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."

Bah!

[Anonymous Coward]

Drop 4000+ Bowling balls and I'll watch.

Re:Bah!

[jest3r]

Don't forget: Western Washington University also brought us the Beer Church! [beerchurch.com]

Re:Bah!

[Admiral Llama]

Drop Squad [dropsquad.com] is cooler. 4000+ balls is a pretty good start though.

Huh

[TexVex]

From the Web site:

Our image/video 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.

They should rename themselves to the Gravity / Chaos Club.

Instant +5 Funny comment

[neonstz]

Putting several hundred megs of video online and then posting it on slashdot has never been a good idea.

Re:Instant +5 Funny comment

[WesG]

Well at least he had the balls to post it... :-)

Re:Instant +5 Funny comment

[joe_bruin]

they may have a lot of balls at Western Washington University, but apparently they're a little short in the fat pipe department.

Re:Instant +5 Funny comment

[Exatron]

That shouldn't matter. It's not the size of your pipe, it's how you use it.

Tomorrow's Story...

[nick_davison]

"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".

Re:Instant +5 Funny comment

[Aliencow]

I bet if you try to email them now it will bounce...

Re:Instant +6 Funny comeback

[jpm242]

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.

Where's the torrent?

[TheSHAD0W]

Would someone who's managed to download the files please put up a torrent? Contact me for assistance if necessary. Thanks.

Re:Instant +5 Funny comment

[bobbozzo]

It is if you're in the Chaos club!

Re:Instant +5 Funny comment

[yintercept]

I suspect that the /. affect is the thing the group is hoping to measure. Thousands of users slamming servers can provide a wonderful amount of click stream data.

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.

Re:hasn't anyone ever heard of

[OverlordQ]

Well one thing you need is other people to actually download the stuff first (the other ISP's) so basically it's still just like bittorrent in that you have many seeds for the downloaders to choose from.

Re:hasn't anyone ever heard of

[agentk]

That's neat. But why don't we actually use it?

1024-low [freecache.org] 1024-std [freecache.org] 117-low [freecache.org] 118-low [freecache.org] 118-std [freecache.org] 118-up-low [freecache.org] 118-up-std [freecache.org] 2dn-low [freecache.org] 2dn-std [freecache.org] 3up-low [freecache.org] 3up-std [freecache.org] 4dn-low [freecache.org] 4dn-std [freecache.org] 118-slow-low [freecache.org] 118-slow-std [freecache.org] 118-up-slow-low [freecache.org] 118-up-slow-std [freecache.org] 3-slow-low [freecache.org] 3-slow-std [freecache.org] backwards-slow [freecache.org] backwards [freecache.org]

These ought to start working as soon as nettobert.physics.wwu.edu comes back online.

reed

Re:Instant +5 Funny comment

[NanoGator]

"Putting several hundred megs of video online and then posting it on slashdot has never been a good idea."

It's just a reminder that those of us that don't RTFA are underappreciated.

Some Balls

[Anonymous Coward]

That took some balls!

Watch our balls drop?

[stevesliva]

I know there are a lot of immature slashdotters, but non-descended testicles?

Insert teabagger comment here.

Cleanup?

[Bob Vila's Hammer]

"Not it!"

Re:Cleanup? - not too bad.

[Anonymous Coward]

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

slashdot readers?

[Breakfast Pants]

If they were slashdot readers why would they intentionally slashdot themselves?

Re:slashdot readers?

[Krach42]

Who wouldn't want to get slashdotted... It's like bragging right amoung geek groups.

Re:slashdot readers?

[Breakfast Pants]

The bragging right is slashdotting someone else with your submission... slashdotting yourself is an embarssment.

Re:slashdot readers?

[Geek of Tech]

But surviving a slashdotting would make them almost mythical.

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?".

RTFA?

[GQuon]

That would only gain statistics about people who actually RTFA. Could hardly include ALL slashdotters?

Re:slashdot readers?

[Liselle]

This is presuming you can get close enough to the webserver without needed a hazard suit and a commercial-grade fire extinguisher.

Re:slashdot readers?

[DarkSarin]

Yeah, but their gonna need a new "visitors since 5/29/03" sign--that one's gonna hit its five digit limit real quick!

Re:slashdot readers?

[cpeterso]

YOU can't and HE can't. Only the Slashdot admins can. He is saying Slashdot user statistics are "unveiled" to arbitrary web sites.

Re:slashdot readers?

[gorilla]

If you click on a link on a site, then the site which is linked TO can log the referer. Therefore by putting up a link on slashdot, and analyzing who follows that link, you can get an estimate of the slashdot population.

Re:slashdot readers?

[jafiwam]

Well, yeah... but rather it will be small subset of the Slashdot readership as the vast majority don't bother to read the linked article anyway...

Won't someone think of the bandwidth

[dswensen]

So, 135 MB video files ready to download...

Trying to use up the remainder of that research grant I see.

Re:Won't someone think of the bandwidth

[seanadams.com]

No, much more - that largest file is half a terabyte! :)

The video is 1 minute and 18 seconds long.

12 FPS 240x180 with standard quality sound (2.32 megabytes)
15 FPS 720x480 with high quality sound (139,918.96 megabytes)
30 FPS 720x480 with high quality sound (297,950.89 megabytes)
Extremely nice 30 FPS 720x480 with premium quality sound (423,545.4 megabytes - can be choppy on slow computers)

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

Bittorrent ??

[jehreg]

Special kudos to the first that makes a bittorrent available of the 117documentarypremium2.mov file.

Thousand of hits

[Liselle]

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

Re:Thousand of hits

[Migrant Programmer]

pictures... from different angles, as thousands of people hit it.

I'd hit it!

No, really!

Feel the Burn

[AttillaTheNun]

"Most of our club members are slashdot readers so we hope the general audience of slashdot will enjoy this as well."

Then you know what to expect next. Feel the burn of a good server slashdotting.

Hope your not running a mailserver on the same box

[Anonymous Coward]

Because mail would bounce quicker than you balls.

Re:Hope you learn "your" != "you're"

[Aardpig]

because until then, I'll keep making fun of you.

...and in this context your would be the appropriate spelling; furthermore, it would seem that the OP meant this in their post. Which leads me to believe that, not only is the egg on your face, but you also come across as a moronic jerk. Congrats, you dickless wonder!

Re:Hope you learn "your" != "you're"

[Aardpig]

i believe he was referring to the title of the post.

And there's the egg on my face. Hmmm, mustn't post after 3 bottles of wine. Still, the OP made a funny remark, and the pedantry of the responder just exposed the latter as a wanky curmudgeon. Which was my hic point hic.

Time to upgrade?

[tarquin_fim_bim]

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.

/.'d

[ee_moss]

Boy, that site was taken off faster than a prom dress.

Re:/.'d

[Anonymous Coward]

"than a prom dress..."

What's sad is that I initially read that as PROM... as in P-ROM, as in Programmable ROM.

*sigh* I need a social life....

Re:/.'d

[halo8]

im sure most of us could take off a P-ROM chip than we could on a prom dress...

*sigh*

such is the life of a /.'er

Re:/.'d

[ee_moss]

... not that many of us /.'ers would know first-hand how fast that would be

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Slashdotted

[MadFarmAnimalz]

Well well. Someone really dropped the ball.

Re:Slashdotted

[X_Bones]

your post needs to come with a rimshot noise, and a basket of fruit for us to throw at you...

The Late Show

[porp]

David Letterman, eat your heart out.

porp

Huh?

[Heartz]

Balls!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Of course.

[raehl]

But you never know when one will appear, and there's always a huge gravitational field when they do.

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 :)

what this is really about

[Anonymous Coward]

"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."

Fucking quicktime,

[TCaM]

might as well put the vids in RealVideo format.

Re:Fucking quicktime,

[Dyolf Knip]

the fact that RealPlayer is bloated, whereas quicktime is not

I'm not particularly enthused with either of the players. Get Media Player Classic and just install the QT and Real codecs. MPC will happily use them.

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.

Re:Basketball + Superball = WOW

[X_Bones]

yep... did this once in my dorm, dropped the basketball+superball onto a hard tile floor. The superball rocketed sideways and hit my roommate right in the middle of the forehead; he damn near choked on the hot dog he was eating. Funniest thing I've ever seen...

Re:Basketball + Superball = WOW

[cybermace5]

Murphy's Corollary of Dorm Room Physics:

If anything you do causes an object to fly away at high speed, your roommate will either be directly in the flight path OR in the reflected trajectory from one or more walls.

Addendum: when the object is thrown back at even higher speed, it will invariably bounce back and hit your roommate again.

Re:Basketball + Superball = WOW

[mOdQuArK!]

I always had fun sticking a pen into the superball before dropping it from a couple of stories up. When it hits the ground, the superball stays (or doesn't bounce very high) but transfers most of its energy to the pen. If it hits just right, you can catch the pen on its way back up.

I kept on wondering how high the pen would go if your superball was bowling-ball sized :)

As you stated, it's best to keep everyone away from direct line of fire of the impact site, since that pen comes blasting away incredibly

Re:Basketball + Superball = WOW

[Piquan]

Besides the problem of making a highly elastic orbital vehicle, you also have the problem of making, transporting, inflating, and lifting a basketball that's a 1500m in diameter and 980,000kg. That's about as much mass as all the fans at a Big Ten game, and the size of 50 basketball courts end-to-end.

Eeeeek mirror!

[Daath]

Somebody put up a .torrent ! Now! :) This I want to see!

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

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

Mirror Mirror Mirror

[TheRagingTowel]

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

2000 pairs of balls will drop

[YoungBonzi]

Once WWU get's their bandwidth bill.

Sure, they go downstairs, but...

[AntiOrganic]

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.

WARNING -- SPOILER!

[CHaN_316]

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.

Re:WARNING -- SPOILER!

[Corporate Drone]

Yeah, well, they'll show the stuff they had to edit out (character development, etc) in the "extra 43 minutes of footage 4-DVD extended set!!!!" that's coming out next November...

Writeup?

[Piquan]

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?

WTF dudes?

[skookum]

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?

Torrent Here!

[nrlightfoot]

117documentarypremium1.mov.torrent hosted by [no-ip.com] Head Hunter's tracker [no-ip.com] (it's named ball drop on his page)

Re:Torrent Here!

[spinkham]

Mod up... Torrent here...

Superballs aint what they useta be

[Viadd]

I have two Wham-O superballs, one labelled (c)1976, the other labelled (c) 2001 (which I bought a couple of months ago). The 1976 one is dark blue and hard. The 2001 one is black and much softer.

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.

Re:Superballs aint what they useta be

[hitzroth]

Either that or things get harder/more efficient as they get older.

I used to go to WWU...

[httpamphibio.us]

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...

Agenda from October WWU Grav&Chaos Club Meetin

[raehl]

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!

Dropping Balls

[Snover]

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.)

they musn't be /. readers ...

[Pyrometer]

The can't be regular /. readers given this announcement ...

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 ;)

Logistics

[BrianWCarver]

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.

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...

That's real...profound

[drix]

I'm sure their parents must be real proud to know where their $30,000 a year [gwu.edu] is going.

Back to the math books for me...

Re:That's real...profound

[z4ce]

Western Washington University != George Washington University != University of Washington != Washington University [in St. Louis](where I am attending).

Typically misconceptions though. Whenever I say I go to Washington University people tend to associate it more with Seattle than George Washington (D.C.) though. Even though we're ranked higher than both! :)

G.W. is super expensive though. I thought $27,000 a year for tuition was expensive... It looks like they make you buy the meal plan at G.W. too. That's

Superballs

[TheOnlyCoolTim]

For a high school graduation prank we released 2003 superballs through various hallways in our school.

Tim

Re:arfg

[Bob Vila's Hammer]

It pays to be a Slashdot subscriber [slashdot.org].

Mirror of the pics here:

[Saint Aardvark]

Managed to grab 'em from my cache; probably some dupes.

http://saintaardvarkthecarpeted.com/drop [saintaardv...rpeted.com]

Re:Mirror of the pics here:

[gad_zuki!]

Email me regarding getting those files to me and setting up a torrent.

Another Mirror Here.

[Pavan_Gupta]

http://www.pug.bz:9876/~gupta_p/balls/

And a easily clickable link [www.pug.bz].

Re:Mirror of the pics here:

[echucker]

A wee bit more light and faster shutter speeds would help next time.

Re:Behold the power of /.

[Adam9]

I wish one of them would mirror it then. I'm trying to mirror it now, but no luck.

Re:Behold the power of /.

[1984]

Nah. It's not that hard to handle server-wise if you're just delivering a handful of media files, even big ones. We had a 512MB Netra X1 dish out about 50Mb/s of those for a couple of one time under the Slashdot effect (we'd put them on a spare box because we weren't too sure what'd happen.) Of course your network connection wants to be good, too...

Re:Amazing...

[MoOsEb0y]

More likely the webserver crapped out from the hits. That, or an admin pulled the plug for using too much bandwidth. It's not free.

Re: Bandwidth not free.

[NortWind]

Ok, I'll bite. How much money did they save by pulling the plug?

Insensitive clod

[GQuon]

Not all slashdotters have balls, you insensitive clod! They have ovaries instead.

Re:Computer simulation?

[jared_hanson]

The other poster is right about the three gravity problem. The three bodies in question need to each exert gravitational forces on each other in significant amounts. With items located on Earth (balls in this case) the gravitational pull off Earth itself on the balls far, far, far... (continue for approximately infinity) outweighs the incredibly miniscule forces the balls may have on each other. Thus, the inter-ball forces can effectively be ignored.

For example, you do not have to take into account the