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Make Your Own Cluster Balloon
Mr. Christmas Lights writes "'Have you ever dreamed of being carried into the sky by a giant bouquet of colorful toy balloons?' John Ninomiya does exactly that using 50-150 four-seven foot diameter balloons filled with helium ... and sealed with tape (duct?) and cable ties. Folks may recall the lawn chair man who floated up to 16,000 feet, but John takes this to a whole new level and his site has some wild pictures ... and includes the comment 'Kids, don't try this at home!'"
If you were a sixth century Scandinavian warrior out to kill a Grendel, and providence provided you with one of these clusters, what would you call it?
What kind of measurement is that? The ambiguous measure. The new way to skimp out on actually *editing* articles.
Unless, of course, they're just different sized ballons, and I'm just being a pedant. Silly me.
Hurricane Ivan: A 17th century prison collapsed. All of the inmates escaped.
Call me when we have an umbrella that lets you fly through the clouds
He eventually committed suicide, though it's unclear if it had anything to do with the amount of ridicule he received as a result of the lawnchair incident. All he needed to do was to make it look like he flew away on purpose, and nobody would be any wiser. Kind of like the guy in this article. :)
The lawn-chair man sounded like a hoax to me, but snopes.com (which we all know is the final word in urban legends) claims it's true!
My favorite part:
As Larry and his lawnchair drifted into the approach path to Long Beach Municipal Airport, perplexed pilots from two passing Delta and TWA airliners alerted air traffic controllers about what appeared to be an unprotected man floating through the sky in a chair.
The Online Slang Dictionary
that looks like a prime position for a serious wedgie...
-Wes
Sounds like we will have some new Darwin Award entries this year!
Please use one of the following mirrors:
/ intro.html coral cache
f 9f692d3cdf2/index.html Mirror Dot
http://www.clusterballoon.org.nyud.net:8090/intro
http://mirrordot.org/stories/be656bccec5ae60c9862
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Check out Danny Deckchair. Its relativly new, and recieved decent reviews.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0337960/
of helium that could have been used by welders and divers and scientists. There is only so much left in the strategic reserves. But hurray for the human spirit.
Try this: 50 to 150 4' by 7' diameter balloons.
Yeah, those rectangular balloons work so much better than the common spherical ones.
From http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/mythbusters/epi
They tried doing this, and let's just say it took a LOT of balloons to get a young girl even neutrally buoyant.
We stopped believing in Magic, when we were 5,6,7, or even 8. But this is amazinglgy great, and news worthy, if the site did not as of yet get slashdotted the QT slide show is kick ass and well made. I wish I could do this. PS be glad these baloons are not made of hydrogen. I wisth the news monoply broadcased this information. Rock On Balkoon Man ..
how much helium/how large of a tank/baloon to produce enough lift and wind resistance to lower you to the ground with, at best, a broken leg... something between a hot air baloon and a $2.00 mylar in size, and only created to drop you at survivable impact speeds....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Let's see, in my bedroom and garage, I've got on hand:
* Paraglider harness
* Reserve parachute
* Helium
* Balloons
* Duct tape
* Oxygen cylinders and masks
* Warm clothes
* Flight helmet
* GPS
* Handheld radio
* BB gun
And here I was wondering what to do with my weekend.
Oh my god!
This is the most magical thing I have seen in quite some time.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
I remember in a fluid dynamic course we did some balloon calculations, and one conclusion was that baloons are unstable, as they go up, the pressure decreases, so the gas keeps expanding until it bursts. I guess this might be different with a real materials, I don't recall how you model the elastic membrane stuff.
Watch out for those kids with the pellet guns!
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
This is going to get at least ONE slashdotter killed....
Great photos though.
The Code Ninja is swift with his tool, precise in his delivery, and deadly accurate in his execution.
now where's my rifle....
I stole this signature
Did anybody else see this and immediately think of Balloon Kid for Game Boy?
Looks like someone imagined a Beowulf cluster of balloons. Reading too much slashdot makes you do silly things.
I can't imagine what i would do if suddenly i was 16,000 feet high in a freaking LAWN CHAIR
Yell "I'm a birdie!" and shit on passing cars?
Just a thought...
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slingshot!!! >:)
A storm comes up. You go out of control, spinning wildly above orchards, ponds, villages.
Picket fences. Busy highways. Powerlines.
You wonder "Was I really that stupid?" You fall.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
There is only so much Helium around... a very valuable resource. Please use hydrogen instead if you decide to try this at home.
Zoeith
This site seems to be the most comprehensive. http://www.markbarry.xom/ There's audio available and pictures of Larry Walters pre-flight (sitting in chair..) Photos of the chair now recovered, some twenty odd years after the flight.
So he messed with air traffic. That's nothing. I heard about a kid who started a nuclear war with fewer than 100 red balloons.
From the Site:
Latex balloon clusters have been flown as high as 20,000 feet; however, for a recreational flight, a maximum altitude of 3,000 - 5,000 feet is more common.
From a BASE Jump site:
The safety margin in a normal free fall exercise is 800 metres (~2600 feet), the minimum height at which a jumper may deploy the chute safely
So basically if something farks up, your really farked.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Did anyone else think of Gonzo from The Muppet Movie?
Jonathan B.
...is just how many people all over the US this guy has suckered into spending the wee hours of the morning inflating balloons, just for him alone to get his kicks. He must be a really smooth talker.
Hm...the volume of the sun is something like 1,000,000 earths and the sun is composed of about 27% helium by mass, so it seems to me that there's about 270,000 Earth-fulls of helium waiting to be picked up.
:-(
Now:
1. Drive Earth over to the sun
2. Collect helium
3. PROFIT!!!!
Oh...wait...there's the little matter of the temperature being millions of degrees...
picpix image polls. create - share - vote. fun!
So.. what kind of processing power do you get from a 42 balloon cluster?
Really high performance. Your productivity rates will balloon! And you won't even be full of hot air (unlike your chase balloon).
Weather balloons are only inflated enough to lift a given weight. (A 1000 gram balloon is inflated enough to lift 1000 grams, for instance.) The balloon is about a couple of meters in diameter (for a 1000 gram balloon,) at that point at sea level. Once released, the balloon expands as pressure drops with altitude. 1000 gram balloons often get to altitudes where the pressure is less than 1% of the lauch pressure, so the volume would be more than 100 times lauch volume.
We've seen wardriving, warflying, warboating I think the obvious next step is warballooning.
Kids, don't try this at home
On the contrary, if you want to try this, do it at home... that way you won't find yourself floating at 16,000 feet unless you have an exceptionally weak roof.
I read somewhere that 10% or less of lightening actually strikes the ground; most is within clouds itself.
Aircraft have metal skins, so I think the passengers in them are protected from such strikes.
Does this guy have any protection besides not going out on an overcase day? I imagine he would be more conductive than moist air, so his body would be in preferred over air as the path of a nearby lightening bolt. I guess one mitigation is if he wore some sore of conductive clothing.
50-150, 4-7, there is a connection here I think, but I don't have enough toes to count on and figure this out..."
Oh well, what the hell...
A one meter/three foot balloon has 27 times the lift of a 33 cm/one foot balloon, etc.
Hydrogen is a peasant, while helium is a member of the nobility.
Go here to get the full skinny on the REAL lawn chair pilot, complete with streaming audio, pictures, maps, the works.
It was on Art Bell a few years ago....
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I recall an A-Team episode where they escaped prison using hot air in trash bags. I was very young at the time, but I've always wanted to attempt this, but the cost of the weather ballons in Edmond Scientific were nothing compared to the cost of the He.
This would be the best present ever for any occasion.
What an awesome event. I am breathless looking at pictures from the ground!
(Just kidding)
Hydrogen is far too volatile for most of the Helium applications. Helium has a complete valence shell and reacts with nothing, which is the point.
>
>Great photos though.
What, the photos on the site, or the photos and video our soon-to-be-deceased Slashdotter will be streaming back to his webserver as he falls screaming to his death, practically guaranteeing a simultaneous appearance on both Slashdot and Fark.
Hmm, a late-model ruggedized laptop equipped with wireless and a dozen pringles cans to guarantee that at least one Starbucks is at range after the crash... it'll survive the impact, but nothing will survive a Slashfarking. You can take it with you!
(I mean, think of the Afterlife. Oh, sure, you might go to the place where Tux gives everyone an iPod and a rack or two from ACSI Ultraviolet, but what if you wind up in the Other Place, with that chubby guy condemned to jump around and yell "Developers" for all eternity? Wouldn't you want to have at least one of your own servers with you?)
Thats how it is for boats as well. A boat under sail will have right of way over a boat under motor because it's harder for to manuever.
I dount you are in the minority with this fantasy. I clearly remember youthful days spending hours upon hours sitting on the back porch looking up at the sky and dreaming about floating off over the fields. This was around first grade, so that would be roughly 1975. I think the trigger was seeing an ad for giant baloons in a comic book. The flying/floating fantasy has been with me in one form or another since then. I have nothing but respect for this guy.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
"Special hoses and manifolds are used to inflate the balloons to the desired size, based on the volume of the helium tanks."
;)
So, if you ever ride on one of these things--make sure you ask to fill with the sized-huge tanks and not the handhelds, or you're in for a new world of hurt.
Or maybe you should just see if they'll throw the entire tank in there.
I am sure I can win the super X-Prize when pigs can fly.
How many of these colourfull helium filled baloons do I need to make a pig fly ?
Alternatively it should be nice attaching enough of these to a cow. (don't do this in India).
Léa Gris
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
wrong. a) if you want velocities that slow, for most of your flight you're gonna be going even slower than your landing so ignore drag for now. You need to figure out the size of the balloon to provide a force resisting gravity for your dude. Helium will give a lift of something like 1.13 kg/m^3 around sea level at stp (iirc, my little bro asked me when he was building a balloon). So do some math, what radius gives you (1.13)(4/3)pi*r^3=100? Something around 2.5 I guess. If your radius is much bigger than 2.5 meters you'll float away. Now, if you get down to say 1.3 meters, where (again just by estimating) you'd have like half the bouyancy force, you're still talking about high impact speeds. You need to get pretty close to neutral weight if you wanna not hit hard. 1m/s is pretty slow, you can handle an impact of maybe 7m/s without broken bones too much, that's the highest I've fallen from. But 12m/s is the point where the fall is more likely fatal than not, a height of about 7m.
Anyway to summarize, you need to get down to a speed where drag force is negligable so ignore that. You need a balloon radius that gets your effective weight pretty close to 0, then go a little smaller but not too much. You get an upper limit on size by solving (1.13)(4/3)pi*r^3=mass, and the balloon size will be between 2 and 3 meters.
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
How about filling up condoms with helium?
Glowing balloons could be fun too at night. Think of the UFO reports...
That said, the shortage of Helium seems to be quite a significant imminent problem.
This news item reminds me of an old episode from "Sendung mit der Maus", a german TV show for children, (and adults!) where they did just that: send a man into the air carried by Helium balloons, and that already a looong time ago judging from the age of "Ballonfahren" at http://www.wdrmaus.de/sachgeschichten/a_bis_z.phtm l?bstb=b already in 1988 ... man, was I really 3 years old when I watched this?
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Nevertheless, the story can be bought here on VHS tape: http://www.bibliothek-der-sachgeschichten.de/shop
"Can a fully grown man fly with normal balloons for children as you know them from the parish fair? If possible, how many balloons would it take? We just tried it out..."
Can't... look..... must... just... read... comments... instead...
From an interview with Clarke: http://www.kinetikonpictures.com/books/texts/clark e.htm
"[later, after Clarke takes a nap]
ACC: I had a chance to think, before I went to sleep, and I had an interesting idea. You know my problem with walking around now? If you had a reasonable-sized balloon it could give you some useful lift, you see?
MB: That's true.
ACC: About a thousand cubic feet could give you about a hundred pounds of lift. That means a balloon by ten feet by ten feet by ten feet. That means a balloon that's big, but not ridiculous. So I think when we get back I'll get one of my ballooning friends to look into this.
MB: Well, what about if there's a wind?
ACC: That's exactly what I thought of too, and you'd be in trouble. And of course if I had more than a thousand cubic feet the air force would have to shoot me down! [laughs] But it would be fun to do it indoors, in an arena or something. It would be a good sport, I'm surprised it hasn't been done.
MB: Yeah, you could moon-walk! Bounce around.
ACC: Exactly. A sixth of a G [Earth gravity]. That would be nice.
MB: That's a good idea, you should immediately patent that one!
ACC: I don't think it's patentable.
MB: You could have a new sport. New sports, in fact.
ACC: I'm very fond of quoting someone who said that a patent is merely a license to be sued! [laughs]"
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Parabounce:
http://www.parabounce.com/
Helium Balloon Patent: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=P
Tarkovsky's masterpiece has an opening sequence of a medieval balloon flight attempt! http://207.136.67.23/film/Reviews/andrei_rublev.ht m
Why?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
...invented by the guy who dropped his last sandbag and realized he was still falling too fast!
"Thank God for incontinence!"
"Creativity is allowing ones self to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep" - Scott Adams