Er, kind of ignore the last post. I forgot that every year, Caltech has it’s famous Pumpkin Drop at Midnight of Halloween. The big question is: “What happens when you freeze a pumpkin in liquid nitrogen and drop it off the rooftop of a tall building such as Milikan Library?”
Some pictures:
Since this crappy cameraphone can’t color balance and focus right, I couldn’t get any pictures of pumpkins actually dropping. But afterwards:
and a close up:
So what did actually happen? Well, supposedly, the pumpkins would give off a flash of blue light when they shattered on the ground (it took them about 2.5 seconds to hit the ground, calculate the height ;)). I think this is somewhat similar to the effect of crushing a lifesaver mint in the dark (it gives off a flash of light). However, I didn’t actually see a flash myself. Perhaps this was because it happened so fast. Nevertheless, they threw about 24 pumpkins down all together. Some guy actually fell off the top of the building and screamed the whole way down before dying. He turned into a mannequin later though.
Oh, one more thing but unrelated: The stars were amazingly clear in the sky over Milikan. I’ve never seen such clear stars before. It was just like going into a planetarium. I easily picked out a few constellations (I haven’t been able to do that since I was a little kid), and even found an extremely bright “star” which I suspect was either Venus or Mars because of its slightly orangish complexion (I think it’s Venus). I also spotted a part of the sky that had a “galaxy” look so I think it’s a galaxy ^^;;. I also saw a really fast moving three points of light in the sky without any noise, but I think that’s just a pretty good aircraft. Yeah, sure.