Are they of specific department stores?

I don't think so. I believe at least some, if not most, of their stock is direct from manufacturers.

It was on this day in 1927 that a man named Philo T. Farnsworth transmitted the first ever all-electronic television picture in history. Farnsworth had gotten the idea for television when he was just 14 years old, living on a potato farm in Idaho. His high school science teacher had gotten him interested in electricity, and he studied electrical engineering in his spare time. One day, he was tilling a potato field, walking with the horse back and forth, when he suddenly had a vision of a machine that could break an image down, line by line, and then reconstruct it on a screen.

And then his brother-in-law, Cliff Gardner, learned to make glass tubes. t /Sports Night

Would it be weird to close my office door so I could chair-dance to Rage Against the Machine?

Going home on the El last night, I was angry and listening to Helmet. Nobody sat next to me. I think they could sense the homicidal fury. This morning I had Sleater-Kinney cranked to drown out the screaming baby.

I wish I had an office door I could close.

1) I also guess 2X.

2) I know that gravity is measured in meters-per-second squared, so I know it's an acceleration rate. So the ball dropped from 10 feet will not be going as fast as a ball dropped from a gerater height. OTOH, I also know about terminal velocity (thanks Mythbusters), so I know that, to tie it all together, a cat thrown from a 10-story window is just as likely to survive as a cat thrown from a lower window.

I wish I had an office door I could close.

Well, I won't have one in a couple of weeks. They're moving me to a new project. Upside: better commute. Downside: no office (and certainly a lot less internet time, sigh).

a cat thrown from a 10-story window is just as likely to survive as a cat thrown from a lower window.

Really? I thought that they were less likely to survive if the window was sufficiently low that they didn't have time to get in a safe landing position.

Then again, not a fan of Mythbusters, so it's not like I saw the ep.

I thought that they were less likely to survive if the window was sufficiently low that they didn't have time to get in a safe landing position.

That's the story I heard too. And I was told babies, OTOH, are not safer falling higher, because their heads weigh too much. So they don't end up in a safe landing position, they end up head down.

Dana, don't you ever, EVER close that tag.

OK, I'm gonna start with #2 and then go to #1.

2) You drop a heavy object from a height of 10 feet, and when it hits the ground it has a velocity of y. What would be the velocity if you drop it from 20 feet? From 40 feet?

20 feet = √2y.

40 feet = 2y.

This seems fairly unintuitive to me. The way I think of it is when the object falls the first ten feet, it will spend a certain amount of time falling in the 0-10 feet range. But as it continues falling, it will spend less time in the 10-20 foot range (eta: giving it less time to accelerate), as it's already moving fairly fast. So in order for the falling object to double its speed, it needs to fall another 30 feet instead of the original 10 feet, for a total of 40 feet.

This might make more sense if I could create a graph. Maybe I will if I have the time.

I thought that they were less likely to survive if the window was sufficiently low that they didn't have time to get in a safe landing position.

A cat can wrench itself around pretty fast -- when my cat rolls off the bed or sofa or whatever (he's not too bright) he still can generally land feet-down.