Pancakes
At school, my chemistry and physics courses claim to be related to real life and pretty practical. So far, I would say chemistry has succeeded. We have blown up various gases, liquids and random objects and have made some weird coloured liquids. This satisfies the two statutary requirements of chemistry: explosions/fire and coloured bubbling things. Physics has generally failed. We just learn stuff like normal, then “Oh, this is used in a CD player” is tagged on the end. Plus we haven’t blown anything up.
With other subjects it’s just a little more difficult to measure how good and useful they are. However, we have used The Window Cleaner Analogy for a few years to great effect. Basically we ask ihow what we are currently learning could be useful if we were to quit and become a window cleaner. For example, in maths this is used thus:
Is this really useful? I mean, if I was, like, to become a window cleaner, do I really need to know how to integrate and differentiate negative and fractional powers?
Most of these requests in maths are meant with a sort of non-decisive “Ummm….”. However, I have found a use for mechanics! There is an equation to work out how to perfectly toss a pancake! Why is this not on the syllabus? Why is it not provided on the exam paper, if only as a useful tidbit of information? These questions need answering.
So you can learn this over the next 364 days, here is the equation for perfectly tossing a pancake.
Where W is the rotation of the pancake in RPM, g is acceleration due to gravity (ms-2) and r is the distance from the elbow to the centre of the pancake (metres). This allows the pancake to hit the pan at roughly 10.1mph after being airborne for just under a second. If you fail to catch it then it splats uncooked-side-down onto the floor at roughly 14mph.
See? Useful 