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Superball!

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the things-you-don't-learn-in-physics-class dept.

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."

3 of 251 comments (clear)

  1. Re:slashdot readers? by lplatypus · · Score: 5, Interesting
    If they were slashdot readers why would they intentionally slashdot themselves?

    Imagine the statistics that one could gather about the slashdot readership simply by processing the access log from a slashdotted site. One could answer questions like "how many Microsoft employees read slashdot from work?" or "how many people read slashdot from China?".

  2. Basketball + Superball = WOW by G4from128k · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  3. hasn't anyone ever heard of by halr9000 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Freecache? I've never used it, but I've also not seen it used widely yet and I wonder why. Please check it out. It's perfect for this type of situation. Unlike bittorrent, there is no seeding, no extra steps. Quote:

    An example:
    Say an up-and-coming rock band, the RockLobsters, has a website that has a large file, say

    http://www.rocklobsters.com/videos/my-new-rock-v ideo.mpg

    that is 5MB-1GB in size. If it gets popular, they will lose their guitars and homes to their ISP because their bandwidth bill will shoot up.

    While keeping their big file on their webhost, the RockLobsters change the URL on their webpage to point to:

    http://freecache.org/http://www.rocklobsters.com /videos/my-new-rock-video.mpg

    When a user clicks on this,

    • the user downloads the file from a nearby machine on their ISP's network, and
    • the user is happy because it was fast.
    • The RockLobsters are happy because they distributed their file to another user but did not have to send the file from their ISP.
    • The RockLobsters' website's weblog registers that a download happened so they can ratchet up their expectation of breaking into the big leagues.
    • The user's ISP is happy because they only downloaded it to their network once and served it to many users thereby saving on their Internet connectivity bill.