Premise : When I was in high school, my dad told me of an exam question he had gotten in one of his classes in MIT where he was allowed as many books as he wanted. I always thought that question was pretty damn smart and neat and hoped that my physics teacher might one day ask something as neat. It went along somewhere like this:

A driver burns a red light and is caught by the police. When the police tells the man he drove through the red light the driver says that he saw the light as green. The policemen then gives him a speeding ticket. How fast was the car going if the red light was seen as green by the driver?

Isn’t that an awesome physics question or what? I have no idea why but today when I went to bed I thought back about it and how if I was a teacher I would make trick questions like that where good students would only need to prove the question wrong without having to do the maths while the bad students would try to prove it by maths, find negative answers and then have to deduce that the question is impossible while they would stress because all the really good students would finish the exam in 35 seconds, hand it in and leave. So cruel. (Mike, I blame you for this)

But back to my point : how much of a geek I’ve been today.

• I spent the day watching Stargate episodes.
• I spent the day watching Stargate episodes with friends.
• I spent the day watching Stargate episodes with friends, with the commentary audio tracks enabled.
• I use words like enabled in normal conversation.
• I discussed with Debbie what dorks we were in high school with photos as proof -omg the hair.
• I lay in bed thinking that red colour waves are actually shorter than green waves and thus going faster would make it go beyond visible spectrum.
• I actually got up to prod my dad in bed to talk to him about it.
• I thought of how nerdy that makes me and how I screwed my life’s mission of becoming a mathematician.
• I decided to go to the computer and blog about it.
• I looked at wikipedia and saw that I was actually wrong. Red waves are ~ 630–700 nm (1 wave crest at every 630 nanometer) while green is ~ 490–560 nm. Which means green’s crests are closer to each other, so if you go super fast towards red waves, you might might run into them quickly enough that they crest more closer together: making the red turn into yellow orange and then appear as green.

P.S. I got two B+ and one A- this semester :) Yay me!