Punahou Carnival Physics

Last weekend, while walking around the Punahou Carnival I had the strongest physics realization all year: All these rides are possible because of what we've learned in physics!!! Whipping out my iPhone, I began to take pictures of all the rides with the Snapture app (not on the app store) while fighting my way through the crowd. After getting home from a great carnival and reviewing my majorly blurry pics i stumbled upon this one which turned out surprisingly well. One of my favorite rides when I was little, the swings serve as a great example of rotation, angular velociy and acceleration, and centripetal force. As opposed to picking up speed tangentially, which is hard to measure since the direction of each rider is constantly changing, one could theoretically measure the angular velocity of the riders during the ride and the angular acceleration/deceleration as it starts and stops by measuring the change in the angle per second, and the rate at which that increases or decreases. Additionally, since this does experience angular acceleration it is safe to assume that something within the ride provides torque, or a force that causes an object to rotate. Lastly, since the swings are travelling in a circular motion, the riders are experiencing centripetal force, a force that varies in form (in this case the horizontal component of the tension in the chains that lead from each swing to the top) and causes the riders to travel in a circular motion until the centripetal force is overcome, in such case the riders would exit the circular motion tangent to the point where the force overcame the centripetal force, which fortunately didnt happen.