average velocity
rallain | January 19, 2010My dad and I had a disagreement. We were driving back from a trip and he let me take over the wheel for a while. His complaint was that I was driving too slow and it was driving him crazy. For me, I thought I was driving fast. My typical behavior is to drive 3 mph under the speed limit. That is just how I roll. In this case, I knew he wouldn't be able to handle this so I went the speed limit (70 mph).
Here is the problem. The speedometer said 70 mph. The gps thingy said the average speed was 69 mph. I think my dad feels that the gps is correct and that cars have speedometers that are…
rallain | September 18, 2008**pre reqs:** [kinematics](http://scienceblogs.com/dotphysics/2008/09/basics-kinematics.php)
Suppose there is some experiment in which you throw a ball up and collect position and time data (with video analysis). What do you do with this data? Your instructor told you to make a graph, but how do you do that?
Here is the fictional data you (or I) collected:
Here is the text file with the data if you want to reproduce the graphs I make here [kinematics data](http://scienceblogs.com/dotphysics/kinematics_data.…