Comments on: Tell Us What You Really Want

By: Taunter

Taunter — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 03:58:23 +0000

It would seem the failure is in a system that puts such a low price on helium that natural gas drillers do not even bother to capture it as a matter of course yet maintains a reserve for eighty years.

Perhaps we should encourage more blimps.

By: DMW

DMW — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 17:08:15 +0000

Sure– I assume the gas drillers will start capturing helium once the price gets high enough. But in the meantime, and for storage and buffering purposes once that happens, the reserve is nice to have. Even with the reserve, northern california used to occasionally run out of helium due to “thunderstorms in poland.” At least that’s what the angry mobs of physicists were told.

Re pudendal: like Denny Green, I think it means what I thought it means. Shooting for “of or pertaining to balls,” I considered various alternatives, but rejected them as inappropriate for a family blog. Pudendal has the drawback that it is lamentably and misogynistically moving towards being female-specific, but the advantage of a whiff of shamefulness in its etymology.

By: Taunter

Taunter — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 01:47:02 +0000

Wouldn’t that be an argument for not letting the helium escape from the vast majority of natural gas wells? Unless the position is that once lost, helium is lost for good, so we should hang onto whatever we started with just to be on the safe side.

I don’t think “pudendal” means what you think it means.

By: DMW

DMW — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 03:52:17 +0000

As a low-temperature guy I feel I must note that helium has uses apart from blimpery. Strategic uses, even. And although it’s the second most abundant element in the universe, we’re actually running kind of low on the isotope they keep in Amarillo (4He). The problem is that once it’s released in the wild, it hastens to the upper reaches of the atmosphere and is removed from earth by the solar wind. The supply of 3He, meanwhile, is at starvation levels, because DHS is using it all in their cargo port neutron detectors. Anyway, from my biased perspective the existence of the 4He reserve is actually something the government got right (by accident, but still). Of course, my industry is one of the beneficiaries, so perhaps this argument makes me the moral (if not the, er, pudendal) equivalent of Johnny Courson.