Saturday 18 September 2010

The area of a circle =pi x r squared

If you're 1760 feet above ground, the horizon is about 55 miles away.

So you can see an area of 55 x 55 x 3.1415927...

That's about nine and a half thousand square miles. On a clear day anyway.

If you happened to be 1768 feet above the ground, with no way of remaining at that altitude, it would take a fair few seconds to reach the ground.

I know how you'd find the exact time, but I don't precisely know the formulae.

It's something like "The time it takes you to accellerate from rest to terminal velocity(assuming you've reached terminal velocity before reaching the ground) Plus the time you've spent at terminal velocity."

Of course, 1768 feet is to all intents and purposes the same as 50 feet. It doesn't matter much which way you land.





I've found a page on wikipedia, that lists tall structures, and it gives a few that are close to the stated height.

This one,



comes complete with orange bit on the top. It's in Cusseta, GA, and it fits the bill perfectly.



*It's taken a while to get myself back up and running on my main PC. It kept crashing for no apparent reason. When I checked, both memory and hard disks were fine. Getting windows was one thing. Getting back online was quite another. Had laptop for slightly poorer online experience, but I'm glad I've got my big fast proper PC up and running again.

The clean reboot was well worth doing. Firefox no longer crashes when confronted with any kind of flash content. The machine shuts down within moments of being asked. And it's ready to roll in half the previous time of pressing the on button.

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