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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?
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
*cough* Quote from the article: "The balloons range in size from four to seven feet; depending on the mix of sizes, anywhere from 50 to 150 balloons may be needed."
Physics makes the world go 'round.
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/
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.
Yes. The Pentagon has to plan for all eventualities, including invasion by an army of angry clowns
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters only to them
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
Cheers, Ryan
Hurricane Ivan: A 17th century prison collapsed. All of the inmates escaped.
Yes. Most of the world's helium comes from a bubble in an oil well in Texas. Once it is released it drifts off into space.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You end up with 100 non-holes in negative space. It must be spectacular to look at.
There is only so much Helium around... a very valuable resource. Please use hydrogen instead if you decide to try this at home.
Zoeith
"There is only so much left in the strategic reserves."
l
There is enough helium in the US reserves to supply the states for 100 years, or the world for 10. I don't think this guy made a dent.
http://www.agiweb.org/gap/legis104/heliumup.htm
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.
Yes, it floats off into space. Where did you think it went? It's lighter than molecular O2 and N2. If you don't believe me, check the wikkipedia or google for "strategic helium reserve". I weld with the stuff and I breath the stuff when I dive shipwrecks with a closed-circuit rebreather. I have a vested interest in knowing.
It's not funny. When I was seven my parents were killed by an angry clown.
We've seen wardriving, warflying, warboating I think the obvious next step is warballooning.
No, there is enough in the reserve to supply the US government to 100 years, the entire US for ~15 years, or the world for about 10 years. The world helium supply is limited and non-renewable. Just like oil. However, when oil runs out we can use solar and alcohol and biodiesel. There is no substitute for helium.
I didn't mean to come off as the Grinch. People like this guy are hardly putting a dent in the supply compared to those damn blimps that leak huge amounts of crude helium (Ne/He) into the atmosphere. I also hate those toy ballons they give to kids. It's another waste of helium and the balloons wind up in all sorts of environmentally unfriendly places.
But I think I have to make an exception for these cluster balloon guys. I think the increase in human spirit and morale far outweighs the reletively small amount of helium used. I'd love to do it myself.
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.
A one meter/three foot balloon has 27 times the lift of a 33 cm/one foot balloon, etc.
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.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium:
"...the concentration of helium in the Earth's atmosphere is only 1 part in 200,000, largely because most helium in the Earth's atmosphere escapes into space due to its inertness and low mass."
You missed a great chance to use the "You Insensitive Clod" header there.
Who is John Cabal?
>
>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?)
Helium has utility in places where you'd never think about- heliarc welding, or any inert gas welding (TIG, MIG, etc.), for example. Welding aluminum isn't the same without it. Liquid fuel rocketry uses it to drive the fuel. It has innumerable cryogenic applications that are irreproducible with any other element. You can't grow silicon or germanium crystals without it, so kiss your computer chips and cell phones goodbye without it. The tests used to throw sizable chunks of foam into a Shuttle wing to simulate what happened to Columbia were done with a light gas gun- which uses helium to create a shock wave of sufficient velocity.
Everyone thinks it's a big joke, a "strategic helium reserve." Truth be known, were it not for the eccentric and vast natural gas fields of west Texas that have very high concentrations of helium, we'd be up shit's creek without a pooper scooper on this one. Fact is, we can lord over other countries that require helium for their own purposes.
Supplies are finite, and we're pissing it away on toy balloons. What a waste. Let 'em use hydrogen instead. Maybe they can do a Hindenburg. How's that for substituting for helium?
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
Hey, I'm new here, you insensitive clod.
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.
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