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From: dgary@ecsvax.UUCP (D Gary Grady)
Newsgroups: net.puzzle
Subject: Re: using a barometer to ... (pointer needed)
Message-ID: <1091@ecsvax.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 25-Apr-85 12:43:17 EDT
Article-I.D.: ecsvax.1091
Posted: Thu Apr 25 12:43:17 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 28-Apr-85 05:25:31 EDT
References: <257@moncol.UUCP> <367@cmu-cs-k.ARPA>, <175@frog.UUCP>
Organization: Duke U Comp Ctr
Lines: 26

>>I remember seeing published somwhere (Reader's Digest? Games?)
>>a canonical list of ways to measure the height of a building using
>>a barometer (throw if off the roof and measure the time to hit the
>>ground, etc.).

> Sometime around 1973 or 1974 I got the question in a quiz in high school.
> 
>					David Hudson

I vaguely remember reading an account in Physics Today around 1971 or 72
of an instructor who had asked this question on a quiz and gotten a
bunch of "creative" answers (as David speaks of giving).  There was some
discussion in the letters column over whether the student should have
been given good marks or bad for the response, with the consensus
favoring the good-marks theory.  If David's recollection on the date is
wrong, perhaps he is the actual genesis of this story.  It is also
possibel that a coincidence is involved.  I've long wondered about an
item in a book of grafiti published in the late 60s that contained one
I'd invented:  "Lenin's tomb is a Communist's plot."  Did someone else
come up with that, or did it propagate fast enough to get published in a
grafiti collection about a year or so after I invented it?  Who knows?
-- 
D Gary Grady
Duke U Comp Center, Durham, NC  27706
(919) 684-3695
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