The elephant is a peculiar creature. In fact, they are very intelligent and
have been said to have a good sense of humour. An elephant is an animal
that is often used featured in films as well perhaps because elephants
also look kind of funny. One of the more famous elephants is Dumbo,
which was teased because of his big ears but eventually they allowed him
to fly and he became a hero of the animated film. While many say that it
was the writers and animators who made him fly, but I like to think it
was all about the perseverance and willpower this animal possessed. While
elephants are not usually aggressive, they can be aggravated and they can
be vengeful as well. Like they say, the elephant never forgets. They could
perhaps be part of Cosa Nostra because both made men and elephants are
shoving stuff on their trunks.

But while elephants are awesome, I'm concentrating on speaking on elephants
that are ignored on purpose and these are the elephants in the room. The
'elephant in the room' is an obvious idiom which means that there's a
topic which is so obvious it should be addressed but people would rather
choose to ignore it rather than deal with it. In this writing I'll bring
up two examples.

People have odd social rituals and one of them is marriage. Or actually
marriage isn't even the odd part here, but in fact the engagement and
proposal is. Let's face it, usually people who get married are people
who have known each other a few years, are already committed to each
other and have already been sleeping with each other for years. So when
you get married, pretty much nothing changes in your every day life.
Yet people have come up with the concept of engagement. For some
mystical reason all people don't want to get married even if they
would have dated each other for fifteen years. So in case someone would
be dumb enough to pop the question to his girlfriend, who doesn't want
to get married, there's an elephant in the room when she says no. Then
you have to wonder what happens next because she rejected your proposal.
Now if you asked her to marry and bought the ring beforehand, now you
are stuck with a ring that you have no use for. Sounds like success!
I would presume that getting rejected when proposing is probably one
of the biggest humiliations imaginable. In some cases the relationship
comes to an end as some people cannot go back to where they were. So
proposals are quite like playing Russian Roulette when there's basically
nothing to win.

Sometimes women ask men 'Do I look fat?' and in fact probably the only
answer is to reply 'No' without hesitation. This works in theory,
because whatever you do, you are told that you hesitated even if you
didn't or you are told that you're just saying that so that she didn't
feel bad in which case you are a liar. So in any case, when the
question is asked, you're already screwed. So now there's an elephant
in the room again and it's quite likely the person who asked the
question. But no fear, since I have come up with a fat test so the
next time you hear this question, you know what to do. You need two
bicycles and a downhill slope. Ask your girlfriend to ride the
other bicycle and you climb on the other one. Give your girlfriend a
few metres head start. Now when she goes down the slope, you follow her.
If you catch her during the slope because of your weight, you can shout
to her 'Congratulations! You're not fat!' while you're passing her. If
your girlfriend is fat, you will probably see her back fading away from
your sight, but the good thing is that now you're nowhere near to hear
her nag about her weight!

In the simplest mathemathical case, the aforementioned 'fat test' can be seen
as the setup of a simple gravity pendulum. Let us assume that the road is a
large half-pipe, aka a hollow hemisphere.

Each cyclist starts at a set angle on one side, and accelerates downwards
towards the lowest point by the act of gravity. After reaching this point,
inertia will carry the cyclists upwards along the other quadrant. The upwards
momentum is, by the same laws, counteracted by gravity, causing them to
accelerate in the opposite direction as they cross the threshold and begin to
move up the hemisphere.

The pendulum 'string' defines the actual length of the total hemisphere and
also represents the force on the wheels of the bicycle, preventing it from
simply falling into the road. This force acts perpendicularly to the current
position of the cyclist on the hemisphere.

In this situation, the laws of physics state that the actual mass of the 'bob'
or in this case, the cyclist does not affect the length of the swing (and the
time it takes for the cyclists to stop accelerating upwards and come back the
same way... the period).

Also, I think Galileo did an experiment involving two equally shaped objects
of different masses dropped from a large height yielding these results.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendulum for more info.