Drop a penny ...

Here’s the age old question: “If I drop a penny from the top of the Empire State building, will it kill someone when it hits them on the head?” Cecil even did a column about this. But I, being the skeptical soul that I am, decided to perform an experiment. I tied a penny to a string and held it out of my car window, keeping an eye out for when the string hit 45 degrees (and keeping the other eye peeled for oncoming traffic and lurking police cruisers). The string was at 45 degrees at about 20 mph, meaning that the force of gravity was equal to the wind resistance on the penny. That would make the terminal velocity of the penny 20 miles per hour, meaning that even if it was hurled down at a faster speed, it would actually slow to 20 mph … right? But Cecil claims the penny (neglecting updrafts) would be travelling at 280 ft/sec or 190 mph ! Who is right?
-Oleg

From here:

Since this guy is from the NASA Lewis Research Center, hopefully he knows what he’s talking about.

Cecil doesn’t say that he’s ignoring updrafts, he says he’s ignoring wind resistance. In other words, he’s ignoring the very thing your experiment determined. He then goes on to say that due to the wind resistance, the true value would be much less than the calculated 280 ft/s, which fact you verified in your experiment.