Slashdot Mirror
Superball!
Ben from Western writes "The Gravity and Chaos Club at Western Washington University dropped 4000+ balls 70 feet through one of our buildings. We took numerous pictures and filmed numerous videos including: from the side on the bottom watching the balls hit the ground, from the top watching the balls drop, from the bottom looking straight up as the balls dropped... Most of our club members are slashdot readers so we hope the general audience of slashdot will enjoy this as well."
Drop 4000+ Bowling balls and I'll watch.
Putting several hundred megs of video online and then posting it on slashdot has never been a good idea.
That took some balls!
Reed does this at its Thesis fair. (Down a hill mind you.)
and im sure you'll soon be the 17000000th. ahh the slashdot effect, we salute you. *another one bites the dust...* anyone got a mirror?
The "Insert Quote Here" line is almost as predictable as inserting an actual quote.
"Not it!"
--"The perfect example of the man of action is the suicide." - William Carlos Williams
0 comments and its slashdotted - wtf
Predicting the motion due to gravity of three bodies is already inexact (the "3 body problem"). However, it can be simulated quite easily, resulting in a mess similar to what is observed in reality. But it will have no predictive power for a single run. Perhaps the statistics could be shown to match up with lots of runs, for example highest rebound and such? Be sure to avoid using decimal.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
If they were slashdot readers why would they intentionally slashdot themselves?
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
So, 135 MB video files ready to download...
Trying to use up the remainder of that research grant I see.
Special kudos to the first that makes a bittorrent available of the 117documentarypremium2.mov file.
I hope some of you folks in the club are also taking pictures of your webserver from different angles, as thousands of people hit it. I've gotten faster transfer rates using two cans and a string. Poor thing. :D
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
Then you know what to expect next. Feel the burn of a good server slashdotting.
Because mail would bounce quicker than you balls.
not super web server. enough said.
wow, if they are regular /. readers why did they put the story up on a server that canno handle the load?
/. effect. I wonder, were the balls uniform or were large and small mixed, a heterogenious drop would be very interesting, especially if dropped in waves (groups) so that balls moving down would meet balls on their initial bounce. Also dropping uniform sets of balls on differen shaped objects would be nice
anyways, it sounds pretty cool to watch, except that i can't get the video or pics off the site due to the
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Go Vikings! I love G-REG! He is a hot man! I love the Chaos Club's balls.
This page should be viewed in Internet Explorer with a screen resolution of at least 1024x768 for optimal viewing.
Putting several hundred megs of video online and then posting it on slashdot has never been a good idea. Well, its a better idea than spending your tuition money on 4000 rubber balls.
--- Worst tagline ever.
I sure hope their server is bouncy as well, cause it sure is down right now.
Would someone who's managed to download the files please put up a torrent? Contact me for assistance if necessary. Thanks.
all the warez kiddies with their rooted edu xdcc's are thrilled this story was posted here
Im trying to waste bandwidth on one of my dedicated servers...if anyone wants to put couple hundred megs of vid's, ild be glad to host it :)
Lets see how fast this mofo goes down.
Email: bhaad@bhaad.com if youre interested
This page should be viewed in Internet Explorer with a screen resolution of at least 1024x768 for optimal viewing.
That's just about all I can see, my OS browser must really inferior.
http://saintaardvarkthecarpeted.com/drop
Carousel is a lie!
They dropped 2000+ geeks? I'd love to watch the real-time video of that. How did they get the 2000+ to jump at the same time? Oh yeah, I read somewhere that they told them Natalie Portman was down there with a beowulf cluster of hot grits.
Boy, that site was taken off faster than a prom dress.
Well well. Someone really dropped the ball.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
David Letterman, eat your heart out.
porp
Most of our club members are slashdot readers so we hope the general audience of slashdot will enjoy this as well
This page should be viewed in Internet Explorer with a screen resolution of at least 1024x768 for optimal viewing.
I left the CS computer labs about 30 minutes before this happened. Dammit, I wish I had remembered!!!
I use Galeon you insensitive clod!
"terrorism" and "pedophilia" are the root passwords to the Constitution
Balls!
Yours is the Gravity and Chaos club? Isn't that rather specific? I mean, do they actually have groupies for that sort of thing?
...by hammering another one that's only serving up a measly 13MB video of 1994 superballs :)
"Our geeky club only has 3916 hits since May. We're trying to increase that by atleast a whole factor. Watch us drop a bunch of balls! We're slashdot loners, so we hope that a good slashdotting will boost our self esteem."
might as well put the vids in RealVideo format.
Drop the pair with the superball immediately above the basketball. When the basketball hits the ground, it rebounds, hits the falling superball and sends the superball into orbit. (Caution: do NOT stand over the pair of balls when they hit, because the superball bounces far higher than the falling height).
It's a fun demonstration of transfer of kinetic energy.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
this is my first "mod parent up" post, that has to count for something.
I know there are a lot of immature slashdotters, but non-descended testicles?
Insert teabagger comment here.
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
Somebody put up a .torrent ! Now! :) This I want to see!
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
That's the university I go to! My Calculus teacher is the one that got to do the honors of opening the box. I didn't expect to find it here!
Nothing hides evidence like a stew. -Gus Pratt
"The Gravity and Chaos Club at Western Washington University dropped 4000+ connections every 70 milliseconds through one of our servers. We took numerous pictures and filmed numerous videos including: from the server logs watching the server hit the ground, from telnet watching the server drop, from http looking straight up as the server dropped..."
I'm thinking they can drop the "Gravity and" part of their name now. The other half, they've definitely earned. That they're almost all slashdot readers kind of implies this chaos was deliberately staged for the above "tomorrow's story".
Slashdotted before their counter could even catch up. Taken down with only 5400 hits?
And to think it's only begun.
Guess they'l have to reset the counter soon
My PI (Principal Investigator = the professor who supervises my thesis research) is teaching physical chemistry right now. I'm going to pass this on to him so he can show his students that movie - that way, when he describes all the molecules in a gas bouncing around everywhere, he can show them what that would look like.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
The video is 1 minute and 18 seconds long. The file is sizes are:
12 FPS 240x180 with standard quality sound (2.32 megabytes) - small size
15 FPS 720x480 with high quality sound (139,918.96 megabytes) - inappropriately large size
30 FPS 720x480 with high quality sound (297,950.89 megabytes) - video connisure size
Extremely nice 30 FPS 720x480 with premium quality sound (423,545.4 megabytes - can be choppy on slow computers) - 400+ MB for one minute of video is just plain wrong.
No wonder the server is slashdotted.
Do me a favor and double it!
I remember when I was in the Air Force working as a radar technician I decided to try this with one ball inside an air traffic control tower late at night. There was a spiral stair case going up about 30 or 40 feet. I thought it would be interesting to drop it and see how far up it would bounce up.
I was very much surprised when the ball hit the concrete and took off in a direction different from vertical and richocheted all over the place and made more of a racket hitting those metal stairs than I thought possible.
Fortunately the noise drew no ones attention and I did not get into trouble for it.
I would think a university would have the bandwidth to withstand an assault of a /.ing, but I was wrong.
I loaded their main page and it was slow. Something tells me that some network admin will be very pissed off Monday morning when he sees the usage logs.
Titan isn't so godlike after all.
(Titan's the name of the webserver (a sun machine)).
Chamrin
I included here the movie for you who can't get the video due to the /. effect:
o o
| oo oo oo oo
\ o o o o
| ooo oo o o oo
/ o o o o o o
| oo oo oo oo
\ o o o o
| ooo oo o o oo ... 4000 balls
4Z5TX
Once WWU get's their bandwidth bill.
Would they be prepared if gravity reversed itself?
The only thing I can't figure out is how to keep the change in my pockets... I've got it! Nudity!
Obligatory Real Genius quote.
because until then, I'll keep making fun of you.
to do this
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Clean up wasn't too bad. We had lots of people to help, and most of the balls were contained on the ground floor, all the doors were closed so they had no where to go. What was funny was the first time we did a test drop, we didn't cover the floor with paper. Seeing as how the bouncy balls were kind of waxy, it waxed the floor really well. :D
The actual event was way cool, just the fact that we're doing something that a lot of people would be like, "What's the point", was worth it enough. Besides seeing all the balls hit the ground and then shoot every which way was really cool. If you get the chance look at the pictures of how many people showed up. Bond(age) hall had every balcony packed with people, which was way cool.
Chamrin
UPDATE:
One of the balls ricocheted into the webserver, film at 11.
I just saw the movie, and it was amazing! The 4000 balls were let go, and they fell, and they bounced all around. I didn't expect that ending...it was pretty cool! Although, character development wasn't that great... and one could argue this was mostly an action flick, but whatever, I still liked it.
"There is no spoon." - The Matrix
That reminds me of the time some midshift buddies and I were killing some time by playing catch with a lacrosse ball over the FB-111 that was parked in our hangar. An errant throw hit a beam in the ceiling and the ball rocketed down and hit the radome of the plane with a huge thud. Later that week questions were raised about the half-inch deep divot in the radome, but the culprits were never revealed.
...but not video compression evidently :(
QuickTime player is crappy, and it constantly nags you to upgrade to the pro version. The latest ver 6 crashes when I play a certain .mov file. If their product is so great, they should allow the download of the codec only - people will still use their player if they want, or not.
While writing an earlier post, I needed to know the mass of a superball. But I didn't see a paper on their results on the web page. Did anybody see a writeup?
He said Balls!
You don't piss into the wind
You don't tug on superman's cape
and you post your own server to slashdot!
Why don't you just give him an apple? To show the effects of kinetic energy.
We're talking about a couple of minutes of video, how could that POSSIBLY be hundreds of megabytes? Any decent modern codec (such as XviD) should be able to encode this in a few MB at most, while still remaining very high quality. I'm not even going to mention the fact that if you guys all read slashdot it should have occured to you that posting hundreds of MB of videos is not going to be possible. BitTorrent anyone?
It's Friday night, and I'm sitting here trying to download of movie of two geeks playing with their balls. Somethings wrong ... very wrong.
117documentarypremium1.mov.torrent hosted by Head Hunter's tracker (it's named ball drop on his page)
what sig?
That would only gain statistics about people who actually RTFA. Could hardly include ALL slashdotters?
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
People are dying in Turkey from terrorist attacks.
Yes, perhaps it's a bit melodramatic, but I couldn't help thinking of it when I read this story.
Puts things in perspective.
Because I love you guys. Unfortunately, I only got two of them:
here
Not all slashdotters have balls, you insensitive clod! They have ovaries instead.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
Which makes sense becuase I have no idea what I'm doing.
"Until Slashdot.org users forget we exist, things will be a little slow / inaccessible"
Sure, but when Slashdot readers forget there comes a dupe.
...You're 23, it's about time your balls dropped!
You'd think they would have set up bittorrents beforehand.
...and hosted them on a different server. They'd still be able to track Slashdot visitors, and they wouldn't have to replace their erstwhile server.
From an 80 inch (~2 meter) drop onto concrete, the 1976 one rebounds 68 inches, the 2001 one only 59 inches. This gives coefficients of restitution of 85% and 74%, respectively.
People today don't have the balls they used to. My guess is that product liability lawsuits have turned everything soft.
Ok, I'll bite. How much money did they save by pulling the plug?
There's a sculpture at a top of a small hill named Wright's Triangle, that consists of four steel planes 20-25 feet long and 8-10 feet tall, all of which angle inward toward each other, one of which is perpendicular to the hill. Well... last year SOMEBODY dumped about 4000 stolen golf driving range balls down the side perpendicular to the hill. There were golf balls all over campus and all over Bellingham for the next couple weeks.
I think we've found our culprit...
sig.
Servers at Western Washington University in Chaos. "Situation grave," reports systems administrator.
That too would be something else!
Pilot to bombadeer...
I. Call to Order
II. Roll Call
III. Old Business
A. Selection of bar for Happy Hour
B. Vote on Method to Slashdot WWU Web Server
i. Construct undergrad-powered cluster to place top-3 in top500, post jpgs on dynamic web page
ii. Drop 4,000 superballs 70 feet and post video
iii. Teach soririty girl to install and use Linux, post jpg's and video.
IV. New Business
A. ????
V. Profit!
paintball
So, the kids at Western Washington University are finally going through puberty? Good for them.
(No disrespect intended, just couldn't pass up the opportunity to make an amusingly dirty comment.)
[insert witty comment here]
Haha they put big file online
But you never know when one will appear, and there's always a huge gravitational field when they do.
paintball
Our server is slow/down for the time being due to increased load. Until Slashdot.org users forget we exist, things will be a little slow / inaccessible. On Monday, we will ensure access from on-campus computers and possibly from the internet at large.
If they were regular /. readers they would realise that come Monday there would be a dupe of this article and therefore a repeat of the /.ing on their server come Monday morning ;)
Where do you buy 4000+ SuperBalls and what does it cost?
Imagining these guys sitting around and thinking this up is not so hard:
"Dude. What if we dropped like a gillion SuperBalls at once."
"Yeah. That would rock."
But that they then followed through and figured out how to pull this off is much more impressive.
Like Digital Freedoms? Then donate to EFF before they're gone.
Could certainly use some more seeders. No one on the tracker has more than 15% of the whole
http://www.pug.bz:9876/~gupta_p/balls/
And a easily clickable link.
I, for one, welcome our new superball overlords!
They should have reseted the counter on the sidebar on their site before posting. It would be quite interesting to see how many people came there from slashdot. I guess about 99% percent from the current count...
Cheers,
RoadkillBunny
For @#$% sakes, stop using a web server to distribute files and media content to masses. Web servers should serve web pages.
use links on your pages for media content distributed by a media distribution system.. such as torrent.. or something equally useful.
when will people learn? for @#$% sakes...
...if most of their members are /. readers that they'd know better than to set themselves up for a /. meltdown.
So Monday I guess we bring down their university's servers, too?
Boing!
Mal the Elder
I'm sure their parents must be real proud to know where their $30,000 a year is going.
Back to the math books for me...
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Me: "Um, no."
I'd hate to know what the server would look like if they had chosen option iii.
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
For a high school graduation prank we released 2003 superballs through various hallways in our school.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
"Like, Omigod, there's this totally cute penguin, and he's all like 'Linix' and stuff, and the names for things are cool too, like there's cats and men, and it's so totally awesome!!"
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
i mean: gravity is hardly a factor in the motion of molecules in the gas phase...
Chaos club? Dropping balls? Sounds like a ploy to get school funding for a beer run to me...
Damn, that David Letterman really was before his time...
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
Dudes, YOU submitted it to slashdot. If you can't take the heat, stay out of the fucking kitchen.
it sort of looks like this was done in bond hall ... which is the same building that used to house the campus networks
http://www.johnaho.com/GCdocumentarylow.mov
for the next ball drop by making the jpg images smaller (they link to the large size ones anyway), or by possibly shifting the "album" of pictures to another page instead of the main event page.
On Slashdot we complain about people posting who do not RTFA. When websites like yours are created without any performance issues in mind, we readers really have little choice.
You guys seem to know Slashdot, so come on, you should be able to at least create an event page more efficient at handling traffic, than the one with dozens of 384x288 sized jpgs.
I guess they didn't realize the GRAVITY of their decision to post this to Slashdot and the inevitable CHAOS that was to follow.
A distinctive mark, characteristic, or sound indicating identity
That's why Apiakun said 2000+. The minimum possible number would be 2000; the upper limit would be 2000 plus the world's entire population of female geeks and castrati.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Bouncy Ball Club