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Comment by AceJohnny2 | Hacker News Reader

The article directly refers to Munroe's What-If article, and Munroe is pretty clear that he relies heavily on Wolfram Alpha for his calculations (see end of "Falling With Helium" [1])

So it's rather amusing to me that things are coming full circle, and that Worlfram's guys are now using Munroe's topic to demonstrate SystemModeler, another Wolfram product.

[1] https://what-if.xkcd.com/62/

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The page you linked says that he normally uses Mathematica, and fell back to Wolfram|Alpha for that piece when it started locking up.

While researching this article, I managed to lock up my copy of Mathematica several times on balloon-related differential equations, and subsequently got my IP address banned from Wolfram|Alpha for making too many requests.

That was an example. If you have to be pedant, then here are his other references to it:

https://www.google.com/search?q=wolfram%20site%3Awhat-if.xkc...

Compare with his (currently) 2 references to Mathematica: https://www.google.com/search?q=mathematica+site%3Awhat-if.x...

Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha are developed by the same company, if you weren't aware.

Oh, suuuuuure, some kind of magic mathematics company run by a reclusive genius who got a Ph.D. from Cal Tech when he was twenty, and/or college dropout and/or megalomanaic bald silicon valley mogul.

answer for those following along: all of the above :)

trivia about flying on helium balloons:

"In 1982, Larry Walters flew across Los Angeles in a lawn chair lifted by weather balloons, eventually reaching several miles in altitude. After passing through LAX airspace, he descended by shooting some of the balloons with a pellet gun."

In Brazil, a priest doing a gimmick to raise some funds to his church went on flying with helium balloons. He was drifted to the ocean by the wind and didn't know how to return. He did took a phone and a GPS device. But he didn't know how to use the GPS he took to tell people his location. He died.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelir_Ant%C3%B4nio_de_Carli

> "In 1982, Larry Walters flew across Los Angeles in a lawn chair lifted by weather balloons..."

I watched an old episode of MythBusters last night on YouTube where they tested exactly that, it was Season 1 Episode 3 - if anyone is interested.

There's also the wonderful Australian romantic comedy film Danny Deckchair. Danny flies away from his problems in a deckchair-balloon aircraft.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0337960/

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