You know how when you see lightning you can count the seconds until you her the thunder an determine how far away it struck?
Fun fact: “Zero seconds” is a bad answer.
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Comics I Don't Understand 
It’s ironic that he can’t sell (insert item here, such as house), but can talk someone into releasing hostages (pehaps some that no one even KNEW were being held?). Maybe he’s in the wrong career, ya think?
I actually chuckled at this. The priorities of business person and the degree to which they are valued to business people are just numbers. Persuading people to buy and persuading people to release hostages are both negotiating tasks. To the company’s interest the sales are more important.
Huh?? Post Blackout? Counting seconds between lightning and thunder? What do these have to do with the cartoon, or even each other? CIDUBill had a black out caused by lightning strike? …OK, but what does that have to do with the cartoon?
Similarly, I don’t get the cartoon: are the hostages being held by the potential customer? Or are those just two unrelated things?
“CIDUBill had a black out caused by lightning strike?”
I think he’s talking about something happening at the Washington Post today. I couldn’t get in online, but I don’t know any details.
No, right here in New Jersey. Big boom, which is why today’s post (as opposed to today’s Washington Post) was half a day late.
I think I might possibly have been a bit clearer, sorry.
larK, you’ve never counted the seconds between lightning and thunder? Since light travels faster than sound, every five seconds between seeing the lightning and hearing the thunder, translates to about one mile way.
Seeing the lightning and hearing the thunder at the same time probably means the neighborhood is going to go dark for a while (or far worse: in a similar scenario, the home of one of my wife’s co-workers burned down)
(NOTE: My typo was corrected after Billybob spotted it)
When a negotitator is called in, their first priority is to get the hostages released, then the next goal is to take the hostage-takers into custody. Worst-case is to use force to kill or disable the hostage-takers.
By contrast, the goal of the hostage-takers is to hold out, and avoid being captured or killed.
So the negotiations tend to involve a partial release of hostages. The negotiator will request this, and if they get it, they will hold off on storming the stronghold. If they become convinced that no more hostages will be released, they’ll authorize a strike in force. That strike may, and usually does, include attempting to kill any of the hostage-takers who can be reached
So, if a hostage negotiator were to leave public service and turn to the private sector, their negotiations would consider closing the deal as ideal and the end goal, but getting some of the hostages released would be an acceptable level of progress.
Five seconds is a mile.
https://www.xkcd.com/2027/
dvandom, that was one of the first things I thought about at the time.
When I was a kid they told us that one Mississippi was one mile.
They knew better.
The actual conversion rate differs, because the speed of light is a constant but the speed of sound isn’t… it varies by density of the medium, and air varies in density as any meteorologist can spend 15 minutes or more talking about.
The speed of light is constant only in a vacuum. Electromagnetic radiation is also attenuated when travelling through a medium, that’s the point of the XKCD comic in dvandom’s link and is also the reason that prisms (and rainbows) work.
Isn’t this comic basically the plot of the 1990 Robin Williams/Tim Robbins dark comedy CADILLAC MAN?
“When I was a kid they told us that one Mississippi was one mile.
They knew better.”
“Moon River, wider than a mile.”
If we see lightning or even just rain and we hear boom – it is the @$#!! transformer 3 houses over going out – AGAIN. And since it covers a small group of houses we will be towards the bottom of the repair list.
We were “lucky” in the storm last week that whatever went out last week was not the transformer and 1500 customers were out – not just maybe 20 – so it was fixed rather quickly.