this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2025
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xkcd #3107: Weather Balloons

Title text:

Once you add the balloons into the model, it makes forecasting easier overall--the forecast is always 'cold and dark, with minimal solar-driven convection.'

Transcript:

Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com

Source: https://xkcd.com/3107/

explainxkcd for #3107

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[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 12 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I'm going to need someone to adjust the model for instances in which an F-22 starts shooting them down.

[–] PodPerson@lemmy.zip 2 points 14 hours ago

How about when an unhinged person in the White House starts defunding NWS and launches get cancelled (yes - happening already).

[–] ValiantDust@feddit.org 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

"Dabei war'n dort am Horizont
Nur 99 Luftballons."

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

The red ones go faster

[–] tate@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 1 day ago (4 children)

All the fighter jets in the world couldn't make a tiny dent in one trillion balloons.

[–] Alexstarfire@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] tate@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

It looks like the dart took out about a half dozen lights and a dozen people in about two seconds, so let's say 10 strikes per second. At that rate it would take 10^11 seconds to pop a trillion balloons. That's more than 3000 years!

Of course I did say "make a tiny dent," but even to eliminate 0.1% of the balloons would take the dart 3 years. One trillion is a number that we use a lot, for example talking about the US national debt, but it is not an ordinary number that lends itself to intuitive understanding. Even a billion is hard to grasp intuitively.

[–] Alexstarfire@lemmy.world 1 points 13 hours ago

Let's just light the atmosphere on fire. Sounds like the quickest solution. Surely there can't be any downsides.

[–] SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'd just shoot doem down with FLAC cannons

[–] ayyy@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 day ago

Good idea using the Free Lossless Audio Codec that will sound way better than mp3 when the balloons all pop.

[–] AmidFuror@fedia.io 1 points 1 day ago

We need more jets right away!

[–] Deceptichum@quokk.au 1 points 1 day ago

Not if we build it one trillion of them.