Milo Living His Dream Career

When Milo was little he wanted to be a robot.

Some would say he succeeded.

Huh, I guess Melissa's one too. How sure are we about Zack?

Robot apocalypse aside, I mostly just wanted to analyse and appreciate this scene. Spoiler: it's just me being a total physics nerd.

I was rather impressed when I saw the stuff they listed here. All of it seems to be actual physics stuff that could be relevant to determining the motion of the cement mixer and how we should interact with it.

Velocity
How fast and in what direction an object is moving. If you know an object's position and velocity you can figure out what it's gonna do from now to forever if you know all the forces that are in play.

Trajectory
What was I just sayin'. Now we know it's velocity and assumedly position ('cause we're looking at it), and probably just taking into account gravity at this point, we can know what path it's gonna take through space. And what do you know, it's gonna hit us. Should probably do something about that.

Mass
How hard an object's motion is to change. Good to know if we're gonna change this object's motion. Not entirely sure how you'd figure mass out from this snap shot of time apart from just looking up the average weight of cement mixers.

Density
Mass over volume. I'd probably have thought it would be more natural to figure out this before mass 'cause you could look up the density of any substance you wanted and then just multiply it by the volume, which you could just measure from what you see.

Angle
Now we figure out the angle of the... uhh. The angle that it's travelling compared to the ground? (get that from velocity) The angle it is orientated? The angle of elevation as seen from us? (get that from looking at it) The angle it's gonna land on us from? (get that from the trajectory) Ok, this one's a bit vague but still potentially helpful.

Gravitational PE
Gravitational Potential Energy is how much energy you have the potential to gain by falling to the ground. In this situation it's how much more energy on top of the energy from it's velocity that we're gonna have to dissipate if we want to stop this thing.

Height
If it's talking about the size of the object, we probably wanted that before we calculated density or mass. But it's probably talking about how high off the ground the object is, which we probably wanted to know before we calculated it's Gravitational PE or it's trajectory. So a bit out of place this far down the list.

Inertia
Oo. It's a fancy physics word. It's more of a concept that objects keep doing what they do until a force is applied. If you had to measure an objects inertia, you're probably just measuring it's mass or momentum, which we already have. Did I say all of this stuff was relevant? Well that was an exaggeration.

Structural Stability
You know it just occurred to me that stability sounds a lot like stabability. Basically the same thing. It's good to know if it's gonna fall apart on your first stab or just fly through you without realising you're there. Lots of plans would probably depend on how easy it is to stab the object you want to avoid.

Positive Gaussian Curvature
Yay. We know how... curvy it's surface is. That's gonna be important if.. you want to draw shapes on it? I don't know. Might factor into it's structural stability maybe? I don't know everything.

Non Uniform Density
An important note to note. The distribution of mass will be very important to how the object interacts with anything you do. And the fact everything is sloshing around in there is very important to it's motion, try rolling a half full water bottle compared to an empty or full one.

Approximate Centre of Gravity
Technically it's different from the centre of mass, but that's only noticeable when an object has gravity varying across it, which only happens if the object is comparable to the earth. Is the cement mixer the size of the earth? No. So we know the centre of mass, which we can get from the density distribution. A pretty important point 'cause that's the point that's gonna follow that trajectory we calculated while the rest of the mixer is gonna roll around it doing it's own thing. If we know this point we can nearly ignore it's rotation and all that cement sloshing around inside.

Wind
Ok. This is as close as it gets to random jargon trying to look sciency. So on the first line we've got SW 087, which looks like the wind is facing 87 degrees off south towards west, which is basically west or 267 degrees around from north. But then the next line just say knots, which is a unit of speed and doesn't make any sense without a number before it. So the wind speed is probably 87 knots and it's going south west, which would be 225 degrees from north. But then the third line is another different angle of 218 degrees. I guess you could rationalise them both being right as 218 degrees is vaguely south west, but it's a bit weird saying the direction twice isn't it? They obviously thought so too, so they put the direction three times by putting an arrow below everything that points vaguely south west. And although its pointing vaguely south east, it's definitely pointing on the west side of south west compared to the south leaning 218. And the arrow also has some ambiguity in it because it could also be pointing to the winds direction of motion compared to what we can actually see. Who cares, the wind isn't going to effect it that much. Unless the wind really is going at 87 knots which is what you'd find near the centre of a category 2 hurricane. No wonder the bridge is down, Danville should be taking some pretty extensive damage right now.

Factoring Minkowski Met
Here's were you know that the person who put this together was a real nerd. The Minkowski metric is the framework that defines spacetime in Special Relativity. This fundamentally changes a lot 'cause you're taking into account the fact space and time don't react wholly how you'd usually expect them to and the equations of motion are crazy. But practically it's gonna change the outcome less than the wind, even if it's just a light breeze.

So that's what roboMilo was thinking about as his plan.. cemented. We now return to your regularly scheduled apocalypse.