Monday, April 19, 2010

We won and only lost to one ten year old

Today was the second annual Larchmont Library paper airplane contest. I took the girls to the event. Camy slept through the whole thing, which was nice in retrospect. Macy was content to run around the library and throw the orphan planes left on the ground.

The contest takes place in the art gallery of the library, where a second story balcony over looks a long corridor of paintings. Each contestant throws his or her airplane from the balcony - farthest flight wins.

Because the corridor is narrow (about 6-7 feet) most of the dart-style planes would run into the wall. So I crafted a glider and tuned it to fly straight with little initial starting speed. My plane went about 40 feet, which gave me a glide ratio of about 2.7 - okay but far from optimal.

The average plane went about 20 feet with a standard deviation of 9 feet.

One youth went 41 feet to win the whole competition. He was particularly proud of his accomplishment, but probably not proud enough to go home and write about it on his blog ;P Macy and I won the 18+ age group.

4 comments:

Sister Mullen said...

Whoohoo! I remember the fourth place green ribbon you came home with in first grade. There had been four teams competing and someone thought a ribbon for each place would blunt reality. I asked you what your ribbon meant, and you said, "It means we lost." Congratulations to you and Macy for a good outcome today. I have to admit I'm glad you didn't defeat the 10 year old. :)

Nathan said...

Congratulations!

Kate said...

Congrats! That sounds like fun!

Lauren M said...

Yay for John and Macy! I guess stats 221 was good for something (being able to understand my brother's blog).