Trying to Throw the Trash Out

Last night, I was making dinner in my Birch kitchen. I tried to slide some cucumber peels off the edge of my counter into the trashcan, but (sadly) I missed. I realized that, using kinematics, I could easily figure out why I missed, assuming the trashcan is 0.5 m away from the counter edge, and 0.5m lower than the counter. From the calculation below, it's pretty obvious why I missed. Then I thought, I shouldn't let this happen again. Doing a simple calculation, I then realized I should have pushed the cucumber peels off at a velocity of 1.6 m/s instead of 3.0 m/s. Lesson learned: less velocity means a cleaner kitchen.