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You, Too, Could Be Batman In 10 To 12 Years
jmcbain tips a fascinating interview in Scientific American with a professor of kinesiology and neuroscience (and a 26-year practitioner of Chito-Ryu karate-do). The question was, how much training would it take for a normal person to become Batman? The professor says: "You could train somebody to be a tremendous athlete and to have a significant martial arts background, and also to use some of the gear that he has, which requires a lot of physical prowess... In terms of the physical skills to be able to defend himself against all these opponents all the time, I would benchmark that at 10 to 12 years." The problem is, even after that amount of training, no one could remain on top of their game for more than a few years. And "Batman can't really afford to lose. Losing means death — or at least not being able to be Batman anymore."
and replace them as they 'fail' ... that way we've always got a batman.
The problem is, even after that amount of training, no one could remain on top of their game for more than a few years. And "Batman can't really afford to lose. Losing means death â" or at least not being able to be Batman anymore."
So, after all that, we should all stick to our day-jobs? Thanks Slashdot, you saved us again!
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
It's only 90 days from being a weakling to stopping bullies from kicking sand in your face. Isn't that what most nerds here really seek?
I've still yet to figure out how I can get things like "Bam, Pow, Biff, Boom" to pop out in the air when I hit people. I think that would require more training than anything else.
when you can just get hit in the head.
.sdrawkcab si gis siht
10 to 12 years for the physical training, but Batman was more than physical ability. He was in a position to determine right and wrong. That takes a lot longer to learn and not everyone is capable of such a task.
Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.
Well, given the size and scope of Bruce Wayne's awesome shit, I'd say quite well.
That, or its being a self-loathing billionaire industrialist that pays out.
Frankly, its probably not even in the scope of most slashdotters to end up being ATHF's Meatwad... after all, Meatwad makes the money, see; Meatwad gets the honeys, G...
and we don't :(
But I doubt that many people have the finances or drive to keep up such a regime until you achieve your goal. And thats what separates the world class people from the rest of us.
Of course some people do have a natural ability that also gives them a benefit. So I doubt a really short person could ever be competitive in a world class basketball - unless there was a league for really short people.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Staying on top of his game is all part of his psychosis. If you hadn't noticed, he's a bit of a whackjob himself.
meh
And am awaiting the panel at Comic-Con.
pop science is important. it is a gateway to serious science for many youngsters and average joes
you are dismayed it does not feature serious science
ok, so go read something else
why the hate for a magazine of pop science?
it serves a valuable function. are you angry that some obscure technical journal is not popular? so why are you angry that a piece of pop science is doing what a piece of pop science must do?
if it is serious science, it is relegated to obscurity, as a rule. because it needs to be digested for the masses, where anything popular takes place
why don't you understand this?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Yeah, the character has an almost super-human physique. And yes, he's got a big pile 'o cash that helps him afford the toys and tools he uses during his "night job". But there's more to it.
Wayne can out-think any of his opponents. His schtick is that he's 5-10 steps ahead of anyone. If he gets into a fight, he's already out-thought the opponent and knows exactly how the fight's going to end.
That's harder to teach. You could work someone for years so that they're at the peak of physical ability, and then dump a cubic f'load of cash on top of them. But they'd still be missing that keen tactical mind that Wayne has.
Jason Van Patten
Hiro used to feel this way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this was liberating. He no longer has to worry about being the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
...more than a couple of attackers, and you're in trouble. Facing ten bad guys, short of some super-exo-skeleton that boosts your strength and armours your body against instantaneous impact and sustained pressure and torsion, you're going down hard, quickly. And no, they don't always helpfully attack one or two at a time: watch half a dozen cops taking down a violent drunk some time.
And if you're facing multiple bad guys with no possibility of escape, the only credible strategy is to try to put at least all-but-one of them down so hard they no longer present a threat. That means at least knocked out or injured seriously enough that they can't fight, not the cutesy pain compliance stuff. If they are weak and clueless when it comes to fight, you are fit and highly skilled when it comes to fighting, you can find some sort of weapon, you are lucky with the environment, and there aren't too many of them, you might just do this for long enough to create an opportunity to escape. Maybe, if you're really lucky.
But it's a fun read, I'll give it that. :-)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
When you find yourself in a fair fight, it's time to reevaluate your tactics.
Future events such as these may affect you in the future!
The Batman workout video collection...
How much will you pay for this?
900$?
NO!
500$?
NO!
For a limited time, just two easy payments of one parent!
Good.. Bad.. I'm the guy with the gun.
Hang out in the YMCA locker room and you can be Robin in under 5 minutes.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
That just takes a spray of acid to the face or a dunk in a chemical vat. No training time whatsoever.
On another note, I get peeved by everyone ignoring Batman's "World's Greatest Detective" moniker and generally accepted reputation as one of DC Universe's smartest humans. Everyone focuses on Batman's physical skills where, in "reality", having keen observational skills and an intellect allowing superior strategems probably alleviates a lot of the need for ultimate physical skills.
http://www.forbes.com/digitalentertainment/2005/06/20/batman-movies-superheroes-cx_de_0620batman.html
http://xrl.us/batman
Being Batman
David M. Ewalt, 06.20.05, 7:28 PM ET
Dark clouds have gathered over Gotham. Crime is rampant, despair is
widespread and no one is safe. Who will rescue the metropolis from
itself, fight the forces of evil and save the good people of the city?
Why don't you do it?
Plenty of us would love to fight for truth and justice--if only we had
magic powers or mutant genes. We all love superheroes. Last weekend,
Batman Begins was the No. 1 film in the U.S., pulling in $71.1 million
over its first five days. The Batman movie franchise is also one of
the most lucrative of all time, with five movies (not counting Batman
Begins) grossing nearly $1 billion.
OK, so he also has a couple billion dollars. Batman's alter ego, Bruce
Wayne, is an old-money heir and the owner of Wayne Enterprises, a
massive international-technology conglomerate. In our Forbes Fictional
Fifteen, we estimated his net worth at $6.3 billion. If he were a real
guy, he'd be the 28th richest person in America, right behind News
Corp.'s (nyse: NWS - news - people ) Rupert Murdoch.
Wayne uses his riches and corporate connections to equip himself with
the latest and greatest in military hardware, and uses those tools to
help him fight villains like the Joker, the Riddler, and Ra's Al Ghul.
But you don't have to be a billionaire to become a caped crusader.
Using commercially available training, technology and domestic help,
the average guy could conceivably equip himself to become a real-world
superhero, provided he's got at least a couple million to spare.
What would it cost to become a real-world Dark Knight? Click here.
The Training
Cost: $30,000
You'd better be ready to defend yourself if you plan to take on all
the thugs and super-villains that call Gotham home.
In the new movie, young Bruce Wayne goes to Tibet on the mother of all
study-abroad trips and ends up learning the martial arts from a group
of vigilante ninjas called the League of Shadows. But similar training
is available to those not lucky enough to get plucked out of obscurity
by Liam Neeson.
A good place to start would be an internship at the birthplace of kung
fu, the Shaolin Temple in Henan, China. One month of training at the
prestigious Tagou school costs about $740, including a private room
and training with a personal coach. It'll take a while to get good
enough to stop the Joker's worst thugs, though, so count on spending
at least three years and about 30 grand for the trip.
The Suit
Cost: $1,585
They say the suit makes the man, and Batman's no exception. Without
his outfit, it'd just be Bruce Wayne running around out there, and
there's nothing particularly scary about a billionaire playboy in his
underpants.
Batman's suit is a modified piece of infantry armor built by the
applied sciences division of Wayne Enterprises. It's waterproof,
bulletproof, knife-proof and temperature-regulating. Paired with an
impact-resistant, graphite-composite cowl and spiked ninja-style
gauntlets, it allows Batman to protect himself against everything from
swords to machine guns. Wayne Enterprises also supplies Batman with
his cape, a specially designed nylon-derivative fabric that stiffens
when hit with an electric charge, allowing Batman to use it as a
glider. All this doesn't come cheap. In the new movie, Wayne's told
that the armor alone costs $300,000.
Real-world superhero wanna-bes will have to go with a much more
prosaic solution. We recommend a lightweight ProMAX OTV bulletproof
jacket, which will cover your ar
Looking at Scientific American articles from even fifty years ago, let alone a century, shows how sadly dumbed down the magazine has become. It used to target a readership of average citizens who were keen on the nitty-gritty of scientific developments. Now it all flash and no substance, little different from Popular Science. The lesson American media teaches us: nothing good is every ultimately profitable as is.
Looking at /. from even 5 years ago, let alone 10, shows you how lame it has become. It used to be about news for nerds and stuff that matters, now it is just about wannabe nerds whining about Popular Science. The lesson: making useful comments ultimately ever informative as if.
Show a man some news, distract him for an hour. Show a man some mod points, distract him for the rest of his life.
My high school girlfriend was a runner-up and spirit award winner for Miss Teen VA when we were 16
Alright, that does not add to the conversation. You're just using this opportunity to gloat.
Would that be a RAIB?
Redundant Array of Interchangeable Batmen?
or more like a High Available Batcluster?
My blog
http://www.toysrus.com/
It would add to the conversation if he included pictures
Bottles.
It used to target a readership of average citizens who were keen on the nitty-gritty of scientific developments
It's bad writing.
SciAM got political and that turned a lot of people off, the same way NYT or WashPost did. They tried to dumb things down while still pretending to be smart and all it did it was anger their core readership and they bailed.
Science has exploded beyond the ability of writers to manage... It used to be that 50 years ago, you could probably have a smattering of what's new in physics and a few other fields, but right now, what's new in physics is a highly specialized thing and it takes way too much to understand what's even old versus what's new. The baseline education of some high school teaches a mathematics based on a level of calculus that's 100 years old at best, physics that's basically newtonian mechanics and chemistry is just doing the old "let's make break up water trick" when right now scientists are looking at individual atoms.
All of this points to a colossal failure in writing. We have a body of technical knowledge that is so disorganized that it takes way too long for humans to really communicate it to each other in order to share the knowledge. Roger Penrose made a heck of a go at it in his book about how everything works, but even he falls into the horrible trap of using bad names for different mathematical constructs. At least biologists got it right when put a taxonomy on species ... but in math we have Fourier Transforms, Newton's Method, and it's just a disorganized mess, and on top of that horrible language, we stack everything we know about the basic laws of the universe.
What the world needs is a bank of good writers that also know math and physics to go in there and get rid of biographically named crap, and organize things in a more direct and intuitive fashion. For the love of god, you can't let a scientist in the field do it, because they are just terrible at naming and organizing.
Writers, step up, and take command!
This is my sig.
What about the expert skills in chemistry? Forensics? Psychology? Research? His business skills? Batman is also a consumate detective, so given his expert skill in these areas how long would it take to get those levels of ability?
You would think a Scientific magazine might also be interested in the mental aspect?
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
What about the mental component? While the movie Batman Begins didn't do too much with it, Batman's greatest asset is his mind.
He's a genius and one of the greatest minds in the DC universe. He uses it be one of the greatest detectives and occasional research, and use strategies/tactics to take down even the greatest forces (even Superman).
It isn't his physic and toys that let him stand with the greatest heroes and face the most dangerous villains, but his greatest asset: his mind.
Without his mind he's just some generic tough guy.
I was bitten by a radio active sloth and now I can do the laying around of TEN men!
Just because you can't beat multiple opponents doesn't mean others can't.
My grandfather was a golden gloves boxer turned weight lifter. 5'10" 225-240 lbs when he competed. Could dead lift 500 lbs with one hand. Actually came from the same area as you. :) He was a natural athlete all his life and a veteran of many street fights. He could take on 5 guys, and did on more than one occasion. Would confront gangs of punks well into his 60s.
Took 7 strong men to drag him to the old folks home. Alzheimer's + elite athletes are a dangerous combination.
-- Boycott Shell
One of the best lessons I learned in martial arts is there are two kinds of fights, those you fight dirty and those you lose.
The trick behind multiple attackers is moving around enough so that they eventually line up and come at you one or two at a time.
Yeah I had my martial arts instructors tell me that too. Problem is that realistically you'll never be on favorable terrain and you aren't good enough to put your opponents down quickly or avoid entanglement. The human body can take a lot of abuse and odd are you'll get tied up with one opponent long enough for the others to get to you.
You *might* escape but that's the best you can hope for. Pretty much you have to hope the exit is close and you can get somewhere safe quickly. I'm not saying you shouldn't defend yourself but recognize that the odds are heavily against you.
Disclosure: I've been a martial arts student for about 20 years. I'm not any sort of exceptional talent but I do have enough experience (including real world) to understand what is possible. Multiple opponent situations are VERY difficult even if you are better armed and much better trained than those you are facing.