Tag: seconds

Estimating the Distance of a Lightning Strike

By Anupum Pant

Everyone who’s studied basic science at school knows that light travels much much faster than sound. Light can travel about 300,000 km in a single second. Sound, in the same time would cover about 0.3 km. That’s a huge difference.

Considering that, it is fairly easy to calculate how far a lightning strike happens by measuring the time it takes the sound to reach you after you see the lightning. In that case, taking into account the enormous speed of light, you assume that the light instantly reaches you and you just count the seconds it takes for the sound to be heard at the place you are.

Then multiplying the seconds with 0.3 would give you, in kilometres, how far it happened – an estimation of, course.

So, if there isn’t a mess of lightning strikes happening somewhere, which usually isn’t the case, and if you can clearly tell which sound came from which lightning strike, which you can’t in most cases, you can actually estimate the distance of a strike very easily.

If you think that’s great. You might be interested in:
How to estimate the temperature.
and How to estimate the time to sunset.

Six Weeks and Ten Factorial – Bizarre Math Coincidence

By Anupum Pant

The number of seconds in 6 weeks might be of little importance to anyone. However there is an interesting bit of trivia related to it, or call it a bizarre mathematical coincidence. Here it is…

The number of seconds in 6 weeks, or 42 days (The answer to life universe and everything) equates to:
6 X 7 (days) X 24 (hours) X 60 (minutes) X 60 (seconds) = 3,628,800 sec
The number 362,880, on the first glance, looks like very random number. Now here is what this number is equal to…

10 factorial (denoted by 10!).
Or simply, 10 X 9 X 8 X 7 X 6 X 5 X 4 X 3 X 2 X 1 = 3,628,800

Down to a single second, the number of seconds in 6 weeks is exactly equal to the numerical 10! Very strange!

One thing you could do is split the 6 weeks calculation into factors, and see it for yourself. The result is all numbers from 1 – 10. The most amazing factoring I’ve ever seen.

If you are too lazy to calculate it yourself, go to this WolframAlpha calculation and see it for yourself. It subtracts 10! seconds from 6 weeks (the result is exactly 0). Apples and Oranges, I know, but the 6 weeks refers to seconds in 6 weeks, here.

6-weeks-and-10-factorial

Salutes to the person who discovered this.

First seen on [Reddit]