Speed of Light Measurement Using Ping
Thomas Colthurst writes "You've no doubt already read the story of ping,
but have you ever used it to measure the speed of light?" Here's a case where all that cat5 on college campuses can actually be used for education ;)
And according to Unreal Tournament, the speed of light is about 50 miles per hour.
1. Ping a machine farther away for more accurate results.
2. Have the entire lab flood-ping it to collect statistics at a faster rate.
3. Get some other shools doing this at the same time so you can compare results.
I recommend slashdot.org.
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This is a little off topic, but not much so bear with me.
A friend of mine found physics easy in high school, but found his teacher unbearable. So he would always convert his (generally correct) answers into inconvenient units, you know, pico-thises, nano-thats.
One time the question was "what is the speed of light?"
His answer? "1 lightyear/year"
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...