Life, Unbounded: Jovian attraction

Caleb Scharf has a very poetic posting about Jupiter.

In my mind's eye I superimposed the great gas giant, king of worlds, two and half times as massive as all the other planets in our system put together. Its vast jet streams and storms, its incredible family of 63 moons, the potent magnetic field, the great plasma torus as Io burrows through a tight orbit.

He goes on to calculate that at its current position—closer to the earth than at any time since the 1960's—Jupiter's gravity reduces the weight of the Empire State Buiilding by 26 pounds.