My leisure reading.

This book tries to answer hypothetical question like how much banana needed to generate enough power for a house (by the fact that banana contains potassium and some potassium isotope is radioactive, which be treated as energy source). In fact, you don’t need to learn much about physics to answer those questions. Mostly, you need Newtonian mechanics (velocity, acceleration, gravitation, pressure, kinetic and potential energy), some fluid mechanics (buoyancy), and that’s it.

The hardest part of answering those questions are the constants of physical qualities, and that’s also the greatest take away of reading this book: http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/, the engineering toolbox, where you can find a lot of them. The author also seems to like using the Tracker Video Analysis software a lot, to measure time and distance from video to deduce speed and accelearation. An alternative link to the software is http://www.opensourcephysics.org/items/detail.cfm?ID=7365

Bibliographic data

@book{
   title = "Geek Physics. Surprising answers to the planet's most interesting questions",
   author = "Rhett Allain",
   publisher = "Wiley",
   year = "2015",
   isbn = "978-1-118-36015-6",
   classification = "QC75.A45 2015",
   lccn = "2015000285",
}