Data Pollution

"Hi, mom"

Seen this story, about three Einsteins in Cincinnati who glued a dollar bill to the sidewalk then went up eight stories to drop water balloons on the people who stopped to check out the immobile bill? One of them is pictured above. (pretty much, you can be sure you're dealing with the seriously stupid when they do the party-grin for the mug-shot. Nick Nolte, now there's a guy who knows how to do a mug-shot; I think I might have one of his shots -- I'll be sure to post it sometime)

Anyway, in the article a physics prof stated that a water balloon falling from an eight story building would be traveling at 60 miles per hour when it hit the ground. That didn't sound right so I thought I'd check his math... Course, we all know v=gt from countless physics tests, but I'd forgotten what g is. (9.81 m/s2) So I google "speed of an object falling story building", thinking it wouldn't hurt to have an estimate of how high an eight story building is. And the information was there in the first page of results. What was discouraging was that of the first ten entries, 7 were about the collapse of the WTC. How can there be that many stupid people out there? Is this the internet Al Gore worked so hard to invent? He must cry nightly.

BTW, could be the U of C prof and I differ on the height of a "story" (I used 3 meters) but I get 48.6 mph, still a pretty good speed for a conk on the head.