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Putting Star Wars to the MythBusters Test
DangerTenor writes "The cast of the show MythBusters chat about their pasts with ILM, talk about some Star Wars myths (Can you avoid freezing to death in a blizzard overnight by gutting a dead animal like a tauntaun and getting into its carcass?) and why R2-D2 is the perfect sidekick." Not as cool as our interview, but pretty neat.
(Yeah, I am a Star Wars Geek.)
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Huh? Jamie Pierre just broke the skiing cliff-drop record with a 245-footer in Grand Targhee. I haven't seen the video yet, but supposedly he didn't even land it cleanly. (The New Zealander who previously held the record hit a 225-footer into slush, landing on his back with a backpack full of foam.)
C'mon, a 50-footer won't even get you into a movie nowadays unless you throw at least a 720...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Could you pilot a submarine through a planet's core?
"If it were possible to have a water core at the center of a planet, then perhaps, but the pressures would be significant," Imahara explains. "That would have to be some submarine."
The canopy to the submarine was an energy force field.
When the sub lost power, the canopy force field would have shut down (along with everything else), drowning the occupants.
The first Death Star held 27,048 officers, 774,576 crew including troopers, pilots and crewers, 400,000 support workers and over 25,000 Imperial stormtroopers. It also carried assault shuttles, Skipray Blastboats, strike cruisers, drop ships, land vehicles, and support ships as well as 7,200 TIE fighters.
As one can see, it's heavily armed. Imagine a botnet of Death Star zombies!
For surface protection it sported 2,000 Turbolaser batteries, 2,500 ion cannons and at least 700 tractor beam projectors, plus, of course, the superlaser.
There we have it! Anti-spyware protection, anti-virus protection, anti-adware protection... The whole lot!
Clearly, we're talking about Windows.
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Water Phase Diagram
Note regions VIII-XI. With enough pressure yes, water will solidify. HOWEVER there is a temperature point at which the water will no longer solidify (not shown on this scale although you can see the "liquid dome" is increasing as temperature increases. Eventually if you go far enough to the right there is a point where only vapor exists, regardless of pressure.
So while GP is correct that pressure will solidify water there is also extreme temperature that will counteract the pressure. One must wonder why water cores don't exist in real life...
I think the real goal would be to dump the animal's viscera and use the large rib cage and fat/hide as a sort of shelter or smelly windbreak. The damp gutsy stuff in an opened-up belly would very quickly be a big old heatsink in the sort of wind and temps portrayed in the movie.
If you really a fun portrayal of this sort of thing, watch the evade-the-British-captors scene in the 1995 version of Rob Roy, starring Liam Neeson. That's a great movie, even without light sabers. Ye Old Ferrous Cutlery does just fine for those Baroque combatants. Tim Roth does a particularly slimy job as the primary villain. Highly recommended.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
No, is not English VSO. Is English SVO. Sound VSO languages retarded.
My Greatest Heist - Muisc partly inspired by the unbeatable Qwantz
My dad was in the paratroopers (I was born at Ft Campbell). On one jump, one of his fellow paratrooper's chute didn't open, and neither did the reserve.
Dad says the fellow fell 2000 feet (divide by three for meters), landed in a muddy, plowed field, and didn't break a single bone! He was in the hospital for his bruises for only 2 days (this was in 1951).
OTOH my Grandfather worked for Purina, and went four floors down an elevator shaft onto a concrete bottom (roughly fifty feet) in 1959. He lived, but he would have beeen better off if he'd died; he was a complete cripple and severely brain damaged, but he lived. But he didn't land in snow or a plowed, muddy field.
So yes, it's completely plausable to not only fall fifty feet into a snowdrift, but to get up and ride that funny looking horse.
-mcgrew
There are twelve known physical types of ice. Look at the phase diagram carefully. Even at 10,000 gigapascals there are forms of ice. Most of these types are denser than water. What we typically think of as "water ice" is specifically called Ice-1 (there are two subtypes, cubic and hexagonal). Ice-2 through Ice-10 are all denser than water, with Ice-10 being 2.5 times as dense. That's some heavy ice. Ice-11 is less dense than water, but Ice-12 is again denser.
Just stay away from me with that Ice 9, alright?
As somebody else mentioned already, some languages have the word ordering Yoda uses. Yoda is based on a blend of Japanese mystics, Samurai and martial-arts masters. Guess what word order is used in Japanese.
I have a device that is very much like a light saber that uses no power at all. It consists of a thermal electron plasma which is contained by a matrix of positively charged ions. I can't get it to glow like a "light saber" unless I supply a lot of energy to it, but doing so weakens the ion matrix to the point where it might fail to stand up use.
Electrostatic repulsion and the strength of the ion matrix prevent it from penetrating another saber of similar design, but the same electrostatic repulsion, when focused to specific parts of the blade, is quite adept at slicing through flesh.
There is a picture of a saber of the type I describe right here.
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Actually, Russian does not depend upon word order to determine the role of a word in the sentence. Rather, it uses case declensions. Certainly, there is a prefered order (generally, SVO), but word order is generally used for emphasis rather than meaning. For instance, "Ya tjebya lublju" and "Ya lublju tebya" both mean "I love you," though the stress in the first would be on the object (you), and the stress on the second would be on the verb (love). Basically, it is the difference between "I LOVE you" and "I love YOU." xander
Rhapsody in Numbers
This is why the only thing (other than Chuck Norris) that a lightsaber can't cut through is another lightsaber.
What about cortosis?
Here in Central Illinois, the story is well known of a circuit riding preacher who was caught out in the sub-sero temperatures of the initial blizzard that started on December 20th, 1830. He managed to survive the night by killing his horse and using it's body warmth. For over two weeks the temperature stayed below -12 degrees F. The article here doen't have that story, but it does describe the conditions that Winter.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain