Remember Joan and Daisy any time you think something’s too difficult to do

The encounter that led to the pregnancy is far more complicated than you might think. To keep things tasteful, let me simply say that while they used an air duct, there was no meeting of a (ahem) glorious sort.

Both Daisy Link and Joan Depaz (Joan is pronounced like “Juan”) were held at the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center, with Daisy on the 4th floor and Joan on the 6th. So no, there was no (ahem) glorious congress.

They communicated by passing handwritten notes that were guided through the air ducts via a makeshift line fashioned out of their bedding. At some point, the relationship got serious enough for Depaz to wrap his semen in plastic wrap and deliver it to Link through their air duct system. I’m beyond impressed; when we first moved into our house, we had an air duct that was effectively a straight line yet could barely move air through it, never mind love notes and liquids.

The news reports don’t provide any details on how their line-through-the-air-ducts system worked, which is greatly disappointing to a techie like me. It occurred to me that since Depaz was two floors above Link, whatever he sent got a gravity assist. That’s when I started doing the math.

The velocity v of an object falling from height h when it finally hits the ground is…

…where g is acceleration due to gravity, which is 9.8 m/s² on Earth.

Assuming…

• A maximum distance scenario, where the vent in Depaz’s cell was right by the ceiling and the one in Link’s room was right by the floor, and
• the floors have a height of 3 meters (close enough to 10 feet; it’s actually 9.84 feet), and
• we’re not concerned with air resistance or air currents in the ductwork

…anything Depaz sent to Link would hit the ground at a speed of √(2 × 9.8 × 6) m/s, or a little over 10.8 meters per second. Expressed in Freedom Units, that’s 24.2 miles an hour. In this case, “splat” is an appropriate word for more than one reason; he must have wrapped up his stuff really well.

(I have theories on how they set up their ductwork communications system and how it applies to identity and networked systems, and if you meet up with me for a beer, I will happily expound.)

All this storytelling is for a purpose, and that purpose is to remind you that you shouldn’t let something deter you because it seems too difficult:

If these people can start a romance and a family in jail from two floors apart using only the material at hand, maybe you can find a solution to the problem you’re facing.