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?

This past weekend a few of us cappers got together to see Cinematic Titanic‘s live shows in Philadelphia. Before Saturday night’s movie JoeCrow was kind enough to take us into his Jersey lair aka The BotCave, where he builds Servos, Crows and other bots for common fans and even folks like Joel Hodgson (pictured at left with me at my goofiest).

We got to see the wonders of how a bot is built, and Joe even made us some Servo heads that we were able to be goofy with at the show (hoisting them when Servo was mentioned or alluded to).

Anyway, the show was excellent, and I’ll be running some of the pictures for your capping pleasure Monday June 22 @ 8 PM Eastern on Inventing Situations. You can preview (and well, caption) them by clicking the image here (that’s the end of the stream, the start is here).

Your fellow capper, Indomitus has recorded a riff of Krull for sale at the Rifftrax site. Enjoy this preview:

you can either buy the track and synch it up with your own copy of Krull, or email Indo (voxorox neoleo net) to request one of his handful of review copies, so you can post an HONEST review at rifftrax.com.

Check it out kids, known capper Matteus (back right)  attended Joel Hodgson and Trace Beaulieu’s  recent appearance at MIT. Check out Matt’s barely visible visible t-shirt, it’s one of the old limited edition* Inventing Situations t-shirts that I used to sell @ cafepress. (Not the new ones that don’t sell).

[alt link to the photo]

Wow, an indirectly mst3k inspired t-shirt I designed in the presence of Trace and one time t-shirt factory employee Joel. At the school whose rejection letter sent me into a nearly two decade long downward spiral. This means something.

* Limited to the tiny number I could sell.

Since all I have to plug that I’m involved in is my friend’s new hi-larious job advice website, Help Unwanted, that I’m doing tech work for (and will have more on later as it really gets rolling), I’ll just plug the next offering from Cinematic Titanic, Coming January 8th :

(direct link)