Thursday, July 8, 2010

The glass toilet door

Ok, now that is one totally random sounding title, but in fact, some of the readers which can be expressed in terms of p/q , where p and q are both integers. That might possibly be because this post is based on a real phenomenon that happens right at my house, in the toilet, and is related to nothing less than the glass toilet door (separating the shower and the rest of the toilet).

So this is what happens. The glass door is open. It is stationary (not a self-shutting door). I get extremely angry with the thought of certain examinations which I have just failed (Tis' called mix and match) and hence bang the door near the pivot. The door shakes wildly, and starts inching closer to closing... when I am frantically banging (ok doesn't work if I bang too hard) the door in the opposite direction. This appears to be a violation of physics, but I don't believe so. Can you solve the mystery before you read my theory about why the door flies opposite to the direction of the force(of banging)?

My theory shall be written in like... white?

This has, in fact a little bit to do with statistics :(. My theory is that the door is actually swinging inwards (tendency to close itself), but static friction is just sufficient to stop the motion of the door closing itself. However, when I bang the door near the pivot, this creates a small force acting against the rotation of the door towards closure, but it creates a large vibration for motion on both sides. Hence, you can think of it as a normal distribution with mean less than the initial force from the hinges in the same direction, but with the variance needed to occasionally overcome static friction. Bad explanation, but some people should get what I'm trying to say I guess...

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