Physics and Driving

We took our time today and spent some time packing up stuff in anticipation of getting home tomorrow.  Do you know how junky a motorhome can look after two people have lived in it for three months?  We only drove to Monroe, LA, about 210 miles, where we checked into the Ouachita RV Park.  We stayed here our first night on the road almost three months ago.

My thoughts wandered, as usual, as I drove. 

Here Comes Another Rant!

Over the past three months I have driven almost 8,000 miles on a lot of different highways, good and bad.  I have seen a lot of drivers, some of them doing stupid things and endangering themselves and those around them.  I have become very understanding of professional truck drivers for the number of miles they drive and what they have to contend with on the highways.  My motorhome and car combined weigh right at 36,000 pounds and is 62 feet long.  It may not be quite as long or as heavy as an 18-wheeler but it is still much larger and heavier than any automobile.  In a collision you could probably guess which vehicle is going to fare worse.  It’s physics.  When a 4,000-pound mass collides with a 36,000-pound mass, the resulting energy (remember Einstein’s E = MC²?) is going to make mince meat of the lighter mass.  That’s because in a collision there is a transfer of momentum (energy) from one object to another.  For example, at 70 mph the energy of the car would be 4,000 x 70², or 4,000 x 70 x 70 = 19,600,00 (let’s not worry about units) and the energy of my RV would be 36,000 x 70², or 36,000 x 70 x 70 = 176,400,000.  I would give you my 176,400,000 units of energy and you would give me your 19,600,000 units of energy.  My RV has 9 (nine) times more energy than your car.  Who’s going to win?

My motorhome doesn’t have the acceleration of an automobile nor the ability to stop as quickly as an automobile.  My rig requires more time and distance than an automobile to pass another vehicle.  This means that I must practice defensive driving if I am to survive.  I have to be vigilant, observant, and know what is happening in front of and behind me.  I have to watch for other vehicles that may be entering the highway in front of me.  I have to be ready to respond quickly when some other driver does something stupid.  People in cars tend to become impatient and agitated with large vehicles on the highways.  These people are usually traveling faster than the large vehicles and don’t like slowing down or having to wait for an opportunity to pass safely.  That’s when their impatience causes them to do something extremely stupid and injure or kill themselves and/or other people. 

Drivers of automobiles don’t seem to pay nearly as much attention to their driving as do drivers of large vehicles.  They talk and text on their cell phones while driving, play with the radio, or look at the other passengers when speaking to them.  They aren’t aware of their surroundings nor are they attuned to the situations and conditions about them.  Plus, they are not always very courteous.  For example, when a truck or RV puts on its left turn signal to enter the left lane (to pass a slower vehicle or to be in the proper lane for an exit) the automobile drivers in the left lane just keep coming, some will even speed up.  They don’t want the large vehicle to pull out in front of them.  Never mind that the large vehicle will probably be pulling right back into the right lane once it is around the slower vehicle. 

If you are driving at 70 mph and take your eyes off the road for only one second, you will have traveled 102.7 feet without seeing anything over that distance.  In 102.7 feet another car could have pulled in front of you, a deer could have jumped in front of you, a pedestrian could have stepped in front of you, or any number of other things may have happened.  And when you look away from the road, to use your cell phone or play with the radio it is probably for more than one second.  In only three (3) seconds you will have traveled the length of a football field without seeing anything along the way.  Why not just blindfold yourself?

As far as cell phones and driving goes, according to the National Safety Council, one accident per second is occurring in the US.  That’s about 645,000 so far THIS year.  Did you know that as far as cell phone distraction goes, statistics and research have shown there is no difference in using a hand held cell phone or a hands free cell phone.  Distraction is distraction.  Your mind is not on your driving.  You need to get your head back into driving and if you really need to use the phone, pull over and stop.

Back to physics again.  We often speak of deceleration (slowing down).  In physics there is only acceleration.  It can be positive (speeding up) or negative (slowing down).  It’s the negative acceleration that gets you in a collision.  Your body is traveling just as fast as your automobile.  If your car collides with another object, say an immovable object, such as a rock wall, the car comes to an immediate stop.  So does your body.  Like they say, it’s not the crash that kills you.  It’s the sudden stop.  From 70 mph to 0 mph in less than one second will exert a force of 98 g’s (g = force of gravity) on your body.  To put that in perspective, astronauts black out during High g training at 4 – 6 g’s. 

End of Rant

Our journey ends tomorrow.  We only have another 200 miles to go and should be home by lunch.  These past three months have been quite a ride!  I’ll have to go back to the beginning and read the blog to remember all of the places we have been and the things that we have seen.  Those of you who have been kind enough to follow this blog please don’t stop just yet.  I’m not done by a long shot.  Also, there will be more trips coming up.  Stay tuned.

Going Back

Today we drove down to Athens (GA) to visit the University of Georgia (UGA) campus for the first time in over ten years and one of only a few visits in the last 30 or 40 years.  Carol Ann and I both went to pharmacy school at UGA.  I graduated from the College of Pharmacy in 1967 and Carol Ann in 1968.  Before I tell you how I changed majors from chemistry to pharmacy I have to relate some things to you about Athens and UGA.

First of all, both Athens and UGA are a lot bigger than they were in the 1960’s.  Many things have changed and yet much is still the same.  In the 1960 census, Athens had a population of 31,355 and probably around 35,000 when I graduated in ‘67.  In the 2010 census, the population of Athens was 115,452 and it was the fastest-growing big city in Georgia between the 2000 and the 2010 census.  Downtown Athens doesn’t really look much different now than it did when I was at UGA, except that many of those same buildings now house restaurants and bars. 

Athens and Clark County were dry, except for beer and wine, back in the 60’s.  If we wanted liquor, say, for a football game when southern football etiquette called for bourbon, we had to drive about 50 miles to South Carolina.  A package store was just across the state line.  You had to be careful because the Georgia State Patrol would sometimes be watching from the Georgia side and stop cars as they came back across into Georgia.  They would confiscate the liquor and charge the driver with bootlegging.  I never actually knew of anyone getting caught so it may have been an urban (or rural in this case) legend.

In 1962, when I enrolled at UGA, there were a little over 11,000 students.  Now the enrollment is approximately 35,000 students and there are thousands more students in the University of Georgia system throughout the state.  In the 60’s, most of the campus was situated on two hills and called North Campus and South Campus.  Between the two campuses was a natural depression containing Sanford Stadium and its parking lot.  To walk from one campus to the other required walking up and down an awful lot of steps until a bridge was built connecting the two campuses.  North Campus was mostly liberal arts while South Campus was home to the sciences.  The hill that South Campus calls home is also known as “Ag Hill” because one of the first schools built there was the College of Agriculture.  I spent most of my time on that hill.  Not in the Ag college, but in the physics building, chemistry building, biological sciences building, the geography building (also the home to math) and the pharmacy school. Today, I was awed by how much the campus has grown.  There wasn’t a lot of space to the North or West for campus growth because of the city.  It had to grow East and South.  There is no longer just a North and a South Campus.  The newer campus is much larger than the old campus with which I used to be so familiar.

I did miss my old haunts today.  When I was a freshman I learned to drink beer at “The Old South” tavern, which was located right across the street from the northern end of North Campus.  Freshmen were required to live on-campus and not allowed to have cars.  The Old South was perfectly located.   It was within easy walking distance of the freshmen dorms.  ID’s were not checked at The Old South. It was often said that anyone tall enough to lay money on the bar would be served.  I remember that draft beer was only 99 cents a pitcher or 25 cents a mug.  You could get shit-faced and not worry about getting a DUI as you stumbled back to the dorm.

I also recall a few times when the bartender, after getting a phone call, made the rounds of the booths and tables telling everyone to drink up and leave if they weren't 21 years old.  A short while later the police would arrive and check ID’s.  As far as I know, they never found any under-age drinkers at The Old South. 

Once you had a car and were more mobile, Harry’s at Five Points was the place to go, especially on a warm spring afternoon.  It was the only place in Athens that served beer on the curb.  It was a drive-in restaurant with a parking lot full of students drinking beer in their cars.  If you had an hour or two between classes it was not unheard of to drive down to Five Points for a beer or two at Harry’s before heading back to class.  By the Spring Quarter of my sophomore year I was beginning to see that chemistry was not for me.  After that I spent a lot of time at Harry’s before my late afternoon chemistry class that quarter.  I would often take a friend with me and we would get two beers each, pour them into milkshake cups and take them to chemistry class.  Although there were a couple of hundred students in the lecture auditorium we had to attend class because roll was taken and only a certain number of cuts were allowed before you got an F in the class.  All seats were numbered and each student was assigned a number.  A graduate student would come in during lecture and record the empty seat numbers.  I was going to flunk the course anyway, so I think the only reason I went to class was for the fun of sitting there drinking beer during a lecture on quantum mechanics.  What was really crazy is that my friend wasn’t even enrolled in the chemistry class!  Unfortunately, the City of Athens soon passed an ordnance that outlawed beer on the curb, which eventually led to Harry’s going out of business.

The best place to take a date and drink beer was Allen’s.  Until it closed in 2003, it was the oldest continuously operating bar in Athens.  It was out on Prince Avenue across the street from the “Navy School” (I believe it was a supply-management school for Naval officers).  Allen’s was really a great place.  The hamburgers were good and the beer was cold.  There were a number of arcade-type games, mainly pinball machines and bowling games.  Bowling was my favorite.  It was a two-player game in which players alternated sliding a metal “puck” down the slick table-surface towards the pins.  The pins were a few inches above the surface with a small “trip switch” under each one.  When the puck passed over the switches, the corresponding pins would flip up and out of sight.  Scoring was identical to regular bowling.  I wasn’t any good at regular bowing but I won many a mug of beer playing bowling at Allen's.

Allen’s had a basement that was for “couples only”.  Your date didn’t have to be subjected to the raucous group on the bar’s ground floor.  A gate next to the bar was watched by one of the bartenders who pressed a button to unlock the gate for couples to go down the steps.  It was darker in the basement and there were booths along the walls.  The basement also had a jukebox and small dance floor.  I don’t remember anything but slow dancing down there.  No wait-staff or bartender bothered you down there.  You placed your order over an intercom, the bartender told you the cost, you placed money on a dumb-waiter, gave the OK over the intercom to the bartender, the money went up in the dumb-waiter, and your beer, hamburgers, and change came back down.  It was a really great system.

There weren’t very many fast food restaurants in Athens in the 60’s. But there was the Varsity.  The Varsity is a whole ‘nother story and I will save it for another time.  I still haven’t told you how I got from being a BS Chem major to a BS Pharm major.

After the fall quarter of my sophomore year I went home for Christmas and while there decided that I HAD to change majors or else I would be in school an awful long time and still might never receive a chemistry degree.  As soon as I got back to UGA I went to see my advisor and informed him of my decision to change majors.  He asked me what I wanted to change to.  I said I didn’t know.  I was almost 21 years old, had almost 3 years (if you include summer school) of college and still didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. 

My advisor picked up a catalog, flipped through it and said, “Hmmmm.  If you change to pharmacy you won’t loose any credits and some of your extra chemistry can count as electives.” 

“OK, I’ll go to pharmacy school,” I responded.

 “Not so fast,” he said.  “You have to apply and have an interview with the Dean of the College of Pharmacy.”

So I did.  And when asked by the dean, why I wanted to be a pharmacist, I told him “I have always wanted to be a pharmacist.  My father is a physician and I think pharmacy would be the next best thing!”

Obviously, it was much easier to gain admission to pharmacy school in “those days.”  Still, I haven’t done too badly in the profession.  In fact, I think I’m a pretty damn good clinical pharmacist.  I even went back to school on the GI Bill (after Vietnam) and got my Doctor of Pharmacy degree.  No brag.  Just fact.  I am now recently retired (for the second or third time) and have no regrets. 

GOOOOO GEORGIA BULLDOGS!!  SIC’EM!!  WOOF!!  WOOF!!