Like many scientific demonstrations, what seems like a fun little experiment to instill a love of STEM in bored jocks has significant real-world implications. Gyroscopes exploit angular momentum to correct a rocket ship’s path. When the rocket turns, these gyroscopes spin in the opposite direction to right its course and prevent it from face-planting into a Martian crater or crash-landing back on Earth in some hapless homeowner’s koi pond.
It’s relevant for sports lovers, too. A quarterback imparts angular momentum on a football to nail that super-precise, game-winning Hail Mary that left you $500 in the hole and explaining why the kids can’t have new light-up Power Rangers sneakers.
Rolling Shutter Photography Distorts Movement
The invention of photography has allowed us to glimpse the otherwise hidden wonders of the cosmos, from the most distant galaxies at the edge of the universe to the infinite biological variety of the microscopic world. Hell, photography is even mind-blowing when it doesn’t work right:
That’s the rolling shutter effect, and it occurs with rapidly moving objects.
Cameras use two types of shutters, a global shutter or a rolling shutter. Global shutters are found in top-end, fancy-schmancy expensive cameras. They “snap” once, capturing the entire image simultaneously in (generally) one-tenth of a second. But your regular ol’ digital camera and smartphone utilize a rolling shutter, which snaps an image line by line from top to bottom.