How many balloons DOES it take to lift a house, anyway?
Ubergeek and overall swell guy Patrick Garvin of the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville calculates it’d take 3,203,756 typical latex helium balloons to lift a house like Carl Fredricksen’s in the new Pixar movie Up.
He and his pal Amanda Warford test-lifted a few items Thursday in a video posted at Jacksonville.com. Amanda found it’d take 90 balloons just to lift a small bottle of laundry detergent:
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UPDATE:
Patrick sent us the graphic overnight.
He writes:
The graphic was a fun one to do. One of the features guys wrote something up that served as a template for what I’d do, and then I did the hardcore math to figure it out.
Click for a larger view:
HowStuffWorks and other sources said that 1 liter of helium lifts 1 gram. Well, no one in America talks like that, so I did a bunch of conversions. I still have my calculator they gave out at my DJNF internship and I use it a lot. I had a lot of math that ended up not making it into the graphic, because we wanted to keep it fun enough that someone wouldn’t freak out when looking at it. I showed my math to the copy desk to check it and their first reaction was, “You’re kidding, right?”
When I was doing the math with this, I approached Jacksonville.com multimedia mavens Amanda Warford and Kelly Jordan about the possibility of doing some sort of video. Amanda made the video of my Elton John/Billy Joel cover and we’ve been sending ideas back and forth on what would be a fun next project. Boston.com did a fun video where an MIT student was asked all sorts of “How many…” questions about the Boston Marathon and answered them with long equations on a chalkboard. Amanda had really enjoyed that and we were eager to come up with ideas with math. When I approached her about Up, I had already been asked to make the balloon graphic, so I was already going to have the math ready.
The video was mainly Kelly and Amanda. My part was a cameo rather than a longer part, because I was only needed to explain the math but I also needed to finish some projects before vacation. Amanda’s personality really shows through in this video. They got a helium tank and filled up all those balloons. It was hysterical. We ended up getting an assembly line going where Kelly filled them, and then I held the air in while Amanda tied the strings to them.
The part where Amanda shows the “ex-boyfriend” (Brad Pitt) was one of my favorite parts. And if you look closely, she’s written “BRANGELINA” on the infant doll. We had several shots of that infant just falling head first onto the floor, but those didn’t get edited into the video.