If he just cut a mouth hole for his gimp, he could use it's moaning and screaming to find his car instead of wasting precious helium.

I get it's a joke, hence the balloon war statement
But he's still wasting helium though for this joke.

I see two problems with this:
1. If everyone starts doing it, then it's going to escalate into a balloon war, perhaps leading to a flag war even
2. helium is limited and precious, stop wasting it for trivial things

As was mentioned above, the cost of the fuel is a non-starter. Currently SpaceX uses a Kerosene / Liquid Oxygen fuel mix.

After the anomaly (the space industries way of saying accident) in June SpaceX did a complete vehicle review. They are now using a more advanced technique to cool the LOX which means for a denser LOX liquid in their tanks, which ultimately means they have more oxidizer on board for their flights now.

Coupled with the LOX improvements they have made upgrades to the engines which means 30% greater efficiency. Basically the horsepower per engine has increased.

This means they can get their payloads to orbit plus have more then enough fuel left over in stage 1 to return it to land.

The greatest efficiency comes from returning the stage(s) and then reusing them in future launches (not proven yet). ALL launchers (u.s, soviet, indian, ESA, Japan, etc) ditch ALL of their hardware into the ocean when getting payload to orbit. Bye, bye multi million dollars worth of engines and hardware.

If SpaceX can turn that scenario on its head and reuse those stages and MORE importantly the engines they will cut their costs per launch by a substantial amount. Ultimately that means cheaper per pound cost to get material into orbit.

All of the media uses the word "explosion" when describing the June anomaly which is funny because there was never an ignition of onboard fuels.

The LOX tanks have smaller Helium tanks inside them. The helium is released during launch. The helium rises in the LOX quickly, expands and pressurizes the tank to ensure the LOX is "squeezed" into the pipes in order to keep up with the turbo pumps.

One of the struts holding a helium tank inside the LOX tank failed. The helium tank shot up and blew threw the top of the LOX tank and took a good part of the top of the stack off. The engines actually fired for a few seconds after the anomaly and then sputtered out. The rest of the vehicle at this point is still fairly intact.

Without proper structural integrity the vehicle started to veer off course, dynamic pressures built up and the vehicle was essentially ripped apart by those forces.

At 3:20 the Helium tank rips off its struts. At 3:27 the remainder of the vehicle disintegrates:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuNymhcTtSQ

SpaceX mentioned that in June, the dragon capsule continued to relay telemetry until it smacked into the ocean. If the Dragon had better software onboard it would have detected the anomaly and recovered with chutes. Elon said that software would be active on Dragons from now on.

Problem 1: Tip toward the wood, as the wood will lose more buoyancy from the air than the lead.

As for the extreme case here, let's use the helium balloon. You tie the helium balloon to the right hand side of the scale. Now, to get the bar on the scale horizontal (balanced) you need to hang the lead weight closer to the fulcrum but on the right hand side of the scale too.

Now remove the air.

The balloon was only pulling up because of the air. Without the air it will hang down. So, we now have two things hanging down on the same side of the scale, so it's very obvious which way the scale will swing...

Problem 2: pi*20m Circumference = pi*diameter. Poles increase diameter by 20m. Really not sure where the 'extreme case' comes into this though?

Beats the hell out of me.

Just to noodle around a bit, the only extreme I can think of about the scales would be to substitute an extremely low density object for the wood. Say, a helium filled balloon? But that assumes that she did in fact mean equal mass for the two objects, and wouldn't actually give valid readings on a scale in atmosphere anyway.

Extreme cases are a rather specialized approach, as I remember...its not really a common, or easy way to get answers. I got the feeling this was kind of a "wannabee" presentation. Like she wanted to do "Smarter every day" stuff but isn't quite able to find and explain interesting non-intuitive problems well.

Yeah, they used some very easy method to pull this off, no matter which way they did it. I can think of a few ways to do it. It's made incredibly easy to do, as well, due to the fact that Teller is allowed to get in it first and also that the bag never leaves it's origin (at the setup anyway--it doesn't matter after Teller is out).

I would use the "bag within a bag" type setup. Essentially when Teller gets in, there is already an opening at the bottom (with the stage sitting right there). Teller is standing on the stage, basically. With the second hole pulled up past him and cinched shut once Penn closes the other end (stopping helium from getting out).

Then they flash out the lights, and Teller merely pushes the bag off him, and making sure to cinch any slack off the bottom so it doesn't "droop" or look bigger than it should--if that was even needed (as they may have put a mild adhesive on the ground to keep the bag in place; Teller can also do it, but it's easier the other way).

It does make for a nice illusion.

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Helium Infused Beer - Fantastic Idea has been added as a related post - related requested by Zawash on that post.

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helium do not work that WAY!

Why have they bothered lying about this? I don't get it.

Obviously fake, as was pointed out, you have to breath helium for it to change your voice It's a function of sound waves traveling through a different gas density, the same reason your voice goes lower when breathing nitrous oxide. The gas doesn't change your vocal chords as some people seem to think.

Nope http://m.snopes.com/helium-beer/

probably should be in debunked channel