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By Mike Dugan, Construction Worker

Falling With Helium

What if I jumped out of an airplane with a couple of tanks of helium and one huge, un-inflated balloon? Then, while falling, I release the helium and fill the balloon. How long of a fall would I need in order for the balloon to slow me enough that I could land safely?

Colin Rowe

As ridiculous as it sounds, this is—sort of—possible.

Falling from great heights is dangerous.^{[citation needed]} A balloon could actually help save you, although a regular helium one from a party obviously won't do the trick.

If the balloon is large enough, you don't even need the helium. A balloon will act as a parachute, slowing your fall to non-fatal speeds.

Avoiding a high-speed landing is, unsurprisingly, the key to survival. As one medical paper[1]De Haven H. Mechanical analysis of survival in falls from heights of fifty to one hundred and fifty feet. Injury Prevention. 6(1):62-b-68. put it,

It is, of course, obvious that speed, or height of fall, is not in itself injurious ... but a high rate of change of velocity, such as occurs after a 10 story fall onto concrete, is another matter.

... which is just a wordy version of the old saying, "It's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop at the end."

To act as a parachute, a balloon filled with air, rather than helium, would have to be 10 to 20 meters across—far too big to be inflated with portable tanks. A powerful fan could be used to fill it with ambient air, but at that point, you may as well just use a parachute.

Helium

The helium makes things easier.

It doesn't take too many helium balloons to lift a person. In 1982, Larry Walters flew across Los Angeles in a lawn chair lifted by weather balloons, eventually reaching several miles in altitude. After passing through LAX airspace, he descended by shooting some of the balloons with a pellet gun.

On landing, Walters was arrested, although the authorities had some trouble figuring out what to charge him with. At the time, an FAA safety inspector told the New York Times, "We know he broke some part of the Federal Aviation Act, and as soon as we decide which part it is, some type of charge will be filed."[2]ARMCHAIR AIRMAN SAYS FLIGHT FULFILLED HIS LIFELONG DREAM, New York Times, July 4, 1982

A relatively small helium balloon—certainly smaller than a parachute—will suffice slow your fall, but it still has to be huge by party balloon standards. The biggest consumer rental helium tanks are about 250 cubic feet, and you'd need to empty at least 10 of them to put enough air in the balloon to support your weight.

You'd have to do it quickly. The compressed helium cylinders are smooth and often quite heavy, which means they have a high terminal velocity. You'll only have a few minutes to use up all the cylinders. (As soon as you emptied one, you could drop it.)

You can't get around this problem by moving your starting point higher. Since the upper atmosphere is pretty thin, anything dropped from the stratosphere up will accelerate to very high speeds until it hits the lower atmosphere, then fall slowly the rest of the way. This is true of everything from small meteors[3]By the time meteors hit the Earth, they have slowed down to a few hundred miles per hour. to Felix Baumgartner.[4]Jason Martinez, Falling Faster than the Speed of Sound, Wolfram Blog, October 24, 2012

But if you inflated the balloons quickly, possibly by connecting many canisters to it at once, you'd be able to slow your fall. Just don't use too much helium, or you'll end up floating at 16,000 feet like Larry Walters.

While researching this article,[5]Additionally, while researching impact speeds for this article, I came across a discussion on the Straight Dope Message Boards about survivable fall heights. One poster compared a fall from height to being hit by a bus. Another user, a medical examiner, replied that this was a bad comparison:

"When hit by a car, the vast majority of people are not run over; they are run under. The lower legs break, sending them into the air. They usually strike the hood of the car, often with the back of the head impacting the windshield, "starring" the windshield, possibly leaving a few hairs in the glass. They then go over the top of the car. They are still alive, although with broken legs, and maybe with head pain from the nonfatal windshield impact. They die when they hit the ground. They die from head injury."

The lesson: Don't mess with medical examiners. They're apparently pretty hardcore. I managed to lock up my copy of Mathematica several times on balloon-related differential equations, and subsequently got my IP address banned from Wolfram|Alpha for making too many requests. The ban-appeal form asked me to explain what task I was performing that necessitated so many queries, so this is what I put:

I hope they understand.

ITHACA, NY—Citing a range of behavior that experts could only describe as “profoundly disturbed,” a new study released by Cornell University’s psychology department Thursday revealed that most otherwise normal people transform into...

In 1924, air mail pilots were having trouble finding their way across the featureless American southwest, so the Post Office adopted a brutally low-tech solution: Every 10 miles they built a large concrete arrow illuminated by a beacon. Each arrow pointed the way to the next, so that a pilot could stay on course simply by connecting the dots.

The system was finished by 1929, permitting mail planes to find their way all the way to San Francisco. It was quickly superseded by more sophisticated navigation methods, but today the arrows still dot the American desert, ready to confuse hikers and, probably, future archaeologists.

(Thanks, Ron.)

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, it interrupted one of the most ambitious building projects in history. Situated near the Kremlin, the Palace of the Soviets would have commemorated the founding the U.S.S.R. with a 21,000-seat congress hall, 100 stories of administrative offices, and a crowning statue of Lenin 75 meters tall.

It would have been both the largest and the tallest building in the world. But only the foundation had been built when the war intervened, and the frame was disassembled for its steel. Construction never resumed, and in the 1960s the site was turned into an open-air swimming pool. This must symbolize something.

Plenty of gamemasters still use graph paper and three-ring binders to organize their role-playing campaigns, but there’s an arsenal of tools available to the tech-savvy GM. I talked to a bunch of experienced GMs to find out how they use digital tools to create and track their RPG adventures.

Read more...

But many observers have commented on what seems to be the fact that fear plays a much smaller part than we should think it must in the life of an animal who lives dangerously. Terror he can know, and perhaps he knows it frequently. But it seems to last only a little longer than the immediate danger it helps him to avoid, instead of lingering, as in the human being it does, until it becomes a burden and a threat. The frightened bird resumes his song as soon as danger has passed, and so does the frightened rabbit his games. It is almost as though they knew that ‘Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.’

– Joseph Wood Krutch, The Twelve Seasons, 1949

“It’s a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.” — Andrew Jackson

“If the professors of English will complain to me that the students who come to the universities, after all those years of study, still cannot spell ‘friend,’ I say to them that something’s the matter with the way you spell friend.” — Richard Feynman

A gentleman received a letter, in which were these words: Not finding Brown at hom, I delivered your meseg to his yf. The gentleman, finding it bad spelling, and therefore not very intelligible, called his lady to help him read it. Between them they picked out the meaning of all but the yf, which they could not understand. The lady proposed calling her chambermaid, ‘because Betty,’ says she, ‘has the best knack at reading bad spelling of any one I know.’ Betty came, and was surprised that neither sir nor madam could tell what yf was. ‘Why,’ says she, ‘yf spells wife; what else can it spell?’ And, indeed, it is a much better, as well as shorter method of spelling wife, than doubleyou, i, ef, e, which in reality spell doubleyifey.

– Benjamin Franklin, letter to his sister, July 4, 1786

“Not for life, but for school do we learn.” — Seneca the Younger

“Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.” — Henry Adams

“Just as eating contrary to the inclination is injurious to the health, study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.” — Leonardo

“I believe that school makes complete fools of our young men, because they see and hear nothing of ordinary life there.” — Petronius

But to go to school in a summer morn,
Oh, it drives all joy away!
Under a cruel eye outworn,
The little ones spend the day –
In sighing and dismay.

– William Blake, The Schoolboy

“The only thing I ever learned in school that did me any good in after life was that if you spit on a pencil eraser, it will erase ink.” — Dorothy Parker

The pupils of St. Cassian, a schoolmaster, stabbed him to death with their pens.

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recovering from san diego! dinosaur comics runs mon/wed/fri this week :0
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July 24th, 2013: San Diego Comics Convention was a lot of fun: I won an award and got rescued by a hunky lifeguard! These two events were unrelated. OR WERE THEY? Anyway thank you to everyone who came out to meet me and say hi - it was great to see you all! One year ago today: real answer: this has happened several times in the past, but in each instance the International Olympic Committee sued the new "Brain Olympics" so hard that they literally got erased from the timeline – Ryan

After taking opium at Malta, Coleridge dreamed of the sentence “Varrius thus prophesied vinegar at his door by damned frigid tremblings.”

Delirious with fever in Scotland, Maria Edgeworth was haunted by the words “A soldier of the forty-second has lost his portmanteau.”

In a vision at Lerici, Shelley met his own figure, which asked, “How long do you mean to be content?”

Poet William Mickle regretted that he could not remember the poetry he composed in his dreams, which he said was “infinitely superior to anything he produced in his waking hours.” But his wife recited two lines he had spoken in his sleep:

By Heaven, I’ll wreak my woes
Upon the cowslip and the pale primrose.

Robert Browning dreamed that he attended a performance of Richard III and heard a line “immensely finer than anything else in the play. … When I woke I still had hold of the stupendous line, and it was this:

‘And when I wake my dreams are madness — Damn me!’”

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hey toronto, come party with me tonight!
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July 29th, 2013: Tonight! CHOOSE YOUR OWN BOOK LAUNCH, featuring This Is How You Die and To Be or Not To Be and me and David Malki! Fun! DEATH PREDICTIONS. SHAKESPEARE RAP BATTLES. You can read more about it, and RSVP, here! It's at 7pm at the Beguiling. You should come! One year ago today: are you there, princess? it's-a me, mario – Ryan

You’re fitted with a watch that imparts an electric current to your skin in increments too small to distinguish. Initially it’s set to 0 (off), and the settings run up to 1000. At the start of each week you’re allowed a period of experimentation to compare various settings, and then the watch is returned to its last setting. Then you have the option to increase the setting by 1; if you do this, you get $10,000. You may never reduce the setting.

What should you do? On the first day your experimentation shows you that the highest setting is completely intolerable; at that setting you’d pay any amount of money to get rid of the watch. But on this first week your decision is simply whether to advance from 0 to 1, getting $10,000 for accepting an imperceptible amount of pain. That seems attractive.

The trouble seems to be that your evaluations are “transitive” only at a large scale. If you prefer 0 to 500 and 500 to 1000, then it’s valid to conclude that you’ll prefer 0 to 1000. But if you prefer 51 to 4 (because of the financial reward) and 103 to 51, can we conclude that you’ll prefer 103 to 4? Not necessarily.

Unfortunately for all of us, this describes a lot of life. “The self-torturer is not alone in his predicament,” writes philosopher Warren S. Quinn, who proposed this puzzle in 1990. “Most of us are like him in one way or another. We like to eat but also care about our appearance. Just one more bite will give us pleasure and won’t make us look fatter; but very many bites will. And there may be similar connections between puffs of pleasant smoking and lung cancer, or between pleasurable moments of idleness and wasted lives.” What’s the best course?

(Warren S. Quinn, “The Puzzle of the Self-Torturer,” Philosophical Studies, May 1990)

In 1921, Pennsylvania surgeon Evan O’Neill Kane removed his own appendix. He wanted to show that a local anaesthetic would be adequate for some surgeries but wanted to be sure that a patient could tolerate the procedure. So on Feb. 15, propped up by pillows on an operating table, he cut into his own abdomen, using novocaine to dull the pain while a nurse held his head forward so that he could see the work.

“Just say that I am getting along all right,” he told the New York Times the following day. “I now know exactly how the patient feels when being operated upon under local treatment. … I have demonstrated the fact in my own case that a major operation can be performed by the use of a local anaesthesia without causing pain more severe than can be borne by the patient.”

He was 60 years old at the time. Nine years later he would repair his own hernia.

In 2005, Chinese novelist Hu Wenliang offered 140,000 yuan ($16,900 U.S.) to the reader who could decipher his novel «?», which consists entirely of punctuation marks:

:?

:!

“‘……’”

(?)·«,»

;——

Hu claimed that the symbols represent a touching love story that took him a year to write, but he told the Beijing Daily Messenger that none of the 20 interpretations that readers had so far offered had satisfied him.

“I have my own answer, which is around 100 Chinese characters,” he said. “The interpretation should cover the description of characters and the plot of the story. I will reward someone who can guess 80 percent the hidden story correct.”

That was in July 2005. If anyone has offered a successful solution, I haven’t been able to discover it.

In the control room of each of the United Kingdom’s four nuclear submarines is a safe. Inside the safe is another safe, and inside that is a handwritten letter from the prime minister to the submarine’s commander telling him what to do if a nuclear strike has destroyed the British state.

When a new prime minister takes office, his letters are destroyed unopened, so it’s not clear how extensive the instructions are. According to the 2009 BBC Radio 4 report The Human Button, they include these options:

• Retaliate with nuclear weapons.
• Do not retaliate with nuclear weapons.
• Use your own judgment.
• Place yourself under the command of the United States or Australia, if possible.

“In that letter,” wrote the Daily Mail in 2008, “Gordon Brown conveys the most awesome decision of his political career … and none of us is ever likely to know what he decided.”

(Thanks, Zach.)

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In 1980 Michigan inventor Lawrence Robinson suggested wrapping an aquarium around a bathtub so that fish lovers can bathe with their pets:

This invention relates to a bathing fixture or tub such as ordinarily employed in the home, which also is an aquarium. The device may be used in the normal manner in the typical home bathroom, but it also provides the unique feature of an aquarium. The aquarium is so related to the bathing section of the tub that a bather will be literally surrounded by the aquarium creatures and/or plants while taking his or her bath.

I wonder what the fish think about this.

“I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.” — G.K. Chesterton