I'm about to disclose to you a cliff diving fact I learned in a magazine recently, and then explain why it stuck in my head. SInce it is unlikely that any reader of this blog gives a damn about cliff diving, this may seem odd but, hey, it's my blog. To pad this out a bit, I'll start with the sourcing. The following fact comes from the Sept. 2016 issue of SELF magazine. SELF is a woman's health periodical, which includes some celebratory pieces on distaff athletes, and I encountered this issue while sitting in a waiting room with a dearth of other worthwhile material. Moving on..... Here's the fact. If a cliff is 30 meters above the water, then a diver will hit the surface of the water at 50 miles an hour. I haven't done the computation to check it out. On this planet, IIRC, an object in freefall due to gravity moves toward the center of the earth at an accelerating pace, velocity increasing at 9.8 meters per second per second. So: what struck me as w...
