I love a thread that allows me to take another shot at Million Dollar Baby:
Perhaps not a scientific but a medical mistake, but all Swank’s character had to do was ask and the staff would have turned off her ventilator and killed her.
With a C1-C2 spinal cord injury, one cannot breathe, and the requests for her to “come on maggie, breathe” at ringside are ridiculous, and the only thing that could keep her alive before going on a ventilator is mechanical ventilation. To boot, putting her in a collar and not a halo is 100% medically inaccurate and would likely make what remains of her neck snap.
A healthy athlete getting bed sores that require amputation after a few months is inaccurate, especiall when it starts on one’s calf, an area that does not bear much weight in a prone person (as compared to the boney areas in the back or butt).
A vent-dependent person talking in complete sentences is ridiculous, esp right away and withouth noticeable breathing - think Christopher Reeves.
I have not seen the '98 Godzilla movie because of one thing I noticed in the previews. This giant lizard is stomping around Manhattan without setting off any car alarms!
In *Space: 1999 * there was supposed to be some kind of artificial gravity gizmo that kept gravity at Earth normal inside the base but wasn’t strong or big enough to extend the artificial gravity field outside the base. So I guess they get a pass on that one.
I don’t know if they count as science errors or not, but a couple of things bug me about a lot of action/adventure films.
One is the way the hero (and sometimes the villain) can take tremendous amount of punishment and damage and still carry on like nothing had happened. At most they’re breathing hard and maybe pretty sweaty. I mean, c’mon. You can only lose so much blood before you get dizzy and weak, the pain of a serious gunshot or stab wound is often enough to end the fight right there, and a man who takes a series of severe electrical shocks is going to be weak! The classic example of this would be Rambo II, where Rambo is tortured with electric shocks but breaks free and beats up four or five Vietnamese soldiers and a Russian officer (with his bare hands, of course).
The other is related to this. Apparently supporting characters are real wusses, 'cuz when someone (other than the hero and maybe the villain) gets shot or stabbed, he dies instantly. Uh, no, guys. Most of the time it takes at least a few minutes if you didn’t shoot them straight through the head or maybe the heart. You stab somebody in the stomach or shoot him in the chest, it’s gonna take him a little while to die. I realize that’s not convenient for the scriptwriters, but that’s the way it is.
I’ll have to look again, I thought the implication was that the syringe was going to be used for a mercury enemma. I thought the syringe was needle-less.
Well there are a couple problems with that…one being the specific mention of iron by Magneto later on (and liquid iron would not be kept in a syringe, and not injected into anyone). Secondly, if it’s an enema, you need to be somewhat conscious to “hold it in” so to speak while whatever it was is being absorbed by sigmoid/colon.
In many movies there are problems in the way medical devises are handled. If the character is a nobel prize winning scientist, do not have him handling lab equipment the way a five year old would. If the character is an MD, do not have him hold a syringe in a manner completely incompatible with how an MD would IRL. And giving an IV injection to an uncooperative patient is not an easy thing.
What about the use of defibrillators? Whenever someone is dying, they start zapping them with the defibrillator, like it was Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory.
It always bothered Pepper Mill, with her medical background, that they never used to show them putting the conductive gel on the paddles. Theyu’ve gotten better about that since, but I’m sure they’re still screwing up elsewhere.
this weekend, i saw part of “race to space” (i think that’s the title). at the end, they send a chimp into space, and as the capsule is falling back through the atmosphere, the thrusters fail to fire so it’s coming in too fast and burning up. meanwhile, the scientists in the control center are keeping track of the g’s that the chimp is experiencing. as the capsule falls, the g’s keep increasing up to 16g’s before the chimp figures out to turn on the thrusters (thanks to the help of a young child in the control room telling his chimp friend what to do).
yes, an object in free fall was somehow subjected to 16g’s.
That’s possible if you are using atmospheric braking to reduce the velocity of the reentry vehicle. The Apollo astronauts experienced up to 7g’s during reentry.
That was me. If you assume that he starts his swing with the web horizontal, that the web’s length is much more than his height, that his weight is much more than the web’s weight, and that the web is completely inelastic, then at the bottom (where the acceleration would be greatest) he would be feeling exactly three gees (that’s the normal 1g from being on the Earth, plus 2g from centrifugal force). If you change any of those assumptions, then the total acceleration is even less. A normal human would have a hard time holding onto the web at those accelerations, but it’s well within the range of Spiderman’s superhuman strength. As for survivability, roller coasters routinely get up to 4g. It’d be a bit of a thrill ride, and I wouldn’t want to be in sustained 3g for a long time, but it wouldn’t be hazardous to the health of anyone he carried.
As for colors of clothing, black should keep you cooler if you stay in the shade, but white should keep you cooler if you’re out in the sun. This is assuming, of course, that the albedo of the clothes are constant, so it’s white or black not just in the visible but also in the infrared (a very questionable assumption). If you can control the entire reflection spectrum of your clothes, the ideal (for sun or shade) would be something that’s white in the visible range, but black in the infrared range.
Depends on what he’s doing. For many of the real “feats of strength”, one or more of his unoccupied tentacles is acting as a brace/fulcrum. For example, when he tosses the car right after leaving the hospital, you can see that two of his tentacles firmly plant themselves in the ground. They’re taking the bulk of the weight on themselves when the car is tossed, so that Otto’s feeble frame hardly has to support anything.
This is assuming that radiation is the dominant mechanism of heat transfer. In fact, under normal atmospheric conditions, radiation plays a dull third to convection/evaporative cooling and (assuing you are sitting on/leanding against some thermally conducting mass) conduction. You lose so little head by direct radiation to the background that you could maintain body temperature indefinately at near-freezing (well, ~40ºF) temperatures. (Note that in direct sunlight you can gain heat significantly, as the effective solar temperature is actually around 10000ºF.) And despite the pale color of Caucasian skin, all human flesh is a pretty close to a perfect blackbody radiator in infrared wavelengths, which is what you’d expect from an extensively selected evolutionary design.
The cut, insulation value, and weave/convective permissivity has far more to do with comfort than the pigmentation. The people who make sweeping statements that black/white/violet with yellow polka dots is more comfortable in the sun are probably the same folks who insist that glass panes are thicker at the bottom because of viscous flow, and who need to pick up a copy of Jearl’s The Flying Circus of Physics.
An object falling through the atmosphere is not in free fall. If a capsule were to reenter the atmosphere at a steeper angle than intended, it would experience significant G force due to atmospheric compression/drag.
Actually, it’s just assuming that non-radiative heat transfer is independant of clothing color. But I agree with you that other properties of the cloth will generally be more important than pigmentation.
