Went and saw Up over the weekend with @mariadelpilar and Benaiah... in 3D.  Viewing the trailer early on, I thought the concept would make for a great short film but I was wondering how it would translate into a full-length feature.  Well, the hour and forty minute ride is defintely worth seeing, with or without kids.  Again, Pixar does a superb job of appealing to a vast audience and spanning huge age gaps.  There's so much believable creativity packed into this film that the writers don't even try to explain how most things in this "world" work.

Well, Wired has done it for them.  The main question is: How many helium filled balloons would it take to lift a house off the ground?

We called Wolfe House Movers, which specializes in moving old structures and had Kendal Siegrist, a manager, take a look at the images from the movie to see how much the house might weigh.

“A building like that, you’d figure right around 100,000 pounds,” Siegrist said.

Then we did some calculations. Air weighs about 0.078 pounds per cubic foot; helium weighs just 0.011 pounds per cubic foot. A helium balloon experiences a buoyant upward force that is equal to the air it displaces minus its own weight, or 0.067 pounds per cubic foot of helium balloon.

One more simple calculation — 100,000 pounds divided by 0.067 pounds per cubic foot — and you’ve got that it would take 1,492,537 cubic feet of helium to lift the house. Of course, you’d need some more balloons to keep getting it higher, but that’s our minimum.

Now, let’s assume you’ve got a bunch of spherical balloons three feet in diameter. They’ve got a volume in 14.1 cubic feet, so you’d need 105,854 of them filled with helium to lift the house. Eyeballing the cluster of balloons above the house in Up, let’s say on average, it’s 40 balloons across and deep and 70 balloons tall. Do the math and there could be 112,000 balloons in there.

And there you have it.

via Wired Science