Another Half-Week

100342 steps 60.20 km. We walked a lot this past week. It was crazy. Not a whole lot happened, it was a pretty slow week. But, we did play volleyball this morning which was pretty fun but I think I burned the bottom of my feet on the hot sand. Also, I found an interesting story that prompted a question. This story is in Isaiah. King Hezekiah is sick and he wants to be healed, so God says that he'll be healed and as a sign, the sun will go back by 10 degrees. So, as a physicist, I was thinking about the acceleration that would involve. The earth is moving really fast, like 2,000 km/hr so, for it to stop like that and return 10 degrees, I think everything on the earth would be completely destroyed. I didn't do the actual math but it would be probable on the order of 10-20 g's of rotational acceleration... When I die and can see everything, I'm going to watch how that went down, because I'm really curious as to how everything isn't dead. Think about that one this week... Well, that's about all I've got.

Until next week!

-Elder Michael Carlson

[Michael shared a couple of insights as answers to questions in a separate email]

[Tell us about your new area. What are the shops like? Where do you buy bananas (and other things)? Are there parks and trees in town? Do they have any fountains or statues?]
It's a pretty rich area where everyone already knows the church or is already baptized and doesn't go to church. We have nearly 600 members in the ward and only 70 go to church... The shops are mostly just small grocery stores. If you want to buy anything, you have to go to the center. There are lots of malls there for some reason. There's a little market at the end of our street where we buy most of our stuff. There's a few trees and a park, that we actually played volleyball there this morning. Fountains and statues, not really...

[Do you ride the bus, get rides with members, or mostly still walk everywhere?]
We take the bus if we leave our area (for meetings and stuff), but other than that, we walk and we walk and we walk.

[Michael also sent us the following addendum]
So, I actually did the math related to it and I found out much different results. Assuming that it takes 10 seconds for it to happen, everything would be subject to about 232 g's of acceleration, which for a 160 lbs person, is about 36,500 pounds of force...