Earlier today I rolled out the first real update to the site in ages.  The big change was of course, finally doing away with the idiotic cap/chat button.  There are now separate fields for captions and chat comments – so you don’t have to tell the site what you’re doing. And when you launch the mini-chat window, you can actually chat from there, instead of just reading other people’s comments. Other smaller improvements include fixing the profile links to the wiki, removing the bug that allowed the recent grabber freeze, plus some under the hood stuff that you probably don’t care about. Sorry for letting the chat/cap button linger so long.

Let me know if you see any new bugs that the changes might have caused, or any old ones I can try to fix while I’ve got the site open. I’m considering making some other improvements to the site, but there’s a lot of junk I want to clean up in the code before I add any more big pieces.

Perhaps you’ve seen this image floating about the internet?

Fellow capper Sans Serif
reposted it to his fb, where one of his friends suggested there might be a sweet spot where an elephant could still breathe without being crushed. To see if that’s so,  we first need to know how much weight that  elephant column puts on an elephant at a given height. [If this were basic cable, this is where we'd put a "science content" warning. Since it's not, we won't. If you flunked out of AP Physics, just ignore the formulas and you should get the gist.]

Adapting from the first source I found, the weight of a column of height h would be

W(h) = R * h * W_e  / H_e * (R + h)

where R is the radius of the earth at the bottom of the stack, and W_e and H_e are the respective weight and height of a unit elephant. So, if we take H_t as the total height of the stack, the total weight would be

W_t = W (H_t) = R * H_t * We / H_e * (R + H_t)

To find the weight, WA,  pressing down at height h, we just subtract the weight below from the total weight and do some mild algebra to get:

WA(h) = W_t – W(h) = C * (H_t – h) / ((R + H_t) *(R + h))

where C is a constant defined as

C = R² * W_e / H_e

So, let’s see if the first space elephant, sitting at the so-called edge of the atmosphere, the Kármán line, h = 100 km, might have survived the weight on top of it.  We’ll treat the earth as a perfect sphere and use R = 6,371 km. To get a (relatively) short stack of elephants, we’ll go with the more pessimistic results of our casual googling and put “every elephant in the world” at 326,000.  We’ll also go with an average height of  H_e = 3.4 m, which puts the whole stack at H_t= 1,108 km. Plugging these all in, we find a weight of just under a quarter million elephants pressing down on the first space elephant.  Without looking up the compressive strength of an elephant, I’m going to say that’s still well in the crushed elephant range. So, there’s no sweet spot in the breathable but uncrushed range.  I’d further wager that’s not just crushed, but liquified too.  So, in addition to the space elevator we’d probably have to build to carry this all out, we’ll also need a tube extending up into orbit to hold our Dumbo gumbo. Which would be some pretty advanced technology, bu wasn’t it Arthur C. Clarke who said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a slurry of elephants?

Some of you may have noticed we had some down time at the end of 2011. That was indeed negligent of me to let it happen. I’m investigating solutions to prevent it from happening again now, from the mild and inoffensive to the more severe that may entail another day or two of downtime.

By way of apology, here are some stupid sound clips to sneak onto friends’ (ok, acquaintances’) playlists.   What, why are you looking at me like that?

Century 21.1 Calling! [ 0:15 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Good old fruit [ 0:04 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Solid! [ 0:02 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Everybody knows [ 0:02 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

When you put it that way... [ 0:04 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

It’ll just be a four day affair, Thanksgiving to Sunday. As usual, there’ll be screengrabs from the original versions of films that were featured on mst3k for everyone to come and riff on their own. You can see the list of movies here, but you’ll have to guess when your favorites are airing. I like the element of surprise.  Sorry for not making a bigger production out of it, but (a) the kids at Rifftrax  and Cinematic Titanic have re-lit the torch sufficiently that I don’t feel as much of a need to keep it going and (b) because.

That’s right capperinos, I so badly want you to become a fan of Inventing Situations at Facebook that once I suceed in getting 100 fans, I’m entering all of our fans into a drawing for their choice of a gift certificate good for a Rifftrax or two or a DVD from Cinematic Titanic.

So, if you haven’t added us yet, go for it,or you know a capper who’s not on the fan list at our FB page, politely pester away.

The fine print: (more…)