It was probably something no one knows how to do off the top of their head, but is easy to google. Or it's something that would take days to do by hand but is easily automated

It was probably something no one knows how to do off the top of their head, but is easy to google. Or it's something that would take days to do by hand but is easily automated

This is not that hard to do, although it would be difficult to get a really accurate measurement this way. You would need: Two relatively powerful magnets, a fishing scale (or better yet a real potentiometer), a stack of paper, a ruler, and an assistant. Stick the magnets together through the window - i.e. one on one side, one on the other. Attach a fishing scale to one magnet and pull until the magnets come apart. Record the maximum force needed to pull the two apart ( fishing scales usually have a handy indicator that stops at the highest weight). Now go back inside and do a little more measuring. Repeat this measurement with several different thicknesses - you could use varying objects, like a CD case, thin panel on a desk, etc - as long as you can also measure their thickness with the ruler - or just different sized stacks of paper. Get 5-10 data points to make a pretty good graph. Lastly, make a graph of your data. The force between two magnets drops off with the square of the distance between them. Make a scatterplot and add a power curve trendline - the equation would come out something like y = mx^0.5, where m is some number. Use the equation to predict for a given value of Y, what is the value of X - the distance along the windows. All in all it took me about 15 minutes to think this up, including googling to remind myself of the relationship between magnetic force and distance, and making a dummy graph to check that my thoughts were correct. And it'd probably take me about a half hour to actually do. BAM

probably asian

... while wearing nipple tassels, a pink wig, covered in Vaseline, and having smeared myself with cheezies so I look like an orangutan...

that's more of a FOL

It's fairly simple to estimate this. First, you need to pick a point on the floor, and measure the distance to it. Then, measure the height from the floor to your eye-level, and using trig work out the angle between your line of vision and the floor-- call it theta. You then need to find a spot on the outside of a window. Holding a measuring tape against the window so that it starts at a place directly opposite the spot on the outside of a window, you measure where the spot appears to be on the measuring tape (we shall call this x). Because you worked out what angle your vision makes with the horizontal, the width of the window is given by x/tan(theta) It took me literally 2 minutes to think of this, and I imagine it wouldn't take any longer to execute it. There you go. Solved in under 5 minutes

im not sure what area of study the intern is in but its interesting how he figured that out. previous solutions by users all doesnt work, maybe the intern did use them and the boss accepted it but they are not good solutions. solution by #137 doesnt work as you need another length or angel to use trig for the distance. the solutions posted by #138 and #148 requires measurements by hand and estimating parts of the calculation. this would provide a inaccurate data. the only way i can think of is the intern shined a line of light through the window, held that in place and went to the other side to measure the angel at which the light came out at. then using the density of the glass he could calculate the thickness of the windows.

My brother worked it out in less than a minute, its really easy to be honest. What you do is you measure how much length there is from the wall to the inside of the window then do the same on the outside, after you have done that just measure the wall and then add the two original measurements together then whatever is left is the thickness of the glass, bang done.

We are the future!