Lived in Racine! (And Kenosha’s def better.)
Oh man, Halliday and Resnick! Now those are a pair of names that bring back some memories…
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Oh, I see I misread the question as “which direction will you be facing relative to your initial orientation.” Carry on.
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And that hanger-on, D’Illetante.
“In what direction relative to your initial direction of travel are you?” I hadn’t thought of that interpretation, and had assumed the question was asking what @shaddack answered. But now I’m thinking ‘90° to the left’ is just as valid of an answer to a semantically different question; for me I would need ‘facing’ before the ? to see the question that way.
For the distance question, “how far are you from your starting point?” has to be asking for an ‘as the crow flies’ response.
@dave_b has given us a mass for our cannon balls, this suggests we need to do more than simply hit a target at a distance. Lets say we need to impact the N/W corner of their 100mX100m base at a height of 10m with a force of 50 newtons, from any vector achievable from the launch point (exactly where we were kidnapped from, same elevation as target). I don’t know if this actually leads to a valid question or scenario (is newtons even the unit I’m looking for?) Assume a spherical cow in a vacuum, but at STP and 70% humidity, its a Wednesday, and the target area is large enough that Euclid is our friend at this range.
Go Shaddack!
I think it was a joke about political science that went over all the “real” scientists’ heads.
But I’m not sure, I’m an engineer, not a comedian.
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You know what, I´m pretty sure you´re right. I guess I was tired.
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Another classic undergrad physics problem: (from Tipler I believe)
[quote]
Hovering over the pit of hell, Satan observes that, although a stationary physics student shrieks at frequency f0 = 866.8 Hz, when the student falls aways into the nether-regions, the pitch of his shriek is fl = 847.8 Hz. What is the speed v of descent of the physics student?[/quote]
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Whats the speed of sound in hell?
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Obviously this car has inertial dampers installed and the real problem is figuring out how much deformation of the local curvature of spacetime is effecting their passage through the co-moving tensor array.
My initial calculations peg them near the centre of the sun… or in a co-orbital configuration with a teapot around L3 of Pluto.
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Or the physicist idealized the movements, aware of his limited ability to remember everything so remembered only the more important stuff, trading data volume for ability to remember in a lossy compression like scheme.
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A true physicist would have no problem with computing rotational acceleration equations in her head.
I just mean to imply that there is a lot more data in here than some Cartesian diagrams.
Isn’t a true physicist something like a true Scotsman?
I see a variant of the problem, for a programmer, where the input data are more complete, and he instead of a simple list of few sections gets a datalogged file from cellphone’s IMU, and has to write code for using the accel/gyro/mag data to reconstruct the path. With the victim wiggling in the trunk, so other movements superimposed to the car’s ones and no GPS.
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If you were a computer science major, then you would have to answer it this way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuIheGaiFLM
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Yep!
Want a history lesson?
Physics explanation?
Comp sci ethical hacking?
Punk tunes you never knew you’d love?
Growing orchids?
(Shudders) poli sci?
This is the right plaice.
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Aye, so it is.
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Where ‘true’ is equivalent to a working physicist who is used to shunting complex equations around in her head all day.
The true scotsman may still be arguing over whether or not it’s a blackboard or a black board.
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aaand now I have to go watch Sneakers. 
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I was wondering if someone would Carp about that pun. You have a focused reading capability like a laser breem.
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