One stormy day not so long ago I was counting the seconds between the time the lightning struck and the time I heard the thunder, then dividing by 5 to determine how far away in miles the lightning was. Before long, a creeping suspicion that the distance I was getting was inaccurate took hold and I headed for Wolfram|Alpha.
It turned out that I wasn't too far off, and in a few hours of wondrous procrastination I threw together this little project. It's a simple one-page-website that calculates the distance between you and the menacing 10-120MV lightning strike you just saw, based on the number of seconds it took to hear the thunder it caused.
The messages it gives are witty, and it needlessly bashes IE users. What more can you really ask for?
All of the code is in the public directory, and all of the javascript is in the aptly named js/everything.js
file. It's nothing special, but if you feel like adding a bit of cleverness to either the messages or the code,
do be my guest.