Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for April 03, 2011

That elephant is going to have one squeaky voice!

Bot really, Dad, considering who can get their hands on weapons of mass destruction these days.

Ah, Danae, did you tie off BOTH ends? If not have a nice trip.

In reality, of course, it wouldn’t work, because the helium would exit through the elephant’s ears.

However, in cartoon world, I hope the elephant doesn’t break wind. In which case, Danae is either going on a long trip somewhere or will have a “heavy” burden on her shoulders (and everywhere else).

Something tells me that Danae might be the next generation of MythBuster. Sometimes she reminds me of Adam Savage.

Air weighs 1.2 ounces per cubic foot. A hephelant weighs 6 tonnes. Boring math skipped, you need 192,000 cubic feet of helium to lift a hephelant. That’s a sphere 70 feet in diameter. Hephelant skin is baggy and wrinkly, but not THAT stretchy! Poor hephelant would pop.

does anyone else feel that tension? there’s a gray elephant in the room…

What a beautifully-constructed strip, in all ways.

Always making our day simply wonderful…what a creative mind.

For a brief minute I thought the Ekert was back!

Hey Danae, ever talk like Donald Duck?

But seriously folk, do not bring a helium balloon to the Post Office and ask them to weigh and mail it to Albuquerque.

but elephants do float……they can swim!

Good strip, and I enjoyed the comments. Not one political comment – even though there’s an elephant in the strip.

Like Ke Nguyen, I did the math. My numbers came out a little different, but the same ballpark. (We engineers are a boring lot.) Just remember, the elephant would have to be super-stretchy, because you can’t compress the helium too much. The more you compress it, the less lift it gives. Lycra elephants, anybody?

How do you make an elephant float?

Take a glass of soda, two scoops of elephant…

I know what a hephelant is, but what is a tonnes?

^ Ke Nguyen evidently is British educated.

British/metric terminology, TheFinalSolution. (Appalling name and avatar, BTW.) As I recall, a tonne is a metric ton, 1,000 kilograms — 2,204 pounds, approximately 1.1 tons, US equivalent.

How about a whole battery of experiments on elephants. We could shoot one into outer space to study the effects of weightlessness on an elephant. Not for any purpose, I just think it would be cool.

“tcayer said, On a serious note- Helium is NOT a toy! If you breath it from a balloon, it’s dilluted with air. But there was a boy filling balloons at a church fair who thought it would be funny to breath it from the tank. Being lighter than air, all his aveoli burst and he died.”

It wasn’t the helium itself that burst the alveoli, it was the fact that he was breathing directly from a pressurized air source. The same thing happens to people trying to get Nitrous Oxide directly from the tanks.

Never try to breath directly from a tank without a regulator or a mask that will release excess pressure.

A fun way to breathe helium is to put it in a large trash bag and hold it up with the bottom open. You can get 2 people to hold it open at the bottom and stick your heads inside it have a chipmunk conversation. If you start to get woozy remember to duck out and breathe real air. Plus launching trash bags is fun unless they fall in your yard.

Ah - the what if - that’s the best part!

JoeRaisin, you are correct - my classmates and I did that experiment in college, with a tank and a regulator. Talked funny until we got woozy, then switched back to ambient atmosphere for breathing.

Birdie, birdie in the sky, Why did you do that in my eye? Sure am glad that elephants can’t fly.

Brilliant strip! Can you imagine the kind of parades we’d see if that was possible?

KE NGUYEN – a big thanks for the mathmatically challenged (like me)!

Dumbo flew with birds. I hope he never…

Hot air is “lighter” than cold, makes balloons, politicians, and radicals “float like a butterfly”. Helium in place of nitrogen in dive tanks makes diving at depth “safer”, but replacing oxygen is a bad idea- in any atmosphere humans occupy.

Remember this one? Why did the elephant sit on a marshmellow? To keep his feet out of the Hot Chocolate!!

Helium’s not dangerous, being inert. But it should be a lot more expensive, since the world supply will run out in a few years. Some say a helium-filled balloon should cost $200 to reflect the true value of the rare gas. Which would make that a very expensive helephant!

This article from late last year suggests that the “shortage” is not of helium in general, but of a relatively rare isotope called Helium-3 (He-3 is two protons/one neutron, vs “standard” He-4, which has two protons and two neutrons). He-3 is produced in nuclear reactors and is useful for specific applications in (according to the article) “cryogenics, medical diagnostics, oil and gas operations and nuclear radiation detection.” There is no suggestion that we are running out of “standard” He-4, which works just fine for inflating balloons.

Link to article: http://www.physorg.com/news191248211.html

Everyone is ignoring the 12,000lb. elephant on the ceiling.

don’t do the garbage bag over the head thing, and don’t assume that because it is inert helium is not dangerous.

an ideal way to commit suicide is to take a large garbage bag and fill it with helium. place the bag over your head and seal around your neck.

helium is absorbed into the blood stream instead of oxygen. the co2 system that causes us to gasp for air is by passed. within 5 minutes you are singing with the choir invisible, and there is no panic, no desire to breath,

Amazing that I’ve read a fairly long string of comments in which a bunch of people don’t spell “breathe” correctly.

When you inhale and exhale, you don’t breath, you breathe.

“Is that an Indian or African elephant?”

So many Non sequitur comments, so little time.

I also thought she was trying to recreate the Ekert - but love it anyway!

Okay, okay! We’ll use hydrogen instead!

Oh! The Absurdity!!!

Small ears…Indian.

Does PETA know about this? I mean really…

Heavenly sight… Readied for flight… So high in the sky… To float and to fly… But now a myth to debunk… The Hindenburg did NOT have a trunk…

IIRC, Bucky Fuller postulated that a hollow steel sphere (490lb/ft^3) pumped down to a vacuum would float in air. Enough of these could be tethered to support floating cities.

With air at 1.2oz/ft^3, and given sea-level air pressure about 15lb/in^2, how thick would the shell have to be not to collapse, and how big would the enclosed space have to be for neutral bouyancy at sea level? How about at 5,000ft ASL?

–Left as an exercise for the reader.

The “Exit Bag” filled with Helium as a method of suicide was apparently first mentioned in Derek Humphry’s book Final Exit in 1991.

By 2007, Canadian press had reported that the combination of a bag and inert gas was becoming the most common form of suicide.

I’ve actually seen the chapter in the Final Exit DVD dealing with this (terminal family member contemplating this method) in the last two weeks, so the strip had a rather morbid association for me.

An elephant filled with mostly hot air? Please. They prefer to be called TeaParty.