Welcome

Welcome to my ever-evolving blog. It started out as a blog on Beachbody workouts and products, mainly when I was a Beachbody coach. I no longer coach, not because I don't believe in Beachbody's programs (I subscribe to Beachbody on Demand and use their workouts every day), I am just not a salesperson and hated that aspect of it. I am more than willing to answer questions about my experiences with their products and the various workouts, and I feel freer to do so without the appearance of giving a biased review of something.

I have also started adding reviews for various things I have purchased like movies, books, CDs, and other products. This was brought about by a fight with Amazon in which all of my reviews were removed over a completely bullshit allegation that I posted a review that violated their terms of service. After going back and forth with the morons in the community-reviews department (even after they admitted that my posts did not violate their guidelines) they restored my account (which took them six months to do), but I have been posting my reviews on my blog to have them preserved in case something like that happens again. And here, I will post uncensored reviews so I will swear from time to time and post reviews that may be longer than Amazon's character limit. Everything I post here on any topic or product is my personal opinion, and I take no compensation for any product reviews I post. I am a member of Amazon's vine program and because I get those products for free, I keep those reviews on Amazon only, but everything I have purchased with my own money, whether from Amazon or some other store/website/outlet, I will post here.  

I also plan to do some longer blog posts on various topics, such as how to learn physics, how to get through calculus, and longer reviews of workout programs as I do them. Basically, whatever strikes me as interesting at the time.  As you can see if you navigate around the blog, I had many years in between postings. During that time I was going back to school to get an engineering degree, and learning material that I avoided my first time through college was a different experience and one that gave me a lot of insight into how to do well in those classes, which I will try to impart here for those who are looking to get a science or engineering degree. 

Sunday, May 8, 2022

Study Aid Review: How to Solve Physics Problems

 


This is a decent book to help you learn the concepts of physics and give you some exposure to the theory. It does have some helpful information at the beginning of the book about how to approach class, how to test yourself to determine if you are learning the concepts, etc. The two main drawbacks are that it does have a bunch of typos. I have not come across anything that made what it was trying to say incomprehensible, and I did not notice errors in the worked-out solutions (but I did not go through them all). Second, like most physics supplements, even though it does discuss some calculus concepts, it does not have examples of what I would describe as multi-part or compound problems that you often get in calculus-based physics classes.

A lot of times, the calculus in calc-based physics is used in lectures to derive the formulas, but when you have exams, you do not have to actually use much calculus. So, teachers tend to make the problems harder than what students in an algebra-based physics class will have to deal with, and one way they do that is to break the problems into a bunch of parts and make you solve for five or six different things. And, a lot of times you have to use the solution to one thing to calculate something else. For example, you will be required to solve for time, then use the value that you calculate for time to then calculate the initial velocity, and once you have that, you can solve for something else. Problems that just ask you to (or show you how to) solve for just one thing are helpful to an extent but are not nearly as complex as what you are likely to see on an exam.

Another drawback to the book is that the drawings are really very basic. That was probably a decision to save money, and while you can still figure out what they are showing, they could have been a lot better. So, overall, this will be a good resource, to a point, but if you are taking calc-based physics (or AP physics in high school) it may not be enough.

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