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Bad Movie Physics Hurt Scientific Understanding
eldavojohn writes "A paper published by UCF researchers claims that bad movie physics hurt students' understanding of real world physics. From the article, "Some people really do believe a bus traveling 70 mph can clear a 50-foot gap in a freeway, as depicted in the movie Speed." The professors published this paper out of fear that society will pay the price. One of the authors commented on advancements in the past years "All the luxuries we have today, the modern conveniences, are a result of the science research that went on in the '60s during the space race. It didn't just happen. It took people doing hard science to do it." I commented on the physics of the most recent Die Hard having problems detracting from my enjoyment of the movie but is it really the root of a growing problem of poor science & math among students?"
Learning is learning, entertainment is entertainment. Star trek has way more fundamental problems with physics than Speed or Die Hard. People shouldn't get their science from TV.
Is there anything left that someone hasn't claimed is 'hurting the children'?
It does go a long way towards explaining the epidemic of bus jumping accidents.
http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/
American students are non-science jobs because that's what our economy rewards. Dentists don't have to contend with global competition. Apparently the envisioned future is that the Chinese and Mexicans will do all the work while we sit back and "manage" them, e.g. continue glutting ourselves by skimming all the profits off their work. Personally I think we're headed for trouble.
It must be the movies. Before movies, everybody had a perfect understanding of physics.
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Engineering is the art of compromise.
We just need to ensure that we teach our children critical thinking skills. Never mind movies, in a world with Fox News and entertainment and lifestyle stories that cloak themselves as "news", this is more important than ever if future generations are going to enjoy a standard of living that even approaches what we have now.
I teach physics at a community college, and I actually like to use Coyote and Roadrunner as an illustration of people's Aristotelian preconceptions. When the coyote steps off a cliff, he has to stop moving forward before he can look down and go, "oh, time to fall." This is exactly what Aristotle said had to happen: an object could be doing forced motion or natural motion, but it couldn't do both at the same time. One reason Aristotelianism was accepted for thousands of years was that it does a good job of codifying the incorrect expectations that people tend to have intuitively. If it wasn't for Coyote and Roadrunner, it would be harder for me to teach this!
My sister works at Pixar, and a lot of her work is physics simulations. (She's working on hair and cloth these days.) She says that a lot of the time, they try simulating the right physics first, but then that comes out not looking the way they want, e.g., water splashes realistically, but they want a cartoon splash, not a realistic splash. So they intentionally mung the equations to get the artistic effect they want. Well, why not? Picasso painted people with two eyes on the same side of their face.
The reason people in the US are ignorant about physics isn't because they see movies with incorrect physics in them, it's because K-12 science education in the US is a disaster.
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Look, if you think that Speed is realistic, that isn't the movie's fault. That's genetics, the education system, and parenting to blame. Movies are not making people ignorant, they're pandering to peoples ignorance. Movies with realistic technology would be boring to most people. Sure, movies might be amplifying an existing problem, but they're not the root cause here.
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Reminds me of a firearms instructor who'd compiled a videotape, no doubt illegal in spite of Fair Use, consisting of terrible movie moments in the context of firearms safety. "True Lies," if I recall correctly, was a particularly egregious offender.
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"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Let me preface this comment with the fact that I am a physicist (astrophysics) and am quite often frustrated by the poor physics shown in movies.
However, I think they're neglecting a very basic fact. Humans have evolved to find Newtonian mechanics intuitive! (especially in translational cases, somewhat less in rotational ones) If someone throws a ball, you can quickly figure out approximately where it is going to land. You have no need to do calculations, because its evolutionarily hardwired into your brain. Watching a movie which doesn't accurately display a free-falling bus is not going to erase that.
It's true that people don't know enough physics to determine the validity of what they see in movies, but they already know enough to get through life. I'd love for everyone to know enough physics to be understand the devices that they use in their lives, but that's probably not a reality in the modern age.
I think what they're encountering is a resistance to learning the formalizations of physics. As soon as you step beyond Newtonian mechanics (really, beyond two-body problems) all that evolutionary intuition is gone. When you get to physics at that stage, you must place it on firm mathematical footing, or you have no hope of understanding: that is hard work.
They are seeing this decline in science understanding, but I think that's an artifact of an overall educational decline, rather than a specific effect of Hollywood movies. Young people are now expecting to be entertained, and while physics is beautiful, at some point it requires you to sit down in a empty room with a pad of paper and a pencil. If anything, it's the "action-packed entertainment" nature of movies, rather than any bad physics that is likely having the detrimental effect. However, if they can entertain these students and have them learn something too, that's fine with me.
We are not only behind in science. We are also illiterate. Most people never read any classic texts. And I will probably make at least one spelling error in this post. The problem is lack of standardized curriculum. Almost every nation that is cited as an example of someone we "really shouldn't be behind but still are" has a standard curriculum in science, math and humanities. We have too much local opposition to it from all-too-powerful teacher's unions. This is not meant to start conservative vs liberal debate (even though I happened to mention teacher's unions). Most of the time in K-12 a program for educating people over a period of 12 years is designed by teachers who can't plan for more than 1 year. They don't have the time or the background to see "the big picture" of where their particular class fits in the overall education. A separate bureaucracy (there, now you can't accuse me of being too conservative) of experts on development could do a much better job of it by designing and tweaking a curriculum for the entire nation. China does it. So does Russia and so does every European country.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
You're going to get tons of people agreeing with your every word and placing you in their friends list, but I'm not going to play their games and be straight with you instead: can you ask your sister to get me a job at Pixar? And will she be my girlfriend? Either will do. Thanks.
1. Women always wear 6-inch high-heels to bed.
2. Men are never impotent.
3. Women never have headaches... or periods.
4. If a woman gets busted masturbating by a strange man, she will not scream with embarrassment, but rather insist he have sex with her.
5. When going down on a woman 10 seconds is more than satisfactory.
6. If you come across a guy and his girlfriend having sex in the bushes, the boyfriend won't bash seven shades of shit out of you if you shove your cock in his girlfriend's mouth.
7. Women always look pleasantly surprised when they open a man's trousers and find a cock there.
8. Women moan uncontrollably when giving a blowjob.
9. All women are noisy cummers.
10. A common and enjoyable sexual practice for a man is to take his half-erect penis and slap it repeatedly on a woman's butt or face.
11. A woman can't wait to get it in the ass.
12. People in the 70's couldn't cum unless there was a wild guitar solo in the background.
13. Men always groan "OH YEAH!" when they cum.
14. Double penetration makes women smile.
15 Assholes are so clean, you could eat out of them.
16. When taking a woman from behind, a man can really excite her by giving her a hard slap on the butt.
17. Nurses always suck patients' cocks.
18. Men always pull out.
19. When your girlfriend busts you getting head from her best friend, she'll only be momentarily pissed off before fucking the both of you.
20. Women smile appreciatively when men splat them in the face with sperm.
21. A man ejaculating on a woman's tits or butt is a satisfying result for all parties concerned.
22. Asian men don't exist.
I hope the next generation fed on an abundance of internet porn doesn't have the same misconceptions.
The last Die Hard is most definitely the worst.
:) or at least playing basketball. Oh, and chicks like basketball players, not nerds.
Spoilers included, so ROT13, use this to read.
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As to the students thinking of science as hard, I don't think the movies are responsible for this. Being smart is apparently not cool anymore, why should it be? You can make much more dough selling SCO Linux subscriptions
You can't handle the truth.
Unless you should somehow happen to decelerate during the flight. As if, say, the power transfer surfaces of the vehicle were not in contact with a surface, or if air resistance in front of the bus countered a portion of the bus' kinetic energy.
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Who cares if the burger-flipper at the local fast food joint believes that a bus can jump a 50-foot span?
Agreed. I mean after all, you have to save room for 50% of the population on the OTHER side of the Gauss/normal/bell curve.
Then again, if you look at all the scientific progress made SINCE the 1960's, I'd say the world doesn't have to fear stagnation yet. Also bear in mind that most of this progress has been made by the same generation that was busy smoking pot/other things in the 1960's...
This is just the same old fallacy about "this generation is morally depraved, completely off the rails, etc" that has been around since Plato and Socrates. Old farts never understand the young idiots that are going to replace them. It's the way of the world.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
It'd make the jump, but you might want to try dropping a bus 1.16m before making the determination that it'd be okay.
Physics don't matter. In a few years, all fuel will be replaced by Brawndo. (It's got what Buses Crave.)
This is an old debate. Yes, TV and Movies largely rob you of time and money, and take up brain-cycles and memory capacity that could be used more productively for other things. Largely. It's because people choose to watch that kind of movie. We could all be watching intelligent, thought-provoking documentaries and technical films. But we don't. (Exceptions are noted.)
Suspension of disbelief is a wonderful ability. I'm glad I have it, it allows me to be entertained by reading, hearing, and watching works of pure fiction. I'm also glad that I'm smart enough to know the difference between fiction and fact. I got that by asking questions (stimulated in many cases by unrealistic scenes in movies, I'm sure). Not everyone wants to learn, however, and those that don't want to learn are probably irredeemable anyway. And laying the blame for their failures at Hollywood's doorstep is like blaming Goth Music and Violent Video Games for school shootings. It completely misses the point that solid education (or other forms of intervention, usually originating with parents that actually, gasp, pay attention to their children) would obviate the need for babysitting people through basic fact-versus-fancy analyses of obviously unrealistic media.
Some of us are able to handle our mindless entertainment responsibly. Those that can learn, will. Those that can't, will probably massively outnumber us within a generation or two anyway, if they don't already.
Raoul Mitgong: Unhelpful.
Movie and cartoon physics have always been highly suspect. The difference is that until fairly recently, it was blatantly obvious when special effects "cheats" were called into play. This started to fall apart with the advent of the green screen, and ironically went completely to hell with CGI. Why ironically? Because the same computing power used to render can also be used to do the physics properly -- but it generally isn't.
Another irony is that some movies that look cartoonish (Pixar films, for example) have more reasonable physics than movies that are meant to integrate the computer-generated effects seamlessly. Cartoons are one place where suspension of physical law is often accepted in order to support the overall comic effect, though there seems to be a sort of convention of "cartoon physics" as well.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Well this comment shows the problem right away. This is actually a mass independent problem, as gravity is always accelerating things (on Earth) at ~9.81 m/s^2. The problem is more what the drag on the bus is over the course of the flight. However, since I am not in the mood to calculate Reynolds numbers for flying busses, I will assume inviscid air.
// Initial speed // Distance to travel horizontially
Problem statement: A point particle moving at 70 MPH at some angle must cross a 50 foot gap, and be at the same height when it reaches the other side.
Given:
v0 = 70 mph
x = 50 feet
Assumption: Force-free motion
Constant gravity ( g = 9.81 m/s^2 )
Solution:
v0 = 70 mph = 31.2928 m/s
x = 50 feet = 15.24 m
t = Time of flight
theta = Angle from horizon
x = v0*t*cos(theta)
y = v0*sin(theta)*t - g*t^2
Solve for t t = x/(v0*cos(theta))
Substitude into y equation
y = x*v0/v0*sin(theta)/cos(theta) - g*x^2/v0^2/cos(theta)^2
Set y = 0 and solve
x*sin(theta)/cos(theta) = g*x^2/v0^2/cos(theta)^2
sin(theta)*cos(theta) = g*x/v0^2
g*x/v0^2 = 9.81*15.24/(31.2928)^2 = 0.15267
sin(theta)*cos(theta) = 0.15267 can be solve graphically. The first valid solution is 8.89 degrees.
So yes, a bus (with no friction) can cross a 50 feet gap, if the ramp was at an incline greater than 8.89 degrees.
Yay.
Why wouldn't I believe it? If my calculation is correct, it only requires a 4.4 degree ramp.
Hey prof, refine you understanding of physics and teaching skills, instead of whining about Hollywood movies on a German junk journal. We all whine about Hollywood movies, but get real, when is the last time that somebody offered you a job in real life to crack 1280 bit encryption in 30 seconds while your sensitive organ is being sucked.
That bus was going at least 75.
www.MagicalTransformations.com Just sayin'...
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
They actually did that bus jump. It's real. And, no, they didn't edit out any ramps.
They had to used CGI to edit the landing area shorter, to make it look like it landed closer to the edge than it actually did, because the bus actually jumped farther than it should have. (And they edited out the camera rig it smashed into.)
How? The gap is not level. Yes, it looks that way on film from certain angles if you're not paying attention, but the starting end was a several yards higher than the back end. Everyone sits there and complains about how a bus cannot do a level jump, and fails to notice that it's not a level jump.
About the only physics that stunt played fast and lose with was by weighing down the back somewhat so the bus wouldn't rotate forward, and, thus, still be movable after landing.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I used to do animation tools for physically based animation, and got some idea of the Hollywood view of dynamics.
A basic concept in filmmaking is that the endpoint of a motion is predetermined. Directors think in terms of "here, then here, then there". The path desired is quite likely to be physically unrealistic, and may have to be pieced together from several shots.
A real physics simulator just isn't "directable" enough. What's used in practice is a combination of hand animation, piecing together motion capture, a collection of clever tricks to make real-world objects go where you want them, and lots of cuts to hide discontinuities. The MTV-style "one cut per second" approach to action scenes makes it even easier.
Much the same thing happens in games, except that you have to allow a user with limited control to drive a character with too many degrees of freedom and not enough embedded smarts to manage movement against real-world physics. This is why, in most sports games, you see beautiful motion-captured motion interspersed with strange jerks as motions are blended in ways that are continuous but nonphysical.
In most driving games, the physics is totally unrealistic. The wheel adhesion is huge, the CG is very low (often below the ground) and it's very common to lock roll rate once the vehicle is tilted beyond recovery angle, so that the vehicle rolls all the way over and lands upright. Driving a full sized car through a remote joystick works badly (we tried this with our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle once, then immediately bought a MoMo steering wheel and interfaced it) and game controller joysticks are even worse. So the vehicle model has to be incredibly forgiving.
There is a classic of computational Hollywood physics worth noting. In the Bond movie, "The Man with the Golden Gun" (1974), a car is driven over a ruined arch bridge at high speed, executes a 360 degree roll, and lands on the far side. It really did do that. The dynamics were calculated by the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory (now CALSPAN) and the ramp was constructed to make it happen consistently if the vehicle was driven at the correct speed. But there's a cheat there, too. The car had a fifth, solid wheel underneath which hit a rail on the launch ramp to initiate the roll. It wasn't possible to induce enough roll rate fast enough through the vehicle suspension.
A shotgun can't launch a guy backwards 10 feet through a window?
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
People who know physics aren't going to be dumbed down by movies; likewise, those who don't know physics aren't going to be enlightened. However, cool applications of physics in movies and elsewhere in popular culture naturally lead to inspired people being swayed toward physics as a profession. Those who aren't curious can safely be ignored: unlike politics, research science does not require the active involvement of the masses to function properly.
Also, remember, "Da masses are as dumb as dumbasses". Nothing will change that, and portraying scientist types as (minor) heroes and not freaky rejects in the media will do much more for promoting science in America (and elsewhere) than checking to see that all media is totally accurate by the laws of the universe (snore). We're probably living in a simulation anyways.
By the way, science is not infallible: http://xkcd.com/298/
Also, I'm not sure we need more scientists with their strange views. A biologist, a physicist and a mathematician were on a trip to Scotland. On their way out of the train, they see a lone black sheep standing on a grassy field. "The sheep in Scotland are black!", exclaims the biologist. "No, silly, at least one sheep in Scotland is black", retorted the physicist. The mathematician sighed, and after a brief pause, explained: "Both of you are wrong. At least one Scottish sheep is black on at least one side."
Forget the bad physics. What about the probabilities?! Don't forget the branch of statistics!! I mean, come on.. What is the probability of bad shit(TM) happening to McClain all the freakin time?? Even worse, what are the probabilities of Bad Shit(TM) happening to McClain exactly as many times as there are Die Hard movies? Either there are some Bad Shit happening to McClain while no one is watching or there are Die Hard movies out there where none of that Bad Shit is happening and McClain is just chillin at home watching TV.
Actually, come to think of it, Bad Shit did happen to his partner Zues. The Motherf*ing snakes on the Motherf*ing plane. But alas, McClain was nowhere to be found.
Ah, right. Got me there.
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There are actually some very positive side effects of Movie Science.
For instance, both the Columbine killers and the recent London "bombers" had an entirely false belief that propane cooking cylinders would explode like grenades. In reality, the cylinders are purposefully designed to rupture without causing a fragmentary explosion.
The recent London "bombers" even seemed to believe that any car set alight would produce a large explosion. In truth, cars burn all the time, it is very, very rare for any road vehicle of any sort to explode. In fact, none of the London "bombers" schemes had any real potential of a large explosive effect.
For this, I think it's fair to say we can thank good old Movie Science. As long as ignorant villians keep believing what they see on TV, we'll be all the safer for it.
"They don't even really understand how gravity works, and that's the most important force which affects us humans in our daily lives."
Well, not entirely true. I'd say that E&M is actually far more important to our daily experience than gravity, especially in the number of phenomena rooted in it.
"There's now some evidence that there might be other dimensions besides the 4 we're familiar with,"
What evidence? Point to some experiment or observation, please, not theoretical work.
"various particles have been detected (like neutrinos) which previously were only hypothesized."
This is entirely false. Neutrinos have been detected for several decades now, and they've even been used as tools in experiments - just look up some papers on deep inelastic neutrino scattering to see what I mean. No, what's new is that we're pretty sure that they have some mass, though we still only have an upper bound on it. In fact the last new fundamental particle to be discovered was the top quark in the 90s, and that was a couple of decades or so after the last new particle. It's now just down to the Higgs hunt as far as the standard model goes, and every particle physicist is praying that when we do find it there's something about it that doesn't fit in the standard model because otherwise particle physics is likely to die from it's too successful theory.
"150 years ago people thought it was impossible to fly in a machine that was heavier than air."
And those people would have been laymen who didn't know what was going on anyway. All you'd need to do is look at Newton's second law to see that if you could somehow push down on the air with enough force you'd be able to make anything fly. Even Leonardo da Vinci, a couple hundred years earlier than your estimate, knew that.
"There's no telling what other facets about our universe exist which we are unable currently to observe and understand, just like we had no idea how to split or fuse atoms and create enormous amounts of energy 100 years ago."
Actually, we do have a pretty good idea. Just like it turned out that Einstein's relativity was only a small modification of Newton's physics in the known regime, it's a pretty good bet that any new physics will have to reduce to the current theories, approximately, in the areas we have already explored experimentally.
Embarrassing, but not so bothersome as most people don't make decisions about physics that effect others (yeah, cars, but they generally avoid having to jump 70 feet in the first place). But a similar result, the "CSI Effect," where people believe that the techniques they see on forensics shows are infallible, is more worrisome, because any of that horde may be a peer on your jury listening to a forensics witness.
It's not just physics. Every area of study has this same problem. Doctors will cringe bullshit medical diagnoses and the like. Psychologists will point out bad/incorrect advice. Business students will laugh at how basic most movie's ideas on the economy are. Computer nerds giggle whenever movies show some guy hacking into the super-secure server in under 10 seconds. All movies bullshit and trivialise, if you can't enjoy a movie because of it, then that's really your own shitty attitude. I imagine most people don't watch House M.D. for medical advice, or Sawfish to learn how to hack, or Trading Places for business advice.
I hope the next generation fed on an abundance of internet porn doesn't have the same misconceptions.
I have met more women who think these items are true and therefore try to emulate the movies. And as each year a new batch of 18 year olds come along, more and more of this becomes true. Definitely not all of it.
Well, let's correct my statement. Numbers 7 and 8 a number of women do as they believe it heightens the experience for a guy. 15 appears to be true for those really into receiving analingus, they try to make it more appealing for their partner. 16 has been true as long as you judge the woman correctly, some like a light pat, while others want a hard smack. 21 seems to be more true each year. On number 20, I will only say that more people are trying this and seem to like it depending on the situation and location.
I have many female friends from all walks of life. I also work in a female oriented "adult novelty" store, commonly referred to as an adult toy store. I have openly discussed sex with females since I was fifteen, I am now thirty. People have always been able to open up to me. Using a margin of lying of 50%, I still see an increase in at least the items I mentioned.
Now your experience may vary, but porn has definitely led into the acceptance of some of these behaviors. Oh and in relation to 19, a few of my friends is like that in certain situations. At least after a group leave a bar together, if one of their friends goes down on their husband/boyfriend, they typically will join in. If they had tried to hide it then she would have starting beating both of them. Plus I have a friends who have left their husbands/boyfriends due to them trying to get a threeway by getting caught with another woman.
I guess there two sides to every conversation. When I watch a movie or TV show, I realize I'm supposed to suspend belief... When the bionic man reaches up and pulls an overturned car down to right it... he should catapult his arm into low earth orbit ripping it completely free from the soft meaty shoulder to which it's attached. Obviously this doesn't happen and Newton is ignored with extreme prejudice. When Van Helsing swings down and snatches the heroin up from a multi-story stunt (thanks to our good friend CGI) there is no profound trauma, no dislocated shoulders or broken ribs... only escape from the undead... the undead should be the hint (the only place you find the undead in the real world is D.C.)
So I think it's only fair to park your "Critical Thinking Brain" at the lobby door when you go to watch a movie... that said, you should remember to pick back up on the way out. For those of you who don't own one, this is why we're having this conversation in the first place... your job is to go out and get one.
People who can't tell that "Looney Toons" are not an accurate depictions of physics, should probably be forced to wear nurf suits, not be allowed to move faster than a brisk walk, and be prevented from procreation as a protection to the intellectual viability of our posterity. I'm sorry, no lack of legal knowlege will prevent you from falling off a cliff at 32 ft/sec.^2.
Along those lines, people who participate in projects like "Jack-Ass the Movie", or attempt to defy the fundamental laws of physics, only to become horrible lessons in absolute inevitability of those very laws, should be protected from their own stupidity. In fact we should all be protected from their stupidity. One more fine reason to elect a president and a legislative body with with a collective IQ larger than bowling ball's.
Of course, then you'll never get a chance to see "Jack-Ass the Nation", but I believe the up side merits the risk.
I think you've said enough, Mr. Vice President.
Well at least The Uranus Experiment: Part 2 got the physics in space right. The physics of an astronaut/alien orgy in zero g!
Mmmm... but would a farmer of 100 years ago have a better understanding of levers and pulleys than a farmer today? Perhaps a better parallel to consider. Probably a farmer of a hundred years ago had a better understanding of physics than a shop girl or a newspaper boy of the time... but then all three probably had a poorer understanding of a lot of other things that an average person takes for granted today: the relevant knowledge that means its easier for a person to get by. Could be argued that knowing about levers and pulleys today is less important than understanding how to make a washing machine work, using modern banking facilities, or accessing the internet. Heck, I like messing around with my classic (1965) car but I'd not know what to do with the black box computer that controls my girlfriend's car...no levers or pulleys in there...
OK, disclaimer, I'm a budding English prof. But it seems a real rush to judgement to me to limit the utility of literature the way you do, to just examples or practice for creating further art. Firstly, there's research that shows that the sort of thinking demanded by interpreting art and literature is not only conducive to but necessary for more utilitarian or "rational" thought processes (Damasio's Descartes' Error is a good start). So it's useful developmentally. But there's truth too in the old liberal humanist saw that there are themes which are, if not universal, at least broadly applicapable to our lives. Your uncle may not kill your father for the throne, but you probably will suffer teen angst or find yourself at odds with society in some other way. Your contention that "most of life is boring" is the sort of sad belief or experience that can be altered by learning to appreciation the slower pace of the fine arts. It is not so easy in our society to learn to contemplate a sunset or the slow transformation of a flower or a lawn or patterns of frost on a window. Study of the arts inculcates such skills and predilictions. As a capping disclaimer, yes, I am a budding lit prof, poetry no less, but my bachelor's is in geomorphology, and my initial profession was in photography and computer programming for planetariums. So I didn't necessarily come to my current positions easily. YMMV, but at least be aware that your sweeping generalizations are, well, sweeping generalizations that likely spring from your attitudes and experiences, as well as possibly from your aptitudes. So be careful about laying down universal laws for humanity. Joy and satisfaction is where you LEARN to find it.
I am sorry - I had to respond to this, because people who honor physics and its importance in the world would have to be smarter than to link Hollywood Movies and a thorough understanding of Physics. If they are not, than I am afraid for our future. If their time is wasted picking apart Die Hard, Speed, and every other Sci-Fi action flick, then who knows what other diversions are using up valuable resources. Hey, guess what, TIE Fighters really wouldn't be able to make that "roaring" sound in Space. Gosh, a lot of people are going to be upset when they take their first tour in Space and realize that it's pretty quiet.
And you wonder why we haven't cured Cancer, or found a way to limit our dependency on oil, or found a way to reverse the severe climate changes in our environment?
Obviously, it is easy to divert attention from what is important, no matter what your level of intelligence.
I don't see any reason why an automatic firearm wouldn't cycle just fine in a vacuum. The pressure of the gas in the action of a gas operated weapon is something like a thousand atmospheres, so the missing 1 atm shouldn't make a big difference. The rest of the action is powered by spring tension, which doesn't care if its in a vacuum or not. Also, dry lubricants like molybdenum disulfide could be used to prevent any loss (or freezing for that matter).
It's interesting to note that guns work fine underwater as well, although in that case they would not cycle correctly as the viscosity of the water prevents the parts of the action from moving at the right speed.
It isn't the teachers or the schools fault that students aren't learning science... or parents... IT IS HOLLYWOOD'S FAULT!!!!
Can we sue the movie makers for little johnny failing his physics test? Like those fat kids who sued McDonalds?
I'm not sure when this was written, but nowadays we have things like babelfish and google's language tools and Amikai (not a misspelling) that do instant translation fairly well.
Not well enough for Star Trek, and it never will. You don't even hear other people talking in their language -- only what the translation of what they say is. That's improbable enough, but there's another bigger problem -- the complete lack of lag and the ability to interrupt people mid-sentence.
If you interrupt someone in the middle of a sentence in different language, you may get completely different information. For example, in English you want to say something like "That man bought the watch I wore to work every day." Let's say that you were interrupted mid-sentence. Your listener would get the fact that "that man bought the watch..." Your listener would know that the watch was bought but not that you wore it to work every day.
Now let's say you were speaking Japanese instead. Due to a significant difference in word order, the sentence is best rendered as "[Every day] [to work] [wore] [watch] [that man] [bought]." If you were interrupted mid-sentence, your listener would only know that the watch was worn to work everyday and not that it was bought.
This is because Japanese uses Subject-Object-Verb order instead of English's usual Subject-Verb-Object order and places all modifiers (including phrases and clauses) before the word they modify. Other languages present similar difficulties. Spanish places all modifiers after the word they modify (while English places adjectives & adverbs usually before and prepositions and clauses afterwards). Classical Arabic puts the verb first. Latin & Russian can have seemingly almost arbitrary word order.
Another complexity is the necessary context in a language. Many Japanese sentences would be considered sentence fragments in English. It's perfectly acceptable to simply use a verb without a subject or an object and to let the context (hopefully) explain what you're talking about. In English, you might say, "I bought it," but in Japanese you could just say "Bought." The ambiguity of the language can make translation exceptionally difficult, especially when a speaker has knowledge that a listener does not and is making no special effort to clarify. (This is more common in watching movies than in conversation, though.)
A Star Trek-style universal translator would have to be able to look into the future to see the entire context of a sentence to know how to render it properly or be able to read the minds of participants. This is technologically unlikely, and it doesn't seem supported by the other technology used in the setting.
Thus, it's pretty much wand-waving magic-tech meant to make the plots go smoother. Don't expect to see it anytime before we see replicators and the power supply systems required to transmit the energy needed to spontaneously create multiple GRAMS of matter (each of gram of which is roughly equivalent to the energy released in the bomb dropped on Hiroshima) meant to wave away supply problems or before we see magical inertia-canceling technology meant to wave away realistic depictions of acceleration.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Of course, if movie's were realistic, we'd be seeing headlines like:
Good Movie Physics Hurt Movie Enjoyment
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
This is a lot of hogwash. I'm an engineer. I grew up watching Star Trek. It sparked my interest in science. Many scientists and engineers would tell you they loved Star Trek when they were kids and if it wasn't there, they might not have become what they are. It's good to discuss the inaccuracies in SF because it prompts the imagination to think about how things really work.
> I saw a couple of kids who couldn't figure out how to get the maximum bounce out of a trampoline.
Possibly they were just having fun, even if it wasn't at maximum efficiency.
Parallel parking is a coordination and depth perception thing. I know plenty of geniuses who suck at it. All you sound like is a crotchety old coot who thinks his generation was the smartest one.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
THIS is what is exactly wrong with North America. Why the fuck should education be entertaining? It certainly is a bonus if what you're learning is interesting, but for 95% of everything that you NEED to know, it's boring. SUCK IT UP. Do you think learning about how to fill out an income tax return is entertaining? No, but you need to hunker down and just fucking do it without complaining. So many North Americans don't have what it takes to do the downright dirty work that is both unappealing and boring because "it's not fun, boo hoo!"
The reality is that you need to learn to get ahead, under any circumstances. You need to work your ass off. If you don't, you will work at McDonald's or maybe a comic book store, because hey, that's fun and entertaining, right?
Since when is learning about Fast Fourier Transforms or the internals of Mergesort entertaining? It's not, and the expectation that education should be fun is what is killing kids. Educational video games? Talk about unrealistic expectations that you as parents put into your kids' heads. You need to say, "Yes, I know it's boring, but you need to learn this, so go learn your timestables."
Now get off my lawn you pesky kids!