Slashdot Mirror
The Biology of B-Movie Monsters
Ant writes "The Biology of B-Movie Monsters is a published paper about the reality of movie-monster anatomy in 2003. In the paper, Michael C. LaBarbera explores the implications of extremely large and extremely small fantasy creatures, whose mass, volume and surface-area scale at different rates as they are shrunk/enlarged (e.g., ants can carry many times their body-weight, but if they were the size of tigers, they'd be crushed under their own carapaces). Other issues covered include the respiratory difficulties of Mothra, the biomechanics of Jurassic Park dinosaurs, and the reason E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial is so effing cute.."
When my dad and I first watched Cocoon http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088933/, few words were exchanged for most of the movie. toward the end, when the old people were on the boat fleeing the US Coast Guard, my dad stood up and shouted, "There is no way in hell that a little pleasure yacht like that could outrun a Coast Guard cutter!"
So he was totally satisfied that intergalactics and geriatrics would hit it off, he believed without question that aliens visited earth in the first place, and did not quiestion that the first notion the US government would have had was to chase down a pleasure boat, but once that boat had exceeded its real-world limitations, he was totally disillusioned.
So my dad is a boat man. This guy is a body size ratio man. Neither seem to posess the skill of suspension of disbelief, a prerequisite for watching a movie. I further the "waste of time" motion.
FairTax baby!
Old sci-fi/monster movies are very cool, I wish we could see more of them re-broadcast instead of the current shaky camera scenes of might-be monsters. Might I add that most "horror" movies these days are actually "startle" movies.
Watching AVP right now, it looks like WWF/WWE had *way* too much influence.
i think it would be absolutely impossible to explore the subject matter he does without talking about Alien (and i suppose its followup, Aliens as well, with its exposition of social insect behavior)
Alien is almost an excellent primer on parasitology, taking some of the more bizarre lifecycle aspects of certain parasites and insects, and exploding it into a scifi universe where humans are the host (with some great neato "what if" aspects of contemplative exobiology like acid for blood, organometallics for an exoskeleton that can resist the vacuum of space, the mouth-within-a-mouth, etc.)
wikipedia has a good exploration of the subject
the point is, Alien satisfies both mass audiences with requisite scares, but it also satisfies the scientifically-minded audience, because it begins with a good grounding in biology and expands upon it in a scholarly manner. Alien is entertaining on both a shallow bug out manner, and is also fodder for intellectual rumination as well. so many movies are just one or the other (usually the former), and it is very rare to find a movie that can do both very successfully like Alien
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Sometimes you see RC airplanes hovering (propeller upward), which tells us something about the scaling of engine power versus mass. And this RC helicopter does crazy things you would never see a large version do. Very cool.
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
While we're talking B-Movie monsters, it's worth mentioning the recent paper(PDF warning) by a couple of physicists proving the nonexistence of vampires and ghosts. Interestingly they didn't show zombies couldn't exist - although they at least came up with a more plausible explanation.
I think the writer could do with a few more palentology lessons before reassessing the comments on JP though.
He seems to have a biologist's preconceptions that life then is exactly the same formula as life now... with species occupying identical niches to those today, a vision that's as alien and unreal as the pro-evolutionist's "Noah couldn't get the triceratops up the gangplank" to what actually comes out of the ground from the fossil record.
The debate over swamp dwelling versus gyraffe model for sauropods will continue to run and run, probably past successful cloning, until some bright slashdotter builds a time machine, and heads off to see. My money's on a animal that sleeps in the water, and comes ashore to feed....
Vampire mythology deals with the problem by positing that only some who are victims are turned to vampires - I'm surprised even a joke paper is ignorant of this (even Bram Stoker's book which arguably launched the modern vampire myth was careful enough to note that vampires choose whether their victims should become vampires in turn).
:)
:)
As for ghosts - supernatural forces by definition are not natural forces. But if you want to deal with "walking" and moving through walls we only need to posit that ghosts exert a magnetic force, or follow flows of electric potential in the air. They float but give the illusion of walking, eg. a stretched form of ball lightning
I'm guessing the physicists behind the paper really didn't think through their logic very thoroughly
consists, surprisingly, of two parts. The part about inertia is famous. The other part is about scaling laws, why bones must become thicker if you scale up an animal and so on.
They did show that zombies which bite you and turn you into other zombies couldn't exist, for the same reason that the vampires couldn't. Although didn't the Romero trilogy end up with the entire world being zombies except for one human outpost? Anyway, the existence of zombie poison has been widely documented for decades. It's not merely a plausible explanation, it's the explanation.
I know this is slightly off topic, but along that same vein, I was thinking about the Matrix the other day. I mean, if you were stuck in a little pod from birth until adulthood, do you know how atrophied your body would be? I doubt you coauld even reach adulthood. I mean seriously, you're muscle mass would be practically nil. Your eyes wouldn't be able to see much at all since they've never been exposed to light. You wouldn't be able to walk. Talk. Manipulate your arms and hands. About the only thing you would be able to do with any efficacy is wet yourself.
But you're right. When we walk into that movie theater, we're already stepping out of reality. We go to the movie theater for that exact reason. We don't want to be bothered by the nitty gritty details of how plausible something is, as long as the artist has successfully suspended our belief, we're happy.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
If you google around, there have been several discussions on Slashdot and elsewhere of so-called meta-materials which can essentially deflect light around an object. No light bouncing off you = no way for a human eyeball to detect you. It's interesting, and apparently theoretically possible and compatible with physics as we know it.
picpix image polls. create - share - vote. fun!
Or a PhD dissertation on Star Trek.
Opps, someone just did that.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Ghost can't be touched => ghost can't touch the floor => ghost can't walk.
Unless, of course, the ghost can fly (for example, by expelling neutrinos or some other hard to detect particles that nonetheless can have nonzero momentum) and is simply pretending to walk to mess with your mind - one would imagine that after overcoming death gravity would not be much of a challenge ? Or maybe the ghost is walking on the ghostly version of the stairs - a bit like it's still wearing clothes despite the clothes not being alive when it was alive (in other words maybe the stairs are part of the ghost) ? Or maybe the ghost is actually somehow imprinted in the house and is just projecting an image of itself walking ? Heck, maybe the ghost is normally dormant (since it has no functional neurons) but jumps into living brains when some come near, and you sense its presence in your body as chills and strange visions ?
About the sudden cold it's hard to say anything, since the author failed to say anything but suggest that there might be drafs in old houses, which is certainly true but does absolutely nothing to prove the nonexistence of ghosts or even rule them out as the possible source of sudden cold.
In other words, the paper fails to prove anything about ghosts but plenty about its author's lack of imagination.
The proof against vampires runs into even simpler problem: a vampire is supposed to be an intelligent being with full access to its logical faculties. In other words, a vampire is quite capable of understanding what will happen if it lets everyone it feeds upon to become a new vampire, and can easily prevent this just by destroying the corpse. In fact, several vampire mythos (such as Dracula) indicate that in order to become a vampire you must drink vampires blood; simply being drained dry by one kills you dead.
Now, I understand that it may be hard to think about the existence of ghosts and vampires seriously; however, when you start accusing others of "pseudoscience", you'd damn well better get even basic logic right yourself. A half-assed paper is half-assed and does no one any good. The paper fails to show that the existence of vampires or ghosts is "contradictory to simple facts". The writer of the paper should devote less time to accuse others of lack of critical thinking and concentrate on improving his own.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.