Throwing a potato into a hole.

Standard projectile motion with no air resistance — a real thrown potato is dense and slow enough that drag makes only a small difference over 3 m, but it isn't modelled here — a numerical check treating the potato as a 6 cm sphere (drag coefficient 0.47) at a 1 m, 45°, 5 m/s throw lands about 3 cm short of the no-drag distance, under 1%, so leaving it out is a reasonable simplification. g is fixed at 9.81 m/s², the hole sits a fixed 3.00 m away and is treated as 20 cm wide, and the 200 g potato mass only matters for the impact-energy figure — without drag, mass never affects the trajectory itself. The animated throw plays at 0.6× real speed, since some of the faster combinations land in well under a second. “Straight in” and “The lob” use different angle-and-speed combinations that both reach the same hole: one takes a flatter, faster route while the other stays in the air longer on a higher arc. Taskmaster has run several tasks shaped exactly like this — throw an object a fixed distance into a target — which is what prompted this page, alongside the straw-and-hose one.

Launch energy is kinetic energy, KE = ½mv₀² — mass and speed only, which is why it doesn't move when the angle or release-height sliders do. The force figure divides that energy by an assumed 0.6 m arm swing (work = force × distance), a rough estimate since real throwing form varies and isn't modelled here. The cat and chair comparisons use gravitational potential energy, PE = mgh, with a 4 kg house cat climbing a 3 m tree and a 70 kg adult stepping onto a 45 cm chair — reasonable round numbers for a domestic cat's weight and a standard chair seat height, not a measurement of any specific animal or person. These are mechanical work numbers, not calories: muscle is roughly 20–25% efficient, so the actual food energy a cat or person burns climbing is several times higher than the PE quoted here.