Idol Mania and the Conservation of Angular Momentum

Last night was the first night America got to vote on the contestants on American Idol. Voting got easier in the second hour after the show. My three fave girls are Paris, Kellie, and Katharine, though I admit that Lisa could beat them all. Mandisa was darn good as well. I hope Brenna gets voted off ASAP. The guys are on tonight, and the only one I really care about so far is Taylor Hicks. Bobby Bennett's bio page says that among his personal goals in life are to win an Oscar, Grammy, and a Tony. This would leave him one award short of Rita Moreno, who was the first person ever to win all of those AND an Emmy. The Emmy came from a guest appearance on one of the five greatest TV shows of all time, The Muppet Show. The others include Dragnet, The Simpsons, All in the Family, and Rocky and Friends (aka the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show).

But if you're looking for a current American Idol outside of the singing stuff, then allow me to suggest Sasha Cohen. As you can see from the pic, she's the embodiment of flexibility. And if you watched her on the ice last night, you saw her use it to great advantage. At one point she was leaning back, skating along on her left foot, and her right foot was about straight up in the air. Next it was leaning forward and doing the same thing in reverse. After some crazy spins and whatnot, she takes her right leg up in her hand, held it straight up above her head, and spun around and around and around and around on one leg. Holy Moley. That's idol material right there.

Watching the skaters spin around at medium speed and then speed up in mid-spin was quite a sight, and for a while I was wondering how it could be possible. Then while talking to someone at work today, I remembered an exchange I had with a friend a while back. We were discussing astronomical bodies that spin at unimaginably high speeds, like the quasar that goes at 100 revolutions per second. And that's not even the fastest thing out there. As a spinning object shrinks in volume but stays the same in terms of mass, then the velocity of the spinning increases by the square of the difference in the change in radius. My friend even used the ice skater analogy as a way of explaining it. So a skater spinning on one leg with arms out can spin faster without expending any more energy just by tucking everything in. It's a great visual image, both in terms of explaining physics and in skating aesthetics. The exact figures he gave were these:

"The sun currently has a radius of about 700,000 km and spins once every 27 days. If the sun underwent gravitational collapse to a size of 10 km (a typical size for a pulsar), its radius would have shrunk by a factor of 70,000 and its rotation rate would go up by the square of that amount (4900000000 times), which would make it spin 2100 times per second."

If Sasha Cohen could do that, she's drill all the way through the earth's core and take the crowd with her, trailing in her wake. Assuming she didn't get separated out like she was in a centrifuge.