I had the privilege of chaperoning over 320 Turlock High seniors at Disney's GradNite on Tuesday.  My partner in crime for the night was Mr. Kamp, our physics teacher.  So, like any good scientist would do, we brought along my Pocket Lab Voyager to quantify our fun.  The stellar data set of the evening was made on the Gaurdians of the Galaxy Mission: Breakout! ride.   It's  a vertical drop ride that has some killer acceleration and weightless moments.  

​Having been on the ride in its past iteration as the Tower of Terror, I really wanted to know if what I was experiencing was indeed free fall or if the ride accelerated us downward faster than gravity.  I also was curious about how long each drop was in terms of distance and time and just how quickly we were accelerating.  I always had a suspicion that the zooming gates in front of our cage were partly an engineered optical illusion, so I thought maybe some data could help prove/disprove that notion.  

Thanks to the PocketLab, we now have some amazing data.  What patterns do you see in the data?  I've also posted a video of a reporter on the ride for context.  It's pretty amazing. 

Laura said she'd like to be surprised for Mothers Day this year, so Zephyr and I hatched a plan to show her just how deep our love for her ran- by adventuring deep into the Earth at California Caverns near the Calaveras County town of San Andreas.  The majority of the cave was still flooded from winter rains and elevated groundwater tables, which abbreviated our tour... but the good news is that water is what helps the caverns grow!  It's pretty amazing to think that the carbonate minerals in these caves use to be tropical shoals several hundred million years ago.  It's even more amazing to think about how subducting ocean crust scraped these deposits-off and accreted them to California.  Awesome!