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How High Can You Jump? From Randall Munroe’s “How To”
I’m currently reading Randall Munroe’s book, How To (Penguin Random House). Personally, I love anything from Randall Munroe — you might know him from his awesome xkcd comics.
The basic idea of the book is to take some crazy (or even normal) questions and explain how to do them. For instance, this question was “how to jump high”. Of course, it’s just a book — and with that, he has to skip over some of the details. But that’s why I’m here. I’m going to fill in all the missing details of some of these equations.
Here is the one I want to start with. The idea is that if you are moving with some speed, you can redirect that velocity upward and send yourself into the air. This would be the case of running on a skateboard and then hitting a vertical ramp. Munroe then gives the following equation (which I have reproduced with LaTeX).
Yes, this was a challenge to reproduce. I used Apple Keynote software (which does LaTeX a little different) and this is the code for that expression.
\mathrm{height}=\frac{\mathrm{speed}^2}{2 \times \mathrm{acceleration}\medspace \mathrm{of}\medspace…
