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."

Re:slashdot readers?

[lplatypus]

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?".

Give the poor server a rest...

[billscarwasher]

...by hammering another one that's only serving up a measly 13MB video of 1994 [mit.edu] superballs :)

Basketball + Superball = WOW

[G4from128k]

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.

THAT is what gasses looks like

[sam_handelman]

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.

Tried that one once

[mpn14tech]

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.

Re:Won't someone think of the bandwidth

[freeslacker]

Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/vinum/export 462G 282G 143G 66% /export

take a few drives and concatenate with vinum
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/ books/handbook/vinum-vinum.html

Stupid airman tricks

[peekitty]

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.

Re:Tried that one once

[titaniam]

I tried it too, except mine was a 5cm diameter steel ball wrapped tightly in 3cm more of rubber bands. Utter demolition of anything and everything in the way of that ball after dropping several stories and ricocheting in a stairwell. If you rolled the ball down a long hallway (quickly) it would (appear to) return to you (after large bang) twice as quickly, bouncing madly.
A nice heavy steel ball also does wonders when rolled slowly on a wavy floor. It appears to have a mind of its own, and drives the dog nuts when it rolls back and forth and changes direction on an apparently level floor.

hasn't anyone ever heard of

[halr9000]

Freecache [archive.org]? 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.

STOP USING WEB SERVERS

[bojan]

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...