In 1982 a lawn chair tied to helium weather balloons drifted up into airline airspace - a dangerous stunt, never to be repeated. Here is the safe version of that curiosity: float your things on paper. Never tie balloons to anyone alive, and never let balloons go outdoors.
How Many Balloons?Weigh the things you'd float, with honest ranges
List a few things. Add a weight if you have weighed one. The page counts the party balloons it would take and draws the cluster. One run estimates every unweighed thing as low, likely and high, picks the one worth weighing first, and calls it: a bouquet, an armful, a cloud - or grounded, because anyone alive stays on the ground.
1 What to float
2 Balloon kind
Lift figures are estimates: helium lifts roughly 1 g per litre at room conditions, minus the balloon's own skin and ribbon. Real balloons vary with fill size and helium grade.
3 The sky
Every thing, low to high
low to highlikelyyour own weight (no range)
The same list, every balloon kind
| Balloon | Likely | Range |
|---|
4 Weigh the list
One run gives every thing you have not weighed a low, likely and high weight, each anchored on what a typical thing of that kind weighs, and names the one thing whose range matters most - weigh that one and the count tightens. Your own weights are kept exactly. People and animals are never counted.
The verdict is a fixed rule on the likely total: a bouquet at 100 g or less, an armful up to 2 kg, a cloud above that, and grounded when everything on the list is alive.
5 Saved lists
How the free side works
Each line is split on | or a tab into name, weight and note. A weight can be 250, 250 g, 1.2 kg, 3 oz or 2 lb 4 oz; with only two columns, a second column that is not a weight is read as the note. Up to 12 things; duplicates and a header row are skipped, and the page says so. Words that look like a person or an animal (me, my cat, grandma, a man, a toddler...) are kept on the ground and never counted, and so is a thing whose note says it carries one (a chair with me in it); a thing-word right next to the animal word (a toy dog, a dog bed, a statue of a man) lifts that flag. After a weigh-in, type in your own weight for the thing it says to weigh first: the page swaps it in and recounts for free, and points at the next widest range.
Balloons for a range: the light case meets the strongest balloon and the heavy case the weakest, so the range is honest at both ends. A sealed party balloon's lift barely changes with warm or cold air - the gas shrinks and gets denser together - so the main unknowns are how full it is, the helium grade and the skin. Before any run only your own weights are counted; a run fills in the rest, and the page checks it: one answer per thing, your weights kept, ranges in order, the verdict rule, the thing to weigh first, word limits, and no balloon counts, weekdays, he or she, or internal field names in the text.
A thought experiment. Never tie balloons to anyone alive, and never let balloons go outdoors - they come down as litter.