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How Much Does A Cloud Weigh?
MyNameIsFred writes "ABC News is running an article revealing unexpected facts about weather formations. Ever wonder how much a cloud weighs? What about a hurricane? A meteorologist has done some estimates and the results might surprise you..." Reports that include the phrase "more than all the elephants on the planet" are always welcome.
Clouds are made of a lot of water. A lot of water is heavy. Clouds are heavy.
In other news, the sky is blue and grass is green.
I always knew that elephants could fly...
On whether it has a silver lining on not
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Assume an elephant weighs about six tons, she says, that would mean that water inside a typical cumulous cloud would weigh about one hundred elephants.
Somehow it reminds me of RIAA's math equivalent.
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Error 500: Internal sig error
Doesn't anybody know that elephants are non-standard units? Give me something I can work with here, people. How many library of congresses would it take to equal the weight of a storm cloud?
Stephen
Fault loves the past, worry loves the future, but content enjoys the present.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
... the cloud is a witch! No wait, ducks not elephants. n/m
I wonder if she has ever considered just how hot is the sun. Wow, its hotter than all the space heaters that have ever been made turned on in the drying closet and you locked in for the whole weekend with only a bottle of soda and some salt crackers. Although by saturday night it would feel pretty much the same.
They use elephant weights in the article to make it easier to visualize. A Hurricane is 40 million elephants. That's just so much easier to visualize than 240 million tons (cubic meters) of water.
Jason
ProfQuotes
I'd guess it weighs about as much as Vaporware.
paintball
Yes, and I have a car that weighs over 1 trillion fleas.
Did I mention my laptop that must weigh over 50 field mice...
Still #1 -- Lonely Gay Geek
The real question is how many midgets does an elephant weigh? If have 48 midgets per elephant, and I have 600 elephants per cloud, then....
This is my sig.
Are they Metric or Imperial elephants?
hurricanes are so destructive what with 200,000 elephants flying all over the place.
This opens up a whole new world of "your mom" jokes... "Your mom weighs as much as a cloud." How many people are gonna be able to figure that one out? :-D
Sure, it can do easy conversions like 1 pint in decilitres.
But can it do 1 cloud in elephants? No!
Perhaps Google isn't god after all.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
I, for one, welcome our new meteorologist overlords!
they based the article on the attention span of elephants aswell...
...where "most" means "those of us who are still stuck in the non-metric Stone Age".
A 500 square meter area got an average rainfall of 3cm
500 * 100 = 50000 square cm
3cm * 50000 cm^2= 150000 cm^3
Pure Water having a specific gravity of 1.00
150,000 cm^3 * 1.00 = 150,000grams or 150Kg
Using the imperial system we have to resort to using inches, hands, feet, arms, britney spears, elephents, and the odd library of congress.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
I couldn't resist. To hell with karma. . .
This message has been ROT-13 encrypted twice for higher security.
If we're gonna do articles at this level, why not skip the written word and do the whole article in pictures, now that would be interesting.
"If it's lost, it'll turn up. Things always do" "I love it when a plan comes together"
550 tons is the weight of all the electrons that have been inconvenienced, although momentarily, by people who read this stupid article online, and then couldn't keep from posting on /. about how asinine it was. (Oops).
For that many electrons, we could have downloaded ourselves a few Libraries of Congress. Too late now, they're all wasted. We'll have to get the 20,000 CD-ROM worth of data delivered to our door by an elephant.
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"I see no reason why most people should have some natural appreciation of what "550 tons" actually means."
Must... resist.. yo mama.. joke...
"Derp de derp."
I know how much 550 tons is, that's like
The weight of 9,500 ex girlfriends, or 550 ex girlfriends if you live in Utah.
The amount of shit expelled in the average SCO press release.
The weight of my formerly miniscule equipment after I replied to *every* penis enlarging piece of spam I've ever received.
Since they insist on reporting on the weights of things relative to others, instead of just sticking to a standard unit of measurment, I say the pick more interesting objects than VW Bugs or Elephants. For instance:
For extremely bad news, they could pick something friendly or cute to reference, such as "A comet with the mass of 7 billion cute fuzzy bunny rabbits is on a collision course with the Earth. I for one can't wait for the bunnies to get here!"
For scientific news trying to get your average Joe Blows attention for future (hopeful) government funding; "In other news, a space probe weighing as much as 170 pairs of Pamela Andersons breasts was launched at Mars today. The rocket carrying the probe created a massive 18,000lbs of thrust to get the probe headed on its way. Although there is a slight possibility of damage to the delicate probe, the 18,000 pounds of thrust must be used on the mass of Pamela Andersons tits to enable it to build up enough speed, faster and faster as it goes, to escape the Earths gravity. I'm sure every man involved is very proud at the success and has a special feeling at the moment."
Etc. Lame, but fun, try making your own.
Beware blue cats moving at
I guess that this is what they refer to as a "fluff" piece...
<grin>
I'll go away now...
"(Score:0, Redundant)
I, for one, welcome our new -1, Redundant overmods."
Heh I, for one, welcome our new sarcastic overmods.
"Derp de derp."
That post was not insightful. It was just the combination of certain letters and punctuation that made it appear insightful.
Don't lose any sleep over it. I see no reason why most people should have some natural appreciation of what an elephant actually weighs unless they've had to carry or eat one.
Me, years of studying physics allows me to convert among numerous units of measure including the ever useful library of congresses, empire state buildings, highways to the moon, and popes in a volkswagon, but even so I'd sure as hell be suprised if 6 tons of anything showed up in my backyard, be it cloud, elephant, or bird shit.
To me, 6 tons is about 5,000 kilos (grew up in the U.S., but I think in metric - how screwed is that) or about 5 of my car or 25 Powermatic table saws. It's all relative to what you're brain has stored. I've moved my table saw and I've had my foot run over by my car, so I have a direct appreciation for the weight of both, but not an elephant, or 6 tons as such.
How much does all the spam sent on the internet each day weigh?
/dev/null
Is there any place big enough to store it?
Yes:
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
well, you cant say he is dumb.He ran his car over his own foot and i cant think of a way to easily do that.
Has anyone converted these figures into units we Brits can understand. Normally area here is expressed as multiples of the area of Wales (Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, uses this a lot). For smaller areas we use the Football (Soccer) pitch. Volume is a bit trickier as there is not a fixed unit but the volume of something is described by how many of the relevant objects would be needed to fill the Albert Hall. As for weight we need it as multiples of the England Pack (That's the eight guys in the scrum for you non-rugby players). So come on british mathematicians, your country needs you. How many England Packs does a typical raincloud over Lords Cricket Ground weigh, how many of them would be need to fill the Albert Hall and what fraction of the area of Wales would it cover ?
No but, yeah but, no but...
that the metric system is irrelephant?
You get the giant stepladder and I'll get the big bucket and scales...
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Ehh... Actually, 6 tons is exactly 6000 kilograms.
Ehh...what do you expect from a physicist? Actually I'd have expected that he'd said something like "6 tons are well in the range of 10^4 kilograms"....
According to the recents changes at the DMCA, you are not allowed to reverse engineere a cloud to know it's composition. Doing so can force you to pay up to 250,000$ per violation, and 6 month in prison. Think twice when you do such things
Skydivers really don't like hail. At all.
:)
They are lucky then that they haven't hit any of the elephants yet
--Grandpa Simpson
The Simpsons Episode 2F31 "A Star is Burns"