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Home Made Star Wars Movie Injury
SaleNowOn writes "Rather than use expensive cgi techniques to make the light sabres glow for their home movie. This couple instead used fluorescent tubes filled with petrol.
Which they then set alight.
If they don't survive they must be Future Darwin Award winners. It makes me proud to be British." And me embarassed to be a Star Wars geek.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/beds/bu cks/herts/4575291.stm
LIGHT-SABRE DUEL PUTS TWO IN HOSPITAL TWO Star Wars fans are in a critical condition in hospital after duelling with lightsabres made by filling fluorescent light tubes with petrol. The pair - a man aged 20 and a girl of 17 - are believed to have been filming a mock fight when one of the devices exploded in woodland on Sunday. They were rushed to West Herts Hospital before being transferred to the specialist burns unit at Broomfield Hospital, Chelmsford, in Essex. Police say a third person present at the incident was questioned.
From The Currant Bun and The BBC.
NB : Before you make any cheap cracks, the people involved are seriously injured.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
They obviously haven't heard of saberology. Silly sots. :)
http://nerdfortress.com/
C'mon, Slashdot editors, do your job and edit. It looks really stupid when the first "sentence" in the first article posted on the Main page is actually a sentence fragment. Have some pride.
If you ban something for having someone tied to train tracks.. You'd have to ban Dudley Do-Right.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
"They filled them with fuel and washing-up liquid ..."
If "washing-up liquid" means dishwasher liquid, then these folks made napalm. Good lord.
A 20 yr old man and a 17 yr old girl, FYI.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
"They filled them with fuel and washing-up liquid to act out a Jedi Knight fight scene from new movie Revenge Of The Sith. "
Gas + soap may make a crude napalm
Plural of genius.
Force FX LightSabers
My cousin has a pair of these, and my wife and I checked them out about a week ago. He paid about 99$US each at a chain movie store. This would have covered their visuals and their sound effects (at least so much as you would need for a home movie). And, according to the guys at ThinkGeek, they will hold up to some small-scale combat.
200$US has to be less expensive than their medical bills will be...
> Which they then set alight
And it says this where, exactly?
Why would you fill a tube with petrol if you weren't intending to set it alight?
Why would you end up in a specialist burns unit if the petrol hadn't got lit?
Nothin' wrong with that... Norse communities used to elect (and remove) their kings. Just cos all our royalty are hereditary, doesn't mean everyone else's are.
the layman's guide to computer science
I know someone who built what looks, in the dark or not right up in your face, like a real functioning lightsaber. A good many of them actually, he pulls them out at renaissance faires after hours to entertain the guilds with lightsaber duels. They're basically real swords lined with side-luminous fiberoptics, and a laser (or at least a strong, colored light source) shining into one end of the fiber. You wouldn't even need to use swords properly to make them... a transparent plastic tube (hard acrylic like they build marine exhibits ala Sea World out of) would probably work better, twist the two lines of fiberoptics down the center, and let the lens effect of the plastic tubing "fill in" the space in the middle.
The problem with the segmented plastic lightsabers you can buy is (A) they're weak as fuck and you can't fight with them, (B) you can see the segmenting and it's clearly soft plastic between!
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
You need tight field lines to get coronal discharge - and if you use them, you'll probably see lightning coming from it in the dark. Tight field lines generally require fine wires. Also, the glow will be unicolor unless you outgas different gasses from your saber.
Not that I'd recommend using fluorescent light tubes filled with anything - that's a shatter risk. And while tritium isn't dangerous in most situations, that much tritium in a fragile container is asking for trouble - getting that much on your skin (where some may soak in) and in the air (which you'll breathe), you'll probably get a couple years to a couple decades of background radiation equivalent (based on the fact that drinking an entire tritium rifle sight is a two years dose).
If you are outdoors, you would probably be just fine. Tritium, after all, is hydrogen. It will rapidly ascend through the atmosphere. If it is inhaled, it is not metabolized by the body or taken into the bloodstream in significant quantities, so no huge problem there. The main with radioactivity is when you inhale a solid dust, and the material sits in your lungs, irradiating them for years on end. Tritium does not do this.
Also, the radiation can't penetrate the epidermis, which is a plus.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
Funny, I work with tritium all the time in a biology lab. No weekly medical exams needed. Maybe you should do more research on the subject before spouting all that stuff.
.. but might not be for cats. My girlfriend and I came home from a bar one night where all of the drinks had mini glow sticks in them, as stirrers. We brought them home and had lots of fun as we watched the cat chase them around the darkened apartment. Well, some stuff happened and we got a little distracted, and when I walked back into the living room the cat had of course chewed open the glow sticks. The couch was covered in fluorescent green liquid and what's worse, the cat, also coated in fluorescent green liquid, spent the next 12 hours foaming at the mouth. Cat survived and eventually stopped glowing.
By that logic, all the oxygen would have settled down here and the nitrogen would be up at 20,000 ft.
It ain't like that.
"But all your emitter and collector are belong to me!"
I never said we don't have a license or weren't trained to work with radiation. I called bullocks on needing weekly medical exams when using tritium.
Yes, but how much do you use in your lab? Most biochemistry protocols I know of use amounts measured in microcuries or even less. The University of New Hampshire requires routine urinalysis for tritium exposure for workers who handle more than 100 microcuries.
An emergency exit sign with six-inch lettering contains about 10 curies. In order to handle those quantities (or the substantially greater amount required to make a bright light saber) I wouldn't be at all surprised if there were fairly strict licensing and medical monitoring requirements.
~Idarubicin