hmmm.... a 15 cubic foot weather balloon will lift one pound into the air. pass this on to kevin and the terrorists.

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0116clay16.html

How to get a lawn chair set for flight

Jan. 16, 2006 12:00 AM

Today's question:

How many helium balloons would it take to lift me off the ground?

I'm not sure this is one I want to get involved with. Remember that guy in California back in the '80s who hooked a whole bunch of weather balloons full of helium to a lawn chair and ended up at something like 11,000 feet? You're not planning something like that, are you?

On the other hand, I can't give you a very good answer anyway, so if you did go sailing away it won't be with my help.

I can't give you a very good answer because you didn't tell me how much you weigh or what size balloons you were thinking of using.

This is the deal: A cubic foot of helium weighs about 0.011 pounds. A cubic foot of plain old air weights about 0.078 pounds. Being heavier, the air sinks and pushes the lighter helium out of its way, so the helium rises. Right?

Now the lifting power of helium would be the weight of the air the helium displaces - 0.078 pounds per cubic foot - minus the weight of the helium itself: 0.011 pounds per cubic foot. That leaves 0.067 pounds of lifting power.

So if you weigh, say, 170 pounds, you would need about 2,700 cubic feet of helium.

However, you would also have to factor in the temperature and barometric pressure, although that starts to get kind of complicated so I'll leave it to you to figure all that out.

Why does my stomach growl when I am hungry?

Actually, it isn't just your stomach that is growling. Your small intestine is sounding off, too.

And it doesn't growl only when you're hungry. It's just that when you have food in your system it kind of muffles the noise.

So your gastrointestinal tract is mostly just a hollow tube. It pushes food and liquids and gas along by muscle contractions in the walls. This is called peristalsis, in case anybody asks.

The rumbling sound is generated in the process of all this muscle contracting and vibrating and so on, and like I said, when you have food in there it helps keep the noise down.

However, if your stomach and small intestine have been empty for about two hours, certain sensors in the stomach send out electric signals that start the muscle contractions going again. I'm not sure why. These rumblings go off every 10 or 20 minutes or so for about two hours or until you get something to eat.

Reach Thompson at clay .thompson@arizonarepublic .com or (602) 444-8612.


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