edself's Comments

The concept here is compliance - how much or little resistance there is to inflation. As the other commenters have noted, uninflated balloons are much less compliant than inflated ones (although compliance drops again when balloons are completely inflated, so the experiment would have turned out differently with balloons that were fully inflated vs. half - inflated.)
This is a big deal in the physiology of the lung, where you want all the alveoli to expand equally. Surface tension decreases the compliance of small (uninflated or partiallly-inflated) alveoli, so they would tend to stay uninflated while inflated alveoli expand further. Surfactant works by reducing surface tension and increasing the compliance of small alveoli.
Cool demonstration, but the explanation was lousy.
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A similarly heartwarming story from the Corvallis (Oregon) Gazette-Times, 5/2/08:

Last Saturday, Western Oregon University softball player Sara Tucholsky came up to bat. She swung away. The resulting home run was her first. Two runners were on base. Tucholsky overran first, spun around to make the tag — and blew out her knee. Agonized, she crawled back to first base.

Her dilemma: unless she tagged all the bases, the homer wouldn’t count. If her teammates helped her, she’d be out.

To the crowd’s astonishment, several members from the opposing Central Washington team carried Tucholsky around all the bases — even though her three-run homer helped to eliminate them from the playoffs.

The umpire said there was no rule against this; it may never have happened before. (And if it has, we’d sure love to hear how, where and when.)

A bouquet of roses to the Central Washington team. Most games are quickly forgotten. But those who witnessed Central Washington’s generosity will not soon forget it.
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