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I suspect it's a [modified] section of a parabola, so short that it's hard to differentiate it from a straight line.
A flying spark is a piece of incandescent metal or other matter ejected from some glowing object; we see its trajectory because it's hot enough to give off light. When/if at some point it bursts into pieces, still glowing, each piece is thrown out into its own path. After they cool off we don't see them, but [except for air resistance] they're all still just falling bodies with an initial velocity, and the paths are all parabolic. "S = 1/2 a t squared" or some variation of that.
[Of course air resistance can be considerable for objects that small, so the deviation from a true parabola may be quite significant.]
Edit: On rereading, I suspect you weren't asking for the name of the shape of the line at all...but I think the gist of what I said covers what you were getting at, so maybe I did answer the question after all.
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Sparks
Jackie 10/01/2002 11:36 AM ![]()
brightly, brightly
wofahulicodoc 10/01/2002 11:51 PM ![]()
Re: brightly, brightly
FishonaBike 10/02/2002 10:41 AM ![]()
Re: Sparks
wsieber 10/02/2002 5:29 AM ![]()
Re: Sparks
jmh 10/02/2002 6:03 AM ![]()
Re: Sparks
Jackie 10/02/2002 1:16 PM ![]()
Re: Sparks
lapsus linguae 10/03/2002 3:49 AM ![]()
Re: Sparks
Wordwind 10/03/2002 8:47 AM ![]()
Re: Sparks
RhubarbCommando 10/03/2002 2:13 PM ![]()
Re: Sparks
Jackie 10/03/2002 11:36 AM ![]()
Re: Sparks
wwh 10/03/2002 1:27 PM ![]()
Re: Sparks
AnnaStrophic 10/03/2002 1:54 PM ![]()
Re: Sparks
musick 10/07/2002 6:48 PM
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