Overhearing terrible things...
(a possible pearoast)

One day when I was a little tiny protogeek, my Dad took me into work with him. I watched him balancing the wheels of a huge lorry ('cos lorries are awesome when you're a tiny kid, and they only get better when you grow up enough to drive them) and he explained how centrifugal force makes try to move away from the middle of a rotating thing. And how if you spin something too fast, bits will fly off completely which is why I had to sit in the van and watch from behind the laminated glass windscreen. And how if the Earth spun much slower, gravity would squish us flat but if it spun much faster it would be too weak to hold us down, like if you don't hold onto the roundabout properly. Great, an introduction to centrifugal force.

A day or two later, going into town on the bus with my Mum, there were two old ladies sitting on the seat in front, bemoaning the state of things (and to be fair in the mid-1970s they were in a pretty poor state).

"Oh aye, the world's jist goin' so fast these days..."

Gulp.

Well maybe if I hold onto the seat really tightly I can stay on until it slows down again, the bus is probably pretty heavy. Maybe when we get to the shops I can hold onto the shopping trolley because the shopping is always really heavy.

For days though I couldn't quite shake the belief that the Earth's rotation was spooling up like a turbine, and about to fling us all out into space...
(gordonjcp, Fri 20 Jan 2012, 18:12, Reply)