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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!
"Not it!"
--"The perfect example of the man of action is the suicide." - William Carlos Williams
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.
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.
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!
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
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."
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.
Somebody put up a .torrent ! Now! :) This I want to see!
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
"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".
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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!
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]
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.
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...
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.