have already reported google's apple-dropping homepage in honor Newton's birthday. In case it disappears, here is a screen shot.

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So, I got this awesome note from Dale Basler. He said that his class had analyzed this falling apple animation. What a very Dot Physics-y idea (check out his analysis). He said they were questioning the results which might be due screen capture issues. I decided to reproduce this.

I captured the motion with Apple's Quicktime X screen recording feature. I then used Tracker Video Analysis - which now has an autotracking feature that works really well in this case (I will post more about that later). Here is a plot of the y-motion of the falling apple.

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I fit a parabolic function to the data (at least to the part where it was falling) and I get an acceleration of about -2 units/sec2. I didn't scale the video so I don't really know the distance units. Is it constant acceleration? Kind of, I guess. What about the bounce? That should have the same acceleration, right?

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Not even close. I guess google thought it would be enough to honor Newton with the silly falling apple, but not falling with a constant acceleration. Hello, Google? I thought your motto was "do no evil."

Actually, this doesn't bother me too much - but I thought the analysis was a cool idea.

More like this

Younger offspring padded in and climbed into bed with us at 5:58 this morning. In a rare show of solidarity (or alertness), younger offspring was the one to hit the "snooze" button when the alarm went off at 6:00. Dr. Free-Ride: Good morning.
I'm writing this on an Apple Computer (a MacBook Pro). I've been using Apple products since 1981. I love (heart?) New York, too. Great city, full of energy. Few cities equal it in my opinion (Paris or Barcelona maybe).
R. W. Apple has passed away, apparently after having planned out the menu for his funeral.
Google and Apple, you ruined my daughter's birthday! Well, it wasn't that bad, but it could have been. Anyway, this is a warning to anyone who uses Apple products of any kind and who uses gmail as their main mail.

Can't you scale the drawing by the size of the apple? (Yeah, I know, I know - apples aren't a set size - but they fall within a certain range - and that gets you a range that may or may not include the g we're expecting).
And no, we don't know what planet this is on - but it's one that has trees more or less like ours, so g can't be too different (unlike Pandorum...)