Yeah. I mentioned this in another thread. I am a computer forensic examiner, and it does take days to do an examination. I can, with effort, look the other way when TV compresses an examination into a shorter time period. But I get wound up when the forensic examiner does their work on the killer’s machine. No, no, no! You take an image of the drive and work from a copy. Every time you do something directly on the subject machine, you’re changing it, which is destroying evidence.
Didn’t they do something like this in the 80’s movie No Way Out with Kevin Costner? I have a vague memory of Costner waiting for something like half a day for the results of some database search to print out on a dot-matrix printer.
Costner’s face is the one that’s going to print out; our hero’s tension-filled challenge is to wrap the case up before the slow computer produces that lead.
Numb3rs is just ludicrous. Apart from the fact that in any dangerous situation everyone is wearing helmets except the leads, who are too pretty to cover up, the plot machinations required to drag dubious mathematical analysis into play are too stupid to gloss over. One of the less stupid ones I can recall involve them trying to fathom the connection between several insurance companies. I said to the wife, “Bet they’ve all got the same reinsurer.” They said, “We need to do some deep pattern analysis involving this specialist we happen to have on this week.” Which somehow revealed that they all had the same reinsurer. Amazing! i must be a math genius!
Also, I was a music major and even I know that MATH DOESN’T WORK LIKE THAT. You can’t just write some formulas on a board and know precisely where someone is.
The thing about the redheaded gene is that you need it from both sides. Plus, Castle was raised by a flighty, red-haired actress; of course he’d marry a flighty-red-haired actress.
The reason she wasn’t around was established way back in Season 1 or 2 - she loved Castle a lot, but she had a budding acting career, and she felt that she wasn’t built for full-time motherhood. Since being a full-time parent is Castle’s raison d’être, neither of them had a real problem with her leaving.
Thanks, I must have missed those establishing moments, including her appearance in season 1. It still seems to me she missed some rather important things, like her daughter graduating and going off to college. Unless I missed that too.
Damn, Ninjaed to the NCIS keyboard scene. That one’s so ridiculous, it makes it hard to think of any others.
Baywatch, etc, are all from a rather long time ago. Of late we’ve imported pretty much every crime scene show, every fantasy show, every medical show, every comedy… Just about the only American shows we don’t import are the news and talk shows, though some channels have tried the latter (always failing) and CNN is available here.
So water can contain only one mineral at a time? How fascinating.
You obviously weren’t paying attention, or you would have noticed that they determined that the flesh didn’t rot away–it was eaten away.
Furthermore, crystals can form much more quickly than you seem to think.
“Crystals should begin to grow within 24 hours.”
And this experiment–albeit with very small crystals–takes only 30 minutes.
Things may have changed in the last 3 years, but when my wife was teaching high school drama I was looking at some of her play catalogs, and noticed that Rocky Horror Show performance rights were only available to professional theaters. No community theaters, no colleges, and high schools were right out.
It’s not unusual for plays to have restrictions on who can perform them, or even exclusive arrangements such as if a professional dinner theater is doing a play, there might be a clause that no one else within a certain range can do that play until the dinner theater’s run is finished.
But the minerals magically aggregate themselves into large separate crystals within days.
Begin to grow. You can grow really nice lattices of salt crystals within a very short period of time (use a charcoal briquette). These feathery creations fall apart at the slightest touch. The crystals in Bones were so hard and attached so well that removing them was a major subplot. That doesn’t happen in real life.
Even rock candy takes a week with ideal conditions: perfectly saturated still water.
Costner’s character was waiting on a printout of a list of registered gifts[spoiler]that included one that proved there was a relationship between the Secretary of Defense (Gene Hackman) and Susan Atwell (Sean Young)
It always looks so clean, sterile and high-tech, when at least in my experience, there were usually a series of cables running to the writeblocker and then to the original drive, and depending on how we did it, we might have had a separate external for the image to be placed on. Lots of cables and widgets and barcodes.
Plus, enCase and FTK aren’t nearly so sexy as whatever they show on TV.
To me the premise complained of by the OP doesn’t seem all that stupid. They have a writing in code, they have a key to that code, they decipher the code. Certainly no more stupid than searching for a “secretarial college” [Is there such a thing] or seeking out someone else to ask.
This third option is partly internet based I think and SDMB is a part of it. So often today people think that asking some stranger with unknown qualifications is a legitimate research method.