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Is The 'CSI Phenomenon' Good For Science?
Tycoon Guy writes "With CSI: Crime Scene Investigation airing its 100th episode this week, I wonder, how do Slashdot readers feel about the show, and its two spinoffs? On the one hand, they've caused a boom in the popularity of forensic science college courses, and they glamorize geeks bent over microscopes, rather than smarmy lawyers. On the other hand, they may also promote an inaccurate view of science: prosecutors throughout the country now worry about juries that refuse to accept eyewitness accounts or even outright confessions, and instead exclusively demand the kind of forensic evidence they see on CSI. But of course, in the real world, you don't get a test like that in mere seconds - or without spending a substantial amount of money. So where does CSI rate on the geek scale for you?"
Um, I don't watch it. Futurama is my standard for geek shows.
Yes. No. Maybe. I stand behind my answer..s.
vampirical
Television influencing people into having twisted world-views!? Never!
Does anyone else *love* infinite resolution? I want a 320x200 security camera that can zoom in on someone's drivers license from 200 yards.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Yeah, you don't get much more scientifically accurate than the X-Files. ;)
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"I have not watched much of the show, but I don't much care for shows that wrap everything up in a neat little box and make people think that all crimes are solved in an hour, give or take commercials."
:)
I take it you're not a big fan of star trek either eh?
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
I sure have cleaned up my evidence-leaving ways, seeing all the good tips on these reality shows.
Heck, if the witness-relocation program didn't keep moving me about, I'd be caught by now, for sure!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
That can't be good for science.
That can't be good for anybody.
You also have to account for the chronotron particle count and muon flux flow.
Jebus.
What's really sad is that after 7 seasons + of the highest quality documentary filmmaking people still don't believe in aliens.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Scritching.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=61
Frankly, I tend to agree.
TFOAE
Well duh! Being nearly legaly blind (and since when do lawiers tell me when I'm blind?), I know that I'd rather take my glasses off if I were going to jump. That way I wouldn't know I was about to hit until a few feet before impact.
--Forest C. Adcock--
I enjoy the show, but from watching it I now sadly realize that I'm not good-looking enough to be a scientist. I am relieved to know that Las Vegas is the location of such vibrant intellectual activity (since I live there).
My wife turned to me and said, "It looks like they need to update their Anti-Virus"
Right in the center of the really busy screen was the Norton Anti-Virus "Update your Anti-Virus Definitions" window.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Most TV show that suck. CSI sucks too. It is good for a chuckle if you really, really have nothing else to do and are too tired to go play on the internet.
I always get a good laugh out of the magic scanner machine. They rinse a q-tip into a little test tube, put the test tube into a rack, the rack gets roboticaly loaded into a machine, there is a couple of seconds of the sound of a dot matrix printer, and the "tech" says in a serious voice, "It's a piece of rubber from the tire of a 1989 green chevy pickup truck! There were only 1000 of this model produced of which only 17 are still on the road and only one is registered in this state. The owner is the suspects sister!"
At this point they confront the sister who admits that she really was in town after all and she did cut up the body, disolve it in lye, grid up the bones and throw the dust in the Atlantic, "but he was already dead."
Since one of the teeth didn't get ground up all the way they are able to put the tooth back into the magic scanner (cue more dot matrix printer sounds) and show he really died of poisoning on tuesday when the sister said that she saw him alive on wednesday.
They then connect to a national database that tracks the cash purchases of everyone in the country for the last 10 years (here we are treated to the sound of a 9600baud modem, dee,doo,deeeeeeeeee,doooo,dooooooooo!) to show that last August she bought some rat poison when she was in Chicago for a business trip and had an affair with the dead guy.
They confront her again and this time she admits she did it. We get about 20 seconds of the main character finally on a date with the cute scientist from out of town when his pager goes off (no nooky for you) and its time to watch an ad for a new cure for erectile disfunction ( when a quiet time becomes the right time) .
Every wrong attempt discarded is a step forward - T. Edison
I love when they take a pipettor, dip into a large beaker of solution left open on their benchtops and pull back a half-full tip with air bubbles in it, with big droplets hanging off the side, then squirt some of it into an unlabeled test tube. The show is great, but as a biologist, I cringe every time they do that.
Also, if you ever see a M.E. kneeling over my corpse, touching my hair and saying "oh, poor baby, who did this to you?" you have my permission to slap her! Or as David Caruso would say, "You have my permission...[dramatically puts sunglasses on]...to slap her."
The best was in the cross-over Miami/New York episode. The crime scene in NY was all cold and blue looking, then it cuts to a shot of David in the same room and he is all orange and glowing.
You can wavelet and fractalate and vigourously wave your hands in the air
Fractalate!
Fractalate!
How did you know this would be my new favorite word? Honestly, if you had used "wavify" instead of "wavelet", I would have mailed you a ham out of sheer glee.
It's not so much that they wrap everything up, it's just that the entire Miami police department apparently consists of the angsty guy from NYPD Blue driving around in a Hummer. The fucking FBI doesn't even dare challenge this guy's jurisdiction. State laws, federal laws, doesn't matter, Judge Dredd will terminate those responsible. I've seen him run kidnapping investigations, direct SWAT teams, they'll track down some suspect and they'll have like 40 guys in body armor and machine guns standing around outside, but then the big fucking glow-in-the-dark Hummer shows up and they're all "whoa, back up guys" and he kicks down the fucking door and takes out like 15 motherfucking KGB ninjas with flamethrowers or some shit.
Fuck, you hire some guy to keep track of which blood spatters belong to who, and all of a sudden he's taken over the entire Florida legal system. You ever see any trials in this show? For all we know he just takes these fuckers out back and buries them in the motherfucking parking lot. It's not like he couldn't get away with it, he apparently got some kind of extra-legal status where he immediately just takes over command in any situation he wanders into.
Bah, who wants more realism in TV and movies?
I want more movie magic in real life!
I dream of a glorious future where there is absolutely no difference in the quality of image you can get from a 320x200 cell phone camera and a $bignum 10-megapixel digital camera.
We could use the same technology to implement amazing lossless compression. 3kb files will store HD-quality images! Entire albums will fly across the P2P networks, tucked away in files that wouldn't come close to filling a 5.25" floppy disk, but sound even better than the original master recordings! Nerds will get dotcodes containing DVD-quality movies tattooed into their skulls in protest of the DVD CCA!
Ah yes, the future is glorious indeed!
The AC is obviously a fan of Yoda.
There are no commercials in Star Wars.
Laws are for people with no friends.
Maybe "sheer glee" is the jelly-like substance that canned hams are packed in?
If true, it would follow that sheer glee lies somewhere between solid glee and liquid glee. I would pursue this further, but all this talk of ham jelly is making me hungry and/or nauseous.
Damn, I thought they acquited him because Chewbacca lived on Endor....
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
XANDER: Not on a regular VCR they don't
According to Buffy, it's still possible to do this kind of crap, just not on a normal VCR.
Technoli
On a related note, as a graduate student in a biosciences lab, I always chuckle when I see one of the CSI lab techs at a bench - without fail there's a pipettor used in most episodes. Usually dispensing some sort of coloured mystery liquid. Obviously it can't be science without your trusty pipette in hand.
Seriously, any other science geeks get a kick everytime they see a lab coat and pipette?
"Nokia is not a country, it's the capital of Finland!" -Moderated "Informative". Yeesh.