There are too many things to write abiout, in truth. The one that always pops into my head is at the end of the first Keaton Batman where he and Vicki Vale are hurtling to their doom from the top of Gotham Cathedral. Batman shhots out a grapple, asnd it stops both of them, instantly, with no ill effects. Vicki would’ve been torn out of his grasp and continued earthwards. Batman would’ve gotten a nuclear wedgie, a broken back, and other things so bad that, if he didn’t die, he’d want to. And this is typical of people falling in the movies. The actual stuntman in the Bond film For Your Eyes Only actually had a sophisticated rig (not just a rope or a bungee) that was supposed to slow him down when he dropped so that this sort of awfulness didn’t happen to him. But in the film, of course, it was supposed to be a single climbing rope that held him in place.
The other common thing that bugs me is people firing guns in enclosed spaces, and then aren’t immediately very deaf.
People swimming underwater to safety. And they always seem to overcome these obstacles:
Visibility is never a problem. Water is always swimming pool clear even though it may be a lake, river, sewer system, flooded building.
Light is never a problem. Flooded sinking ship, sewer, swamp. Always seems theres plenty of light from somewhere to light their way.
No need for googles? Because you can always read peoples lips, open a combination lock, find secret exits wile everything is a blur.
Super lung capacity. Doesn’t matter that your adrenaline is running cause your about to be shot or drown, you can still hold your breath for over 2 minutes if your trying to escape underwater.
Prime example: Lethal Weapon 2. Mel is shackled and thrown off a pier in the middle of the night. However as he sinks to the bottom the water is crystal clear and theres plenty of light for him to recognize his drowned grilfriends face without the aid of goggles.
Or how about stopping your fall by grabbing a stationary ledge? Bruce Willis in Die Hard falls over 10 feet down an elevator shaft and stops himself by grabbing a ledge with his fingertips?
You have to remember, Spidey has the proportionate anus of a spider. Very strong to hold in the intestines.
Speaking of which, I don’t know of any spider species that shoots it’s webbing out of it’s front legs… I’m just saying, movie Spider-Man got lucky is all. Probably why Stan Lee had him invent web-shooters. Ditko refused to draw him the “right” way.
If there’s any CGI people on the boards, could you do a webslinging composite with the spinnerets in the right place? Cause hoo-boy, that would be funny!
Well, Charon is about Texas sized and wasn’t discovered until 1978. Sedna wasn’t discovered until 2003. So while you’re correct about the asteroid belt, I guess it is possible that something large with a low albedo could come moseying in from the Oort Cloud. Although I’d guess there’d be some gravitational indications if something that large entered the solar system, it would probably take quite a while for it to get detected.
Or Dr. Banner bravely ‘saving’ his lab mate by diving in front of the gamma burst? That would have the great result of killing two people instead of one, as very little of the gammas were going to be stopped by a body. Thus the use of dense materials such as lead and tungsten to shield one’s DNA from gamma rays.
Since it was apparently pulling in metal, that’s not a huge issue. As for radiation, probably not, since there was some sort of implied containment or something.
The real problem is this: how the heck does a fusion generator grow by adding heavy metals and die when immersed in water. (For other reasons, it probably would die when immersed in water, but it would be because the regulators would immediately go nuts and the thing would splatter hot plasma everywhere, but with no serious damage.) And again, fusion generators don’t go “critical.”
Of course, this is Sam Raimi we’re talking about here. He may well have known exactly what he was talking about, and just found the idea of bull$%^&&^*# the audience amusing.
I remember reading a question about the forces Spider-Man would experience during his swinging here on the SDMB a while ago, and one of the experts mentioned that in a previous thread it had been calculated that he would experience about three gees max. Which I don’t think is enough to splurt the intestines out of even a normal anus (though I’d like to know if I’m wrong about that).
In Peter David’s novelization of the recent Spider-Man movie, Peter Parker ponders the placement of his spinnerets during the scene in the school cafeteria where he inadvertently webs things and causes trouble for himself with Flash:
Charon is a rather poor example, because it went undiscovered so long only because it was right next to Pluto, and the two were indistinguishable. If Charon had been out there, on its own, it probably would have been detected sooner.
And it would also be an easy thing to detect in the inner solar system. There are three reasons that it’s hard to detect Trans-Neptunian Objects (aka Kuiper Belt Objects), of which Pluto and Charon are examples.
They have low albedos (they reflect a small amont of the sunlight that reaches them.)
They are far from the Sun (so little sunlight reaches them.)
They are far from the Earth (so the inherently dim little objects are far away, making them appear even dummer to us.)
Once they swing into the inner solar system, factors 2 & 3 go away. While it’s not as easy to detect as a big, light-colored object, if it’s a 1000 kilometers across, its still going to be hard to miss.
But I contend that it won’t actually be a low-albedo object. When you bring in a large object from the frigid outer wastes of the Solar System, the many and various volatile ices that make up its surface and interior start to sublime, creating a comet. Even the non-Texas-sized cometary nuclei we have observed thus far, which are only 10s of km in diamter, can create a cometary head the size of Saturn, with a tail that stretches for hundreds of millions of miles. So I’m a bit skeptical of the notion of a low-albedo stealth impactor stealing in from the outer Solar System.
So why don’t we see large Texas-sized cometary nuclei swooping toward the Earth? Because it’s hard to change the orbit of such a huge object to bring it into the inner Solar System.
Which is a good thing for Life on Earth, because if one of those babies was headed for us, we would not be able to change its orbit, no matter how many years in advance we saw it coming, and we would be pretty well screwed. Just like they would have been screwed in Armageddon, if the writers hadn’t been living in a happy, fact-free fairytale land.
Despite the various objections to Spiderman et all., remember that these are comic book movies. In the comics, science stopped in 1970 or so. Everything since then is a “special power.” In fact, many of those “special powers” not only can’t be mas-produced, they can’t even be reproduced once. Yet clearly they work, whether or not other scientists can duplicate it.
That’s just now science is in the comics. Even seemingly technological things like spaceships and so on are really just special powers possessed by nations or species. That’s how comics are.
Two things always bugged me in The Hunt for Red October, although I’m not sure if they’re strictly science errors.
First, the point is made throughout the movie that the Red October is an aggressive, first-strike weapon; but ballistic-missile submarines serve the exact opposite function. They are designed to be hidden so they can’t be destroyed in a first strike and guarantee retaliation.
Second, the Americans are particularly afraid of the new submarine because of its propulsion system that will make it undetectable by their sonar. But the operator on the Dallas figures out how to track it within a day. Once that information gets out to the rest of the U.S. fleet, the Red October is no more of a threat than any other Soviet sub.
Yeah, I was kinda wondering why what’s essentially a miniature sun wouldn’t…you know, if nothing else, create a lot of steam when you threw it in a river.
