How long was the red light, if you had no clock with a second hand but could work it out later at home?
real-life/timing.traffic.light New
New entry, edited from material collected for the archive and not yet in a released version.
Problem
How long was the red light, if you had no clock with a second hand but could work it out later at home? The other day I was driving home. I always seem to miss a left turn light and have to wait for it to turn green again. It seems to take forever. I thought it would be nice to know just how long the light is red before it turns green again. Unfortunately I didn't have a clock with a second hand handy. I was however able to figure out how long the light was red within about a second, but not until I got home. Any ideas as to what I did?
Show solution
I counted the clicks made by my turn signal, and when I got home I used a clock with a second hand to determine how long it took to click the same number of times. Other things I could have done was to time my windshield wipers (assuming it was raining) and to time how long between certain points in a song on the radio (assuming I was listening to the radio, only one song played while I waited, and the song was not overly repetitive). -- Chris Cole, rec-puzzles.org wiki