Physics 105 Problems in Real Life

I spent many years helping physics 105 students work problems about someone throwing a ball off a hill with some sort of initial velocity where they have to figure out what the time of flight is, or the final distance or something like that.  A common comment is that no one does this in real life.  I've said it myself many times.

This week at work, we had something break.  It sits up fairly high off the floor, and threw some broken pieces across the room.  The details aren't important, but this was a bit of a safety hazard, as things aren't supposed to fly across the room.  As part of the report on what happened, they wanted to come up with an estimate of how fast the pieces were moving across the room, as a gauge of how dangerous the event really was.  So they came to me.  Finally, my skills are fully utilized!  With a few simple formulas I was able to calculate the initial velocity of the objects based on their final location, initial height and initial angle.  Sure, the calculation isn't perfect.  I can only guess a reasonable range of angles (though, because of other things in the room, and, you know, the ceiling, I can do pretty good on that) and we're neglecting friction (as always!), but the point is, I was finally able to use those very basic equations for motion in two dimensions to solve a real problem at work!