Starship Asterisk*

• If I shot an infinitely strong laser beam into the sky
  at a random point, how much damage would it do? — Garrett D.

• Could a person walk the entire city of NY in their lifetime? (including inside apartments) — Asaf Shamir

• People sometimes say "If I had all the money in the world ..." in order to
  discuss what they would do if they had no financial constraints. I'm curious,
  though, what would happen if one person had all of the world's money? — Daniel Pino

• My 12-year-old daughter is proposing an interesting project. She is planning to attach a number
  of helium balloons to a chair, which in turn would be tethered by means of a rope to a Ferrari.
  Her 13-year-old friend would then drive the Ferrari around, while she sits in the chair enjoying
  uninterrupted views of the countryside. Leaving aside the legal and insurance difficulties, my
  daughter is keen to know the maximum speed that she could expect to attain, and how many
  helium balloons would be required. — Phil Rodgers, Cambridge, UK

• How fast could you visit all 50 states? — as discussed by Stephen Von Worley on Data Pointed

Beyond wrote:so... what is the equivalent resistance between the two marked nodes, in the above xkcd?

BDanielMayfield wrote:

Beyond wrote:so... what is the equivalent resistance between the two marked nodes, in the above xkcd?

My quick guess would be 1 ohm. Prove me wrong, I dare ya.

BMAONE23 wrote:

BDanielMayfield wrote:

Beyond wrote:so... what is the equivalent resistance between the two marked nodes, in the above xkcd?

My quick guess would be 1 ohm. Prove me wrong, I dare ya.

http://m.wikihow.com/Calculate-Series-a ... Resistance
Here is the simple equation

Beyond wrote:The answer is.... stick the ends of the two leads of an Ohmmeter on the two nodes and read what the scale says. I've got the meter, but no 1-ohm resistors.

Beyond wrote:so... what is the equivalent resistance between the two marked nodes, in the above xkcd?

Chris Peterson wrote:These resistor network problems are routinely assigned in first year college electronics class.

Chris Peterson wrote:

Beyond wrote:so... what is the equivalent resistance between the two marked nodes, in the above xkcd?

These resistor network problems are routinely assigned in first year college electronics class.

In this case, the answer is about 0.77 ohms (in fact, it's exactly 4/pi - 0.5).

Nitpicker wrote:In my classes, we failed if we gave the correct answer with no derivation:
http://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath668/kmath668.htm

• arXiv.org > cond-mat > arXiv:cond-mat/9909120 > 08 Sep 1999 (v1), 12 Jan 2000 (v4)

• What if everything was antimatter, EXCEPT Earth? — Sean Gallagher

• When I was about 8 years old, shoveling snow on a freezing day in Colorado, I wished
  that I could be instantly transported to the surface of the Sun, just for a nanosecond,
  then instantly transported back. I figured this would be long enough to warm me up
  but not long enough to harm me. What would actually happen? — AJ, Kansas City

• If you stripped away all the rules of car racing and had a contest which was
  simply to get a human being around a track 200 times as fast as possible,
  what strategy would win? Let's say the racer has to survive. — Hunter Freyer

• What is the farthest from Earth that any Earth thing has died? — Amy from NZ

• What if people's incomes appeared around them as cash in real time?
  How much would you need to make to be in real trouble? — Julia Anderson, Albuquerque, NM

• Stopping rain from falling on something with an umbrella or a tent is boring. What
  if you tried to stop rain with a laser that targeted and vaporized each incoming
  droplet before it could come within ten feet of the ground? — Zach Wheeler