FoxTrot Classics by Bill Amend for April 25, 2020

you’re already a laughing stock, Jason and Marcus

Helium? There’s a shortage of that stuff, they shouldn’t be wasting it on balloons.

…not when they could be using HYDROGEN. Mwah ha ha ha haaaaaa!

That kite looks like a kritter. And it looks like there are even smaller kritters hanging on for dear life on the top/right edge of the kite. And I think that kritter has antennae

This was a more level headed plan than those bottle rockets.

I found today’s strip to be very uplifting.

Where there’s a will … there’s usually a corpse.

https://www.rockymountainair.com/blog/how-is-helium-extracted/

I see lots of Helium “party cans” at the local recycling station. Maybe this shortage is a manufactured thing like no gasoline in the 1970s and now with fracking we have tons to spare.

Helium is a very tiny molecule. My first job as a co-op electrical engineer in a lab testing double pane windows to be filled with nitrogen as “insulation” between panes. We would pump helium in and measure fast it escaped. (Helium is a much smaller element than nitrogen, so it leaks faster.) The engineer in charge told me to go to the tool room and get the “standard leak”. I laughed and told him I’m not that naive. But he insisted. After three or four exchanges, I did go, and discovered that there really is such a thing as a standard leak. Boy, was my face red. I didn’t get fired, fortunately, but got laughed at pretty good. Many years later, I have double-pane windows, and one of them fogs up on cold mornings because the nitrogen has leaked out. The others are still doing great.

it took THAT many balloons to make the kite fly? I thought it was made of newspaper and sticks, not plaster and drywall.

Where do these two get all their money?

What happened to the rockets they bought yesterday?

Years back, some politicians decided that USA should not be in the helium business and mandated selling their stockpile off at bargain prices. Scientists and engineers HAVE to get into politics. There is no other way to prevent politicians from doing scientifically illiterate stuff.