My attempt. Haven't proofread the exact values, decent odds I copied something wrong at some point hehe. I considered writing a program to record all these values systematically and therefore be able to feasibly include the uncertainty in the measurements (using the range of kitchen bin heights instead of the average for instance), which would also have enabled me to be able to tell you which piece of information would be most useful to me (converge to the true answer faster).
As for the track bending, my thinking is that as long as the bends are mostly elastic, the energy will be returned to the ball when the contracted material expands again, thus converting it back to kinetic energy. A bigger issue is the potentially alternate trajectories (neon green in my diagrams) that would massively change the results.
My attempt.
Haven't proofread the exact values, decent odds I copied something wrong at some point hehe.
I considered writing a program to record all these values systematically and therefore be able to feasibly include the uncertainty in the measurements (using the range of kitchen bin heights instead of the average for instance), which would also have enabled me to be able to tell you which piece of information would be most useful to me (converge to the true answer faster).
As for the track bending, my thinking is that as long as the bends are mostly elastic, the energy will be returned to the ball when the contracted material expands again, thus converting it back to kinetic energy. A bigger issue is the potentially alternate trajectories (neon green in my diagrams) that would massively change the results.