It's raining today... It was raining yesterday... I will, most likely, be raining tomorrow... So here's a (possibly) interesting thought about rain...
For a while, I've wondered whether or not rain feels softer when you're higher up... After all, if you drop a penny from 6 feet above the ground, it doesn't do any damage (except maybe to your self-esteem when you realise you've been reduced to dropping pennies from different heights) but if you drop a penny from the top of the Empire State Building it can actually bury itself in a person's skull, or so I'm reliably informed... This is, I think, because from a greater height the penny has more opportunity to increase its velocity...
So, when rain falls from the clouds, if you're on the top of the Empire State Building (which somehow gets itself dragged into all kinds of conversations along similar lines as this) it's fallen a far shorter distance to reach you than when you get rained on at ground level... Does this mean that it feels softer?
I don't know, and I'm unlikely to find out right now, so I thought I'd ask you, my bored and undernourished readers who may or may not exist, to email me at mail@manek.org.uk with an answer, if you know the answer, that is... If not, feel free to email me anyway!
2 comments:
I spit off the Empire State Building once when I was 13.
I've never been more proud.
Until just now...when I realized my saliva might've buried itself in the depths of someone's cranium...
Nope...still kinda proud.
The thing is - rain and pennies are different. Rain starts from much higher up, for one thing, so for any one raindrop the difference in height between the ESB and the surface of the earth is minimal, compared with the distance already travelled (generally several thousand feet). Pennies are a different shape too - the shape of a raindrop depends on its size, but they aren't the same shape as pennies, nor do they have hard edges. It's unlikely you'd notice any difference between being rained on at the top of a tall building and being rained on at ground level. Sorry.
But you could think of the rain as pennies from heaven.... if it helps!
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