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The Physics of Superman
eieken writes "The physics of Superman mostly belong in the realm of comic books, but some scientists decided to give their input on the matter. The article tells of 'a scientific experiment in which a researcher put several chickens in a centrifuge and raised them in twice-normal gravity for months at a time. When they emerged, the chickens were stronger and had larger bones and muscles, and greater endurance. In other words, they were superchickens.' Do they have human sized centrifuges?"
see the book "The Physics of Superheroes". It's about exactly what you would expect.
Chickens can fly, they just have their wings clipped to prevent this.
e ns&cat=Chicken%20Care&sub=wing%20clipping
http://www.omlet.co.uk/guide/guide.php?view=Chick
See Larry Niven's Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex
Basically, since orgasm can be described as a 'pleasurable seizure', Superman would rip Lois apart while blowing the top of her head off.
Another must-read on the physics of superheroes is Niven's "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex". Unless you're heavily humour-impared though, please don't read it while dining on a bowl of soup.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Almost all breeds of chickens (especially domesticated) cannot really fly... at least not like you see pigeons, doves, swallows, etc. fly. It is more of a semi-powered unstable glide and they can only maintain it for relatively short distances.
The can "fly" just enough to get up into the relatively low branches of trees, over tall fences, gliding down from heights and of course as a method of faster escape at ground level.
Ask and ye shall receive.
For anyone interested in the development of Supermans powers as the series progressed, check out this website:
http://www.johnath.com/~david/etc/superman.html
As other posters have mentioned, yes, it is true that he started without flying ability -he could leap only one eighth of a mile. The development of his powers is actually quite staggering, going from what nowadays would be a lesser superhero, to being one of the most powerful superheroes in the combined comic book multiverse.
I picked up the book "The Science of Superman" some time ago. Not a bad read, and it goes into the details of how Superman's powers might stem from the differential in intensity of the earth/krypton sun, gravity, etc.
My chickens didn't have their wings clipped, and they could still barely fly. They could make it into 10 foot high branches without too much of a problem. They were also incredibly good at evading my attempts to catch them, flying into trees, decks, roofs...
The ultimate high-g planet is the super-jovian Mesklin, in Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity. At the poles it was about 600g. The natives were centipede-like, obviously very strong and fast, but they had no clear idea of "falling". If you dropped something, it disappeared and reappeared on the ground, smashed or squashed flat. More extreme, the astronomer Frank Drake imagined life on a neutron star, based on nuclear reactions rather than chemical, microscopic and extremely fast. Robert Forward did a couple of novels using that idea.
No, but if you like, you can go through all 10,600 Google results for "welcome our new * overlords":
g +%22welcome+our+new+*+overlords%22
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aslashdot.or
If you want to read more details, use the "Inside Book" search on Amazon within the Great Mambo Chicken.
From the search results link above, visit pages 54 and 55 - the sidebars navigate to the next and previous pages.
No I have no affilate link in there (that I am aware of) - call me crazy.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Actually some professional athletes train in low oxygen environments to give them more stamina in normal oxygen environments.
No discussion of the Physics of Superman is complete without this analysis of why Superman can't have sex.
Remain calm! All is well!
They're alluding to the time dilation effect in general and/or special relativity.
Basically if you are travelling close to the speed of light relative to some other point ( say earth), then time slows down for you relative to the time flow at the other point. The effect is:
sqrt( 1- ((v**2) / (c**2)))
Where v is your velocity and c is the speed of light. So if you get really close to the speed of light time slows down for you a lot.
I'm assuming that when they say comes back in two hours they mean from Superman's time frame and not the earth's.
Its also sometimes called the twin paradox. Take a pair of twins, put one in a space ship and fly it close to the speed of light in a round trip that ends up back on earth. Their ages are now different even though they both travelled close to the speed of light relative to each other. See here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox for a better expalanation.
I recently read Human Acclimatization and Adaptation to Stresses. The article explains, unsurprisingly in retrospect, that altitude training has different effects on different people. Some are helped, some remain the same or worsen. But the majority of athletic improvement should be attributed to the other big condition of a high altitude camp: the absence of stresses of normal life. The article also suggested that an athlete often ends up unintentionally training less intensley due do the difficulties of low oxygen. Upon returning to sea level, the athlete is well rested not from any changes due to low oxygen but due to the unintentional taper, and thus improves performance. Another interesting fact mentioned was "with elite athletes, training effects are so specific that there is no beneficial carry-over of circulatory improvements in one activity to another". For example, improvements in running do not translate to improvements in cycling; I'm interested in a more in-depth explanation of that phenomenon.
Using slashdot search and ordering by date, and clicking next 30 I got http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=441212 2&sid=41804 on Tuesday October 08, 2002. But it appears to not be the first. Google doesn't show all the results either. The one I link to does follow the simpson quote exactly. (talks of insects)
c id=736976 from Monday October 02, 2000 (I think) is linked from wikipedia. It offers apologies to The Simpsons. Wikipedia claims it is the first know use. (talks of fungus)
A wider search of overlords gives the same post
This one http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7988&
I don't preview or spellcheck.
Dude, grits are corn, not potatoes.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
IHRC (I have raised chickens). Chickens with clipped wings can still make very high jumps when flapping their wings hard. They also can maintain a near verticle glide when jumping off of a high space. Chickens with clipped wings can often jump over fences or most high barriers they just cant maintain flight for extended periods.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
Goku and Vegeta already did this a long time ago in DragonBall Z or GT... at 500G.
Do they have human sized centrifuges?
Yes.
If anybody didn't catch the reference, it's referring to Real Ultimate Power.
The only way to tell the difference between a hamster and a gerbil is that the hamster has more white meat.