Winter Break Physics Contest

While we were in Florida last weekend, we got a bunch of snow at home, so we came home to the proverbial winter wonderland. It's warmed up quite a bit since, though, and stuff is now melting. When I got home this morning after doing a bunch of revisions to the book-in-progress, I looked out the kitchen window to see the scene in the "featured image" above, which I will duplicate below:

Snow hanging off the edge of SteelyKid's playset.

That's the snowpack from the top of SteelyKid's playset, now melting, just barely hanging on from sliding off the edge of the plastic cloth stretched over the top.

I looked at that, and said "Hey, I bet there's a physics post in that." But I don't have time to write it. So, you do it.

We'll call this a contest, for a valuable prize to be determined at a later date, but probably something like a signed book. Come up with something interesting and physics-related you can do with this photo, and write up a description. Email it to me-- orzelc at steelypips, which is not a com but an org-- as a plain text email or a link to a web page (if you need to add additional pictures/ diagrams) by 11:59pm Eastern US time on January 1, 2014, and I'll pick the one I like best. Assuming I get anything.

I belatedly realized that I probably should've provided something to set the scale of the image, in case you want to do something that needs that. Sorry. I believe the board projecting out into the front of the picture is a 4x4, though, or if you're really enterprising, this is the playset and you can probably find the full dimensions there.

The decision as to what constitutes the "best" entry will be entirely up to me, with possible assistance from Kate. All decisions will be final. No purchase necessary, void where prohibited. Past performance does not guarantee future results.

On the off chance that you need three-dimensional information, here it is from the side facing the end of the snowpack:

The snowy playset from the side.

Have at it.