Culture

Abstract

Ever found yourself zoning out staring at an object, wondering how far you could throw it? Yeah, that. Welcome to Critic Does Sport: Frisbee Edition. 

Introduction

We assembled the Uni’s best and brightest (your bona fide ranga reporter and our only friend who can throw frisbees half-decently) to get scientific in a test to see how far we could throw shit. That's right – we, as grown adults, decided to throw stuff around to see how far it would go. But not just any stuff. No, sir. We compiled a list of the most frisbee-looking items we could wrangle (and some fun ones we found out and about) and gave them a right toss. 

You may be thinking, “That is so incredibly stupid, it's not even a real test.” That’s where you would be wrong. If there’s one thing we all learned in high school science class, it’s – well, first that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, but secondly: the scientific method. We even wrote a hypothesis (basically placing bets). For the control for this very scientific experiment, not only did we throw them all on the same day so they saw similar weather conditions, but we also included a conventional frisbee in the mix in order to see how the rest compared. Let's see how the ten competing items fared!

Hypothesis/TAB

The top three is expected to be the frisbee (duh); the drum skin because it is lighter and bigger than the frisbee but wind will probably slow it; and the bin lid, as it is also frisbee-shaped but should have enough mass to not be thrown by the wind. The door is going to be last. This is not a prediction, we know this for a fact. 

Method & Materials

The method was simple: gather as many frisbee-adjacent objects as possible (which involved a lot of running around campus), recruit Otago Ultimate Frisbee member Kazuki Esteal as a tester, and throw each item across the Union Lawn three times each. For health and safety purposes, we chose a quiet Monday afternoon. “Decapitation” would be an awkward incident form to fill out. We stole (with permission) one of those measure-things from the Surveying School to accurately see how far each object went.

Results

1. Frisbee (57.3m): While the frisbee finished where we expected it to (first) it went a fair bit further than we thought it would – primarily due to favourable wind conditions and Kazuki’s weapon of an arm, surpassing the expected 50 metres.
2. CD (46.6m): Jesus H Christ, this thing went over four times further than we thought it would. It didn't even fly flat all the way, falling out of the air at about the 45m mark and coming to a near dead stop.
3. Drum Skin (30.7m): For those uninitiated, a drum skin is basically a frisbee, but with a metal rim and a flexy fabric sort of shell. Due to being plagued by similar issues as the CD, it fell short of where it could have reached but still surpassed our expectations for distance by 70cm. Not too shabby.
4. Pottery Plate (24.7m): This was more disappointing than a wet toilet seat. We’d hoped it would explode, either in air or when it hit the ground, but it did neither. On the bright side, it did mean less cleanup. It travelled about as far as we thought it would, with 20m+ being the general guess.
5. Ping Pong Paddle (24.0m): God, this one was annoying. It kept hitting branches and falling out of the air. Very cringe. But it did soar twice as far as we thought it would, so kudos to the ping-pong!
6. Square Bin Lid (17.5m): Despite falling outside of the top five scorers, the bin lid was a solid performer. That being said, its frisbee-like shape set our hopes too high. Due to factors we can’t really work out beyond it being too big, it performed a bit shit, coming in at half of the predicted distance.
7. Wooden Crutch (13.4m): Disclaimer: This is not hospital property, we just happen to have one in the Critic office. That would be kind of fucked up if we threw a hospital-grade crutch for this. Technically, it wasn't really frisbeed but more thrown and it happened to take a sort of rotating path. It’s performance was average (that’s what she said), outperforming expected distances, but far off the podium overall. A solid performance from probably the oldest competitor.
8. Textbook (9.0m): This went well for about the first ten metres, then it opened, stopped, and came backwards. Wind was less of a factor here. It was more the whole air having to go somewhere, so when the book opened its surface area went up a bajillion-fold. Don’t fact check me on that one. 
9. Critic Magazine (4.9m): Clearly, we didn't design the mag with aerodynamics in mind. That's probably a good thing because someone pelting one of these at the back of your head mid-lecture would be pretty annoying. The mag performed similarly to the textbook, but with less initial mass, it opened and flopped. End of story.
10. Door (DNF): The hallowed Critic door (not the one to the office, but another one kept inside the office for certain beer sport-related antics) was decided upon as the final competitor. Then we picked it up, promptly put it back down, and said bugger it. 

Discussion

Not gonna lie, I barely paid attention in science, so I’m not sure what you’re meant to “discuss” here. Read the results for yourself, they’ll tell you all you need to know. Anyway, here’s some fun awards for the objects. Coolest throw goes to the CD as the light bouncing off it made it sparkly as fuck and that was pretty swag. Most improved would have to go to the ping pong paddle, as it went twice as far as expected. Most disappointing would go to the pottery plate: didn't explode, didn’t do anything cool. Boo.  

Conclusion

All in all, the competitors put up one hell of a fight for the most part, but some clearly didn’t have it in them. We would like to give a shout out to the Otago School of Surveying for providing scientific equipment for the experiment and the OUUC for sending out a representative for this test.