What happens to released helium balloons?

While at Vail's Sunday Market, Shirlene and I saw a released yellow balloon and wondered what would become of it? Does it eventually pop? Fly forever? Slowly return back to the ground? Get eaten by birds mistaking it for candy? Well, actually...

1. When let go, they rise at a rate of 2-m/s
2. After 1.5 hours they reach an altitude of 5 miles
3. At this point, the temperature is about negative 40 degrees C - because its so cold, the balloon becomes mad inelastic.
4. Simultaneously, while rising, the atmospheric pressure decreases and since the pressure in the balloon is the same, it gets larger.
5. Eventually, there's a point where the balloon becomes too inelastic and the pressure keeps pushing to increase the volume of the balloon.
6. Wait for it...
7. POP

And now you know.

Compy Ram

I'm currently looking into upgrading my macbook memory from 1GB to 4GB. woot. So I went to newegg.com and looked up what's up ... unfortunately there were all these specs for memory and I had no clue about anything so... here we are. Info for when you get around to upgrading your compy.

Buffered/Unbuffered - This is a hardware thing that allows your compy to talk more easily with your memory. Only beneficial/usable for servers when you're running like 10 RAM sticks for 128GB of memory. O_O
CAS Latency - How fast it is. The lower the faster ... on the order of nanoseconds.
ECC - Error correcting code. Another hardware thing, sounds cool but only compatible with servers.
Heat Spreader - Its a sheet of stuff that manufactures add on for dispersing heat better, more surface area I think. The popular belief, however, says that they're useless - possibly trapping heat and making things worse.

So when you get around to buying memory, ends up you want the specs to say "no" and just make sure the MHz is right. Simple enough. done. (and never buy memory from the apple store :-p )

FIRST!

backstory: Charles and I figured that the stuff we don't know could fill an encyclopedia, so we've set up this blog to update each other on the things we've just found out about on google. Unfortunately, the address googleblogger.blogspot.com was already taken by the google folks. But KNOWLEDGE PROJECT (courtesy of Charles) sounds pretty cool too, so that's what this is.

I'm at Vail, CO, visiting Charles, and we found this wonderful gelato place called Rimini at 675 Lionshead Place. We've had it twice in two days. Naturally, the question came up as to what the difference is between gelato and ice cream. And, courtesy of World of Ice Cream, we present this answer:

"...lesser ice creams also have more air whipped in. As much as half the carton may be air, in fact. More air--or "overrun"--means softer ice cream that scoops more easily and melts more quickly. Premium ice creams have very little air added; gelato has no air added at all... usually include more egg yolks, more milk and less cream... [and] actually has less fat than regular ice cream, [although] gelato's low overrun makes for an extremely dense, rich and creamy treat."

Today's cup of heaven = pistachio gelato + white chocolate raspberry gelato + giant caramel pistachio chunk. Thank you JWU person behind the counter! We're definitely going again tomorrow, mmm...