Curling

Last week I learned how to play the sport of curling. The Aalborg Curling Klub hosts free practices for curling for students of all abilities every wednesday night and every other friday. For those of you who do not know what curling is because it is not played much outside of Canada/ Scandinavia, it is a sport much like shuffleboard but on ice.
If you have never seen curling either in the Olympics or on a visit to Canada, it is played on an ice rink. Two teams of four players compete to score the most amount of points in 10 ends. An end is when both teams throw all 8 stones down the ice. The stones are thrown from the start to towards the "house," which is a series of concentric circles at the other end of the rink. The team with the closest stone at the end of the end will get points, one for each stone in the house that is closer than any stone that the other team has in the house. Each team has a Captain, who directs the thrower about where he should aim, and acts as a defensive sweeper. There is also a thrower who initially pushes off and sends the stone on its way across the ice. They are famous for being very loud to inspire the remaining two players who are the sweepers. Their job is to correct for inaccuracies in the throw by sweeping more or less. Every player should however know how to play all positions because traditionally each person throws two stones so everyone plays all positions.The name of the game is called curling because when you throw the stone you are supposed to spin it slightly so that it travels on a curved path or "curls." Now the next bit is going to be a bit "mathy" and "nerdy." This is okay because I am both of those things... and it helps to explain why the game is fun/interesting. If you could careless skip to the paragraph after...
Any who, despite what one may assume the stone does not travel on a perfectly symmetrical parabolic curve. Instead the apex of the curve is much closer to the house than to the start. The reason the stone curls is because of the resistance to angular velocity caused by the friction on the ice. In other words as the stone spins it pushes off the ice in the direction of rotation causing it to not travel in a straight line. However, when the stone is initially released it has a greater forward velocity, therefore its momentum pushes it forwards faster which means the effect of the rotation on the ice is less. When the stone slows down it curves much more because it is noticing a greater effect due to the angular velocity caused by rotation. This allows a skilled thrower to slide his/her stone around and behind those of their opponents. The sweepers aid in this process because sweeping melts the surface, therefore if you sweep in front of the stone it will travel further but it will also curl less because, again there will be less friction which means it is harder for it to change direction. In curling friction is both a curse and a blessing...
So I played curling on wednesday and friday. Wednesday was really fun but there were so many people we got little playing time in. On friday there were not as many people so we could play a lot. In fact one of the senior members of the club played on my team because there were only seven on my lane. We were talking a lot and he was teaching us about strategy and such since the rest of us had just learned on tuesday. Apparently I had some talent however, because he invited me to join the club at a little train camp/practice competition in Arhus this coming saturday. Additionally he invited me to practice with the club on wednesday because the other lanes are rented by a private company so there is not free curling for students but club members have some space reserved every day so that will be fun. Curling along with ping pong add to the list of sports that I did not play in the US nor are necessarily readily available but are popular here in Denmark.