classical dynamics

Okay, Devin Hurd manages to lob me a meme. I’ll bite—anything to inject a little actitity into this (temporarily) neglected blog.

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

Wish I had a more (overtly) musical book at hand, but here goes:

Jerry B. Marion and Stephen T. Thornton (1995), Classical Dynamics of Particles and Systems 4th ed. (Fort Worth: Harcourt).

As it happens, the would be fifth sentence occurs at the very end of page 123. Thus, taking the first three sentences of page 124:

Example 3.2
Consider a pendulum of length l and a bob of mass m at its end (Figure 3–12) moving through oil with θ decreasing. The massice bob undergoes small oscillations, but the oil retarts the bob’s motion with a resistive force proportional to the speed with Fres=2m√(g/l)(lθ̇). The bob is initially pulled back at t=0 with θ=α and θ̇=0.

Hmm… If this has a link to Devin’s book, it’s in that it reminds me of flipping through Braxton’s Catalog of Compositions.

Okay, I’ll tag a couple of musicians—Dominic Lash and Taylor Ho Bynum—who always seem to be looking for a good read (and might have a more interesting book at hand then a physics text book), and, just for a measure of insanity, I’ll tag sjz. I’m also going to lob this over to roboflutist even if, between taxes and recitals, I suspect she won’t have the time to respond.
Finally, to atone for the choice of a science text book (of the positivist, empirical variety), I’ll tag Zuska.