Physics in a Ceiling Fan pull cord

So as I was staring at the ceiling in my room, trying to think of something to write a blog about, I caught sight of the pull cords hanging from my ceiling fan in my room. (Apparently the shutter speed of my camera is fast enough to catch the fan blades as still, even though they're moving really quickly, but maybe that's another blog. :P) Ignore the strange shadows that my camera flash caused on the ceiling.

Both the pulls, the round crystal-ey one and the dolphin one, are like the weights that we've been studying and doing problems about. They both have two forces working on them: the tension of the metal cord pulling them upwards, and their weight (mg) pulling them downwards(NOT SIDEWAYS, despite how I sometimes want to draw them in free body diagrams). The weight, mass x the acceleration of gravity, is equal to the mass of the plastic pull itself. The tension of the cord must be equal to the weight of the fan pull, since the pulls aren’t randomly floating upwards.

I've also just learned that if you try to paste to straight from Microsoft Word to Blogger, Blogger becomes unhappy. And the picture disappears. Okay, won't do that again.

First post of the year ~ 30 something more to go?

Surviving day by day... and fighting confusion.

It can't possibly have only been four weeks of school. It seems like it's been so much longer. So far, AP Physics B has lived up to my expectations as one of the hardest classes at 'Iolani. (I say "one of" because my Precalc-Honors teacher told me that PCH was the hardest class at 'Iolani). Sometimes I feel swamped with the homework and reading, and I'm finding it so much harder than Chemistry and Biology. Physics isn't just memorization, like Bio, or even plugging numbers into equations, like Chem. It actually requires thinking, which could be a problem. :D The labs help a lot, though, so I can kind of understand what the reading is trying to tell me. The little powerpoint explanations are helpful too. :) I feel like I understand about 90% of what we go over, but actually doing it on problem sets and tests is another matter altogether. I am worried about the pace of the class getting up to speed, though. It already seems pretty fast to me. :O