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mattbellIt's fun to breathe in helium from a balloon to talk in a high voice, but you only get to do it for one breath. However, you can breathe in an atmosphere that's 20% oxygen and 80% helium indefinitely. (The nitrogen that makes up 80% of the atmosphere serves no function to living organisms, so it can be replaced with an inert gas like helium), Thus, you can spend a good quarter of an hour giggling in funny high voices while sitting in a small chamber filled with this air.
A co-worker told me that scuba shops can give you a tank of compressed gases in any proportion you want... so I quickly ordered up a custom atmosphere optimized for silliness. I made a giant airtight balloon out of a king size mattress bag, which was big enough to hold two people and the tank.
Here are the results:
The video contains some mild language and a lot of silly voices but is otherwise SFW.
FOR SCIENCE!
A co-worker told me that scuba shops can give you a tank of compressed gases in any proportion you want... so I quickly ordered up a custom atmosphere optimized for silliness. I made a giant airtight balloon out of a king size mattress bag, which was big enough to hold two people and the tank.
Here are the results:
The video contains some mild language and a lot of silly voices but is otherwise SFW.
FOR SCIENCE!
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Date: 2008-10-20 04:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-20 04:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-20 04:34 pm (UTC)http://thegeniemusic.com/
I saw him perform in 2005... he plays what he calls "scratch guitar", which involves doing a lot of experimental things with an electric guitar.
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Date: 2008-10-20 04:56 pm (UTC)of course, dead organisms couldn't ... ahem, survive ... without nitrogen!
(I'd leave a more useful comment except I can't watch videos at work!)
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Date: 2008-10-21 06:42 am (UTC)I'm always surprised at just how much of the air is oxygen - I somehow always assume that CO2 is a much higher part, but I guess they always measure that in hundreds of ppm, don't they. I had been thinking about this as a way to sell the climate change issue to people - every extra molecule of CO2 in the air is one less molecule of oxygen for us to breathe! But I guess the quantities are so vastly different that this effect is trivial compared to the climate change and ocean acidification issues.
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Date: 2008-10-21 06:48 am (UTC)There's only so much science I can squeeze into a 20-second intro. It's all really interesting stuff though.
My favorite metaphor regarding climate change is to tell people to think of it as similar to defense or counterterrorism. If there were a 5% chance that a terrorist would try to nuke a major US city in the next 20 years, almost everyone would agree that it would be worth spending a few billion to come up with a defense. Ditto for climate change.
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