Anonymous asked:
How many helium balloons would it take to lift an elephant to the top of the Chrysler building?

According to Google, 1 liter of helium is enough to lift 1 gram. Also according to Google, your typical balloon would contain roughly 12 liters of helium, and an African bull elephant (the biggest kind of elephant) probably weighs about 7000 kg, or seven million grams.

So a rough estimate? Maybe somewhere in the neighborhood of 600,000 balloons. That would be a good place to start.

You would probably need more. You’re not just lifting the elephant, you’re also lifting the balloons and the strings. And you’ll need some heavy-duty strings too, since I imagine your basic length of yarn is going to snap under the weight of an African bull elephant no matter how many helium balloons are attached to it.
At some point you would need to question why you aren’t simply renting a blimp.

There is an additional problem with this scenario in that the Chrysler building isn’t open to the public—it’s leased out to private buildings. The elephant wouldn’t be allowed past the lobby. Once you airlifted it to the top, it would have nowhere to land. So now the question is, what happens when an elephant falls 1,050 feet onto the pavement of east Manhattan. I’m not sure I want to know the answer.


Anonymous asked:

How was your first chorus practice this week?

It went fine.

There are five pieces in our repertoire: Mozart’s “Te Deum” and  “Laudate Dominum”; Beethoven’s “Fantasia”; and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Requiem”. On Thursday’s rehearsal, we started on the latter two.
For my part: never heard them before this week. So I’ve got some learning to do. I don’t know the melodies and I don’t know the words. The plan is to try my best to pick it up as we go along.

It was certainly a productive first day, I guess. We got some work done on the Beethoven and the Lloyd Webber. I got a decent handle on the German lyrics to the Beethoven piece.

It’s been a long time since I last sang in a choir. I’ve missed it. Choral singing is a team effort—each chorus member contributes only a tiny portion of each piece, and it all comes together into something bigger than the sum of its parts. I think that’s beautiful.

Ask me anything

Because answering questions is fun. That's why.

The thing with doing the AMA schtick is that the questions almost always provoke thought. I guess some people might just answer monosyllabically, but I think that's not the point. It's not just a random question someone wants the answer to--it's a prompt. The answer might be simple, but there's always room to expand with interesting anecdotes, pre-emptive answers to possible follow-up questions, elaboration of the reasons behind my answer, and so on.

I could write as if I'm answering a question like "Why do you want people to ask you questions?" and just pretend for my own sake. But that's a lot less fun. For one thing, I have to come up with the pretend question myself, which sort of defeats the purpose, doesn't it? If I already have a topic I want to write about, I don't need to contrive a fake question to answer. And for another thing...actually, that first thing pretty much covers it. It's just better as a two-person game.

I did an AMA on reddit a while back and enjoyed it very much. People asked good questions, and I felt like I had interesting answers to give to them.

I'm a little jealous of Mark Rosewater's neverending supply of inquisitive fans. My inbox is always empty.

But my inbox is also always open, so please, drop something in over at http://troacctid.tumblr.com/ask.

Anonymous asked: I'm sure people have told you how much they dislike Runescape. How would you convince these people that the game is worthy of your time?

[Cross-post from Tumblr]

Worthy of your time? Are you kidding? It’s a time sink. That’s the whole point of the MMORPG genre. You wouldn’t play it—or any of its competitors—unless you had time to kill.

I’ve played a lot of RuneScape, and I’ve dabbled a little bit in other MMORPGs. As far as I can tell, they’re all pretty much the same. I’m certainly not going to recommend one over another. If you’re picking between MMORPGs, you should go with whichever your friends are playing so that you can at least have a shared experience. And if you don’t have any friends who play MMORPGs, then you might as well play a single-player RPG instead.

If you really want reasons, here’s a few advantages RuneScape has over similar games:

• Cheap.
• Some of the best quests I’ve seen in an MMORPG.
• Accessible. (Browser-based, low system reqs, etc.)

Those are the big ones. I’m pretty sure none of them can trump “I have friends who play [other game]” anyway.

Way I see it, there are three types of people who dislike RuneScape:

1. There’s people who play a different MMORPG, and for those people it’s perfectly reasonable not to want to play RuneScape, as MMORPGs require a significant time investment and there’s usually not much reason to swap between them.
2. There’s people who don’t play MMORPGs at all, and they’re usually disliking the entire genre moreso than any individual game. That’s fine; there’s no accounting for taste.
3. And there are ex-RuneScape players who quit because they got bored, or because they thought some update or other “ruined” the game. Well, they probably got their money’s worth back when they were playing, so bully for them.

Me, I pretty much beat the game, more or less, so I don’t play much anymore except to make my weekly contributions to clan projects.

Have you ever played through your Pokémon game so long that you’ve beaten the story and found all the secrets and filled up your Pokédex, and the only reason to play it is to train Pokémon for competitive battling? It could be one of your favorite games of all time—heck, you wouldn’t have sunk so many hours into it if it weren’t—but at some point you hit a ceiling where you just can’t squeeze any more play out of it. Sure, you could try and endlessly beat your Battle Tower high score or something, but when it comes down to it, no matter how addicted you might have been to it before, there’s no longer much reason to turn it on again.

That’s basically where I’m standing in RuneScape. I’ve completed all the quests and I have all the levels I ever wanted. Do I really need to try and max every skill? I have nothing to prove and better things to do. Regardless of how good I think the game is, I don’t really have much reason to keep logging in anymore.
Anyway, I hope that answers your question.