one of the pitfalls of hobbies like historical reenactment is precisely this. Nobody does armour or most material goods correctly in visual media, and once that’s a salient fact for you it really kind of breaks the spell.
Also as a former fencer, I've realized that fencing has so little to do with most "blade" warfare, whether in real life or in the movies. Epee might be the closest to reality for parts of Europe with duels etc, but I think all three forms diverged pretty quickly since the death of an opponent kind of kills the sport.
That's what I always felt, like lightsaber fights are apparently about striking each other's blades in the middle with zero risk of hitting each other. They got (even) more visually interesting later on though.
That said, the more I learn about things like that, the less a sword seems practical in actual combat. Spears and (spiked) hammers are where it's at, with knives/dirks as backup worst case.
That's what historical stage combat always looked like so, I can live with it. To an extend, that is.
What really gets me so, is large battles. For some reason, it is cool to just break formation and charge a tightly packed enemy some 200 meters away. While screaming as loud as possible. Or the helmets in the last duel, hell, collored cloths over armor and insignias have exactly been developed in medival Europe to identify famous nobles and knights without seeing their faces... Plenty of occassions to show some famous actors in other scenes.
All of that is toped by the really bad writing we have in last cpuple of years. I mean TV took off with things like Breaking Bad. And the we got season 8 of Game of Thrones, to pick just one famous example...
At the end of the movie Gladiator(2000), Maximus has a vision of being reunited with his family as he walks through a field of wheat. However the wheat is clearly a modern dwarf variety. These weren't developed until the mechanization of agriculture in the 20th century. Ancient varieties would have been taller because the stalks were used as a building material.
Do horse drawn vehicles make 3 grooves (I assume that's what you were alluding to)? I'd expect it would just be a wide band of pretty bare ground with two grooves inset from the edges?
Yes, but I wouldn't expect it to be a groove. Human hips mean when walking single-file we make a grooved path, particularly in harder terrain as we'll narrow our gait to reduce environmental resistance to travel. Sheep produce very similar paths. But horses are wider at the hip yet have a similarly wide foot .. so I'd expect more of a swathe (wider path, ie not a groove) of damage, with sufficient horses.
I grew up in a small village where a significant proportion of people ride, gaps in hedgerows where a number of horses have just passed through (eg a hunt) produce a wide band of hoofprints. But, I've never seen a route mainly used by horsedrawn carts.
Most of our bridleways look like slightly wider footpaths, but they're primarily used by pedestrians or bicycles and horse traffic is still relative little.
Yeah you need a better name for that, because, while the phenomenon is real, the name is kind of meh. Why not the electrician problem? Or the teacher problem? Any profession would work. Why plumbers? Plus, I can't really recall any movie or novel where expertise in plumbing was essential to the plot.
Editing here because based on some replies my message wasn't clear: I was talking about expertise in plumbing exhibited by one of the protagonists, not someone watching the movie obviously.
I know “the expert problem” as being unable to explain your area of expertise to anyone because your entire vocabulary and mental model of the world is so deep into that expertise. This is why so many of us on HN are ignored at work, for example - the leaders prefer simpler explanations they can understand, even if they’re wrong.
The dull name kind of emphasizes how it applies to practically any field of knowledge, AND how it often has no plot significance. The plumbing example given was just an anachronism in the set design.
> Plus, I can't really recall any movie or novel where expertise in plumbing was essential to the plot.
That's the point, expertise in an area can completely distract from the plot entirely. I can't even watch anything medical-related with my wife since she'll get annoyed about inaccuracies and start complaining about them. Doesn't matter how unrelated to the actual plot it is.
The point is that expertise in plumbing isn't essential to the plot. Sometimes it might be, but sometimes it is just a background thing that a plumber would catch but most people don't. If the scene is in the basement a plumber might notice that the drain pipes are all flowing uphill, but the average person just sees a bunch of pipes that to think look like the pipes in any other basement.
Of course in a lot of cases expertise is needed. However that isn't important. The important part is you have more knowledge about something than the average person.
Does he? “Here’s a phrase I use, and what it means” seems fine to me. There might be a bit of personal history why he chose a plumber, but I’m guessing he doesn’t remember.
> Simon Orrell: My first exposure to “The Plumber Problem” was sitting in a theatre with my dad in 1973 watching “Emperor of the North” and my dad leans over to whisper, “They didn’t make culvert pipe like that back in the ’30s. It was plate, not corrugated.”
A young couple, living in a campus apartment complex, are repeatedly harassed by an eccentric plumber, who subjects them to a series of bizarre mind games while making unnecessary repairs to their bathroom.
It's too bad then that the rest of the show was so awful.
How can writers focused on scientific accuracy create such ugly and unlikeable caricatures for their cast and embed so much anti-intellectualism in every episode?
> How can writers focused on scientific accuracy create such ugly and unlikeable caricatures for their cast and embed so much anti-intellectualism in every episode?
The show isn't aimed at people they're caricaturing. And it was apparently tremendously successful, so whatever they're doing, they're doing it right.
>ugly and unlikeable caricatures for their cast and embed so much anti-intellectualism
Isaac Asimov saying is quoted for a reason...
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’
Incidentally, at the gym I go to, Young Sheldon is on one of the TV's when I'm there.
Just as terrible as the original from which it's a spin off. They actually had Jason Alexander and Ed Begley, Jr. on one of the episodes this week. I guess with enough money you can get almost anyone.
Knowing how legacy software lives on far past its expected lifetime, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if SQL (and services though which you could pass SQL injection) are still in use 235 years from now.
This applies to the real world as well.
I've had a couple of times when I've been closely involved in an event that was covered in the national newspapers. Both times the stories were presented with major factual inaccuracies and with clear bias.
I've brought this up in conversation a few times over the years and quite often a similar experience was reported by others. Yet everyone still seemed happy to trust the accuracy of the other articles being reported.
Actually, this is an even bigger one after working on classified intelligence projects. Being able to watch in real time what is actually happening in some place a news reporter is speculating about and get wildly wrong makes you despair to the point of wondering what they're ever right about. It's even worse to come on a place like Hacker News and see the kinds of wildly wrong things people believe or speculate on, which is doubly frustrating because you can't even legally correct it or even say you know they're wrong.
That doesn’t bother me as much when people get exceptionally easy to verify completely open facts wrong. If they can’t even bother fact checking to the point of a simple google search, why should I trust anything else in the article?
> I've had a couple of times when I've been closely involved in an event that was covered in the national newspapers. Both times the stories were presented with major factual inaccuracies and with clear bias.
Same. A few years ago, I worked at a large tech company that a certain well-known news organization likes to cover. After a few articles were published relating to work I was involved in, I found myself thinking "Nope, that's totally wrong" or "Technically correct but presented in a biased way". I decided to cancel my news subscription with them because I realized that they have a certain narrative they want to present to the public, and why should I trust any of their reporting on other topics if the one I was involved in firsthand was just completely wrong?
There's no money in unbiased news. If news organizations want subscribers they need to present a clear voice that is distinct from what other organizations offer, otherwise people will just click the first link on google or facebook and never pay. Unbiased can also mean undiferentiated, so NYT has leaned into technoskepticism, the journal into Karl Rove conservatism(and now just plain old republican or bust), and on and on. A news organization that hasn't made itself into a destination for its readers is forced to rely on cheap farmed out content that's usually either listicles or just straight ripped from a wire service.
I have to believe that's not true. When Bill Gates or Warren Buffett sit down at their breakfast table, do they get fed the same diet of pablum that I do, as an Apple News subscriber? I doubt it. They presumably pay a ton of money for access to unfiltered, unbiased global intelligence.
But I have no idea how to get the newsfeed that people like that must have access to, regardless of cost.
Bloomberg is indeed the first source that comes to mind when I think "Pay a lot more than most people for a premium newsfeed," but then, on my list of trusted news sources, Bloomberg is ranked somewhere between Russia Today and the Brothers Grimm. Their reporters are literally paid to move the markets [1].
Because Business Insider is such a great source. And no, I do not believe the ultra rich employ private inteligence serices preparing morning briefings for them.
If you want just the facts so, try Reuters or AP, basically the source of the majority of news stroies we are fed by media (the exception being in-house investigated stories, but those are rarer by the day and flanked by so much filler articles that it is hard to filter the facts out). Also, professional inteligence organizations can be spectatularly wrong as well. Sometimes a lone, local jourbalist on the ground witj working internet for soke background research has it better. Local, because some random person from far away will lack the necessary backgroing and context to deliver more than some isolated, uninformed, highly objective opinion.
Illegal or not, it's defamatory if untrue. I assume that Bloomberg would sue for libel if the quote from their reporter were fabricated.
(Read the quote from the reporter carefully: the market isn't what's being manipulated. The news is... and by extension, the reader. The reader is who does the market-moving.)
So, a plain statement of fact then? Your initial claim was that Bloberg rwporters are paid to manipulate / move the market. Said quote doesn't support that.
I said they were paid to move the market, which is the case according to their own reporters. They are not allowed to do that directly, but they have both the right and the ability to choose their subjects and slant their stories to achieve an identical effect.
What is your interest in carrying water for a company whose representatives admit to market-harming journalism practices? More important, what does such a company have to do with my expressed wish for an unbiased news source?
Trump apparently reads at something close to a 6th-grade level, going by what his staff have said about having to simplify his briefings to the level of Saturday morning cartoons. He's not a potential customer for any premium newsfeed services.
Musk is not an apparent functional illiterate like Trump, but he unfortunately has a long history of choosing poor information sources and reacting accordingly. (The "pedo guy" case comes to mind.) He cares less about accurate news than I do, that much is safe to say. So I doubt he takes advantage of whatever higher-quality sources might be available to him. Not when the latest missive from Catturd69 is free.
I think they are reading the same stuff you have access too. Maybe they have a FT subscription and a Bloomberg one where you don't, but I don't think there's some team of billionaire journalists. Business stuff is different, theyll have employees trying to get insider info, but politics, largely the same.
And yet we manage to keep ourselves reasonably informed. I subscribe to one of the major papers, and avail myself to a variety of mainstream sources. I can count on the fingers of one hand the times, over multiple decades, that I've ever looked back on an issue and felt that I had actually been misinformed. "You made one tiny mistake so your entire organization is discredited" would have been an unreasonable reaction.
So I think that Gell-Mann Amnesia, while amusing, is overblown.
Regarding a topic that you never come into personal contact with, your entire knowledge of it throughout your life will be media-mediated. How, then, would you ever learn what you had been misinformed of?
How often do you learn new things later that, even as transmitted through untrustworthy media, allow for clear falsification of the former media presentation?
This isn't zero but it's not very common either. Usually, the domain in question is sufficiently subtle that you can't make a rigorous prediction from an untrustworthy media presentation at all; thus, the media accounts are effectively unfalsifiable (unless you go out and seek personal experience).
> Usually, the domain in question is sufficiently subtle that you can't make a rigorous prediction
Is it really a big deal then? Experts really care about the details so they will notice inaccuracies, but does that mean that they really matter to the point that the entire notion of journalism and media itself should be discredited?
Saddam had current stockpiles of WMDs. (No, he'd long ago gotten rid of them.)
The attackers on the US compound in Benghazi were regular folks upset about the film "Innocence of Muslims". (They were organized Islamist militants, including groups affiliated with Al-Qaeda.)
"Hands up, don't shoot!" (There's no evidence Michael Brown ever said that.)
Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation. (The contents have been repeatedly authenticated.)
Those are four massively popular lies that the media told over 20 years, of which you should be aware. I regularly see media outlets peddle falsehoods that they have been told are false, but I don't know what your specific knowledge is.
> So I think that Gell-Mann Amnesia, while amusing, is overblown.
I've had the same experience. I've been on the "inside" of a news story a few times in my life, and in every case what was reported was wildly different than the actual situation. It's only a few data points, but also 100% unreliable in those cases.
This seems to be the case with virtually any profession. You have to just learn to live with it, mostly, maybe even laugh at it. It was damn near a pasttime when I was still in the Army to make fun of how the military is portrayed in film and television. Basic as fuck shit like almost no one even has a haircut that meets regulations. It also makes you doubly appreciate when someone gets it right. We all loved Band of Brothers for that. At least the first season of Mr. Robot stands out in light of so many ridiculous and shitty "hacker" portrayals. Having worked on classified projects is even worse. After working for the NRO for years, scenes of people willy-nilly taking over satellites are so silly you just have to take it as part of the way that fictional universe works, clearly unlike the real universe. The Mission Impossible movies are still pretty entertaining in spite of it.
Honestly, probably the worst thing I can recall is the first season of The Walking Dead when Rick hides inside of a tank turret. I was a tank commander back in my time. Do television writers really think there is that much space inside the turret?
In the Matrix humanity is enslaved to use them as an energy source.
But the 2nd law of thermodynamics requires that any energy harvested would be, by definition, less than the energy of the food required to sustain their bodies.
Therefore the plot makes no sense, because they should just shovel the food directly into the computer and skip the humans.
Right but that still means they need to pick literally any other human output besides “energy”. At the very least it would have to be some very specific form of energy that humans emit.
Just like it would make no sense to explain the purpose of animal agriculture in human society as “extracting the animals’ energy”. Like you said, it’s the different form of energy (plus nutrients) that they can provide, not energy simpliciter.
I always interpreted "battery" to be lazy shorthand for using the humans as data storage or computation. Like an external hard drive or compute cluster. But I knew I was amending the story so I could stay invested in it.
This one is super easy. We're getting this story from a band of lunatics. Of course their understanding of the situation is limited by the framework they exist in.
The Doylist explanation is that of course the human brains are being used as computing substrates; the energy explanation is a symptom of how little the Zion people actually know about the world.
Specifically, IIRC, it was in test cuts of the film, and identified as baffling by test audiences.
I don't think anything substantive in the films is inconsistent with it (and the behavior of the agents throughout the films is suggestive of it), just the in-character exposition.
Which, to get really meta, you can explain as the filmmakers incorporating the inability of audiences to grasp, and projecting it into the film as an inability of the “free” humans to do so, so that (as part of the system of control it is established that Zion is) instead they were fed the “battery” story.
Yeah it's a shame because it was such a cool Philip K Dick-esque kind of plot point.
> Which, to get really meta, you can explain as the filmmakers incorporating the inability of audiences to grasp, and projecting it into the film as an inability of the “free” humans to do so, so that (as part of the system of control it is established that Zion is) instead they were fed the “battery” story.
Yeah and the original was already meta being a postmodern critique of society so it's a "yo dawg I heard you like meta..."
Which is weird because a spiritual predecessor (and another Keanu Reeves film), Johnny Mnemonic, uses a similar plot point where the brain is used as a data transfer medium.
The live action films I don't think so, but a few of the shorts in the Animatrix were supposed to be an accurate history archive from the creation of the first machines all the way through the war and the creation of the Matrix. The shorts both included it and kind-of came up with an explanation:
During and before the war, the machines were mostly solar-powered, so blocking out the sky was a last-ditch effort by humans to stop the machines that almost worked. But the machines developed a new form of fusion that used human bio-electricity as some sort of activation or catalyst. They weren't being used as energy directly.
An alternative explanation is that the machines aren't using the humans for anything; they're just devoted to the most ethical treatment of these billions of people who believe themselves to be at war, and the only way to capture them and keep them sane is to hook them up to virtual reality and keep them complacent.
Every human is a prisoner of war, in the finest possible cell.
that's one opinion of a world driven by machine. But where machines are currently unable to feel compassion or show mercy, an energy optimization algorithm could easily be seen as sociopathic as it separates mother from child for efficiency reasons because an algorithm said it wound be a more optimal arrangement.
The same thing annoyed me too but not that much--the premise is a bit like a macguffin where the 'why' isn't important.
Pretty much anything to do with physics, especially in sci-fi/space stories. Now I see everything as a typical human emotional drama with a science/space backdrop. Actual sci-fi where the plot directly ties into it is rare, and good ones rarer. It was actually better when sci-fi was niche and what there was, was trying to be good.
Even worse for me these days than this plumbers effect is bad acting. Once my mind gets into the reality of actors doing a job, getting this filmed, and played for me, it's hard to get back into the storyline even if it might be great, like trying to return to a dream when fully woken.
We use cows for the same purpose - we eat them instead of shoveling grass straight into our mouths, even though in some strict sense the grass contains more caloric energy.
Or, we eat vegetables even though the energy in them is less than all the solar energy that falls on them.
But of course the calories in grass and sunlight aren't accessible to us. It's not impossible to imagine some parallel situation where human biology - perhaps genetically modified - is useful to transform some source of energy into a more usable form.
Use your imagination. Maybe some biological process in genetically engineered humans can sort uranium isotopes more efficiently than a centrifuge. That would make them a net producer of "energy" by a reasonable definition.
The Black Mirror episode “Fifteen Million Merits” is the same. And in fact, it directly shows humans being used to generate electricity, so it can't be explained away.
Going along with narrative requires suspension of disbelief. However, when you see obvious factual errors, disbelief comes knocking again as you begin questioning everything.
One of the reasons I like fantasy is the plot is set in a universe with different physics and so much of my knowledge of this world can be set aside. Even then though I often wonder how do they feed those large cities with only wilderness between them (most are set on navigable water, even though it is just luck at least the city location doesn't violate possibility, but the lack of explanation of how they get food) - underground dwarf cities are the worse about this.
Dwarf Fortress answers that last question with: mushrooms!
I think the fantasy city problem is at its worst in 3D video games, where you visit some impressive capital city, massive walls, towers...and enough housing for about a hundred people.
My problem with fantasy is that the physics of the universe is not well presented. For the entire duration, I watch with the premise that anything and everything is possible until shown to be otherwise. It's probably different if the source material was read and the viewer already has that context. There's probably some science-fantasy that fits your description which I would enjoy more than the more typical magical/mystical sorts.
One of my biggest pet peeves in watching people play TTRPGs is that the NPCs don't seem to know they live in a world full of magic users, and the party is the first they've ever encountered.
I'd expect shop owners to have collectively figured out ways to deal with bards. Banks how to deal with invisibility, etc.
The thing that bugged me the absolute most and destroyed by suspension of disbelief completely was Hugh Jackman couldn't type a coherent sentence on a keyboard if his life depended on it (and it did in several scenes). It looked at times like he was just bouncing all ten fingers up and down on the keyboard like a kid just going bang, bang, bang on a piano.
Aside: Watched that movie twenty-two years ago and am still obviously triggered by it!
Bad tech realism in scifi doesn't bother me, because a lot of it is showing the way tech could be, with a few liberties taken.
Generally they show extreme capabilities, similar to what machine learning can do now(Except it's implied that a lone genius coded it, rather that it being a trained model), in a world of highly flexible IoT type devices that can be repurposed to do anything via a pretty easy GUI.
I take it as a challenge. Using an app I wrote should feel like being on SeaQuest DSV. If there's a broken connector, can I make a software workaround? If I'm buying a product, what's the state of the art for that area?
Or, she could just note the exposition as part of the fiction and its presentation.
Years ago, I used to be critical when it came to that sort of thing, then I realized that I was being critical of something with a clear purpose that's useful. And, that this was just a distraction from the often much more appalling flaws in mass media that can actually have real-world harms. I.e., flaws that give people the wrong idea about how things actually work in ways that can negatively impact their behavior.
These days, I see something like two axes, when it comes to flaws in movies (/ productions of any kind). One axis relates to "style" / "taste". For example, some people dislike works of the author Charles Dickens because he tends to spend a lot of time describing settings, preferring the works of someone like Shakespeare, who's typically much more "action-oriented". The other axis relates to factual / logical / structural issues, the worst in my estimation these days being in the "factual" part of this sort of "dimensionally reduced" axis (i.e., you could of course have 3 or more independent axes for what I've written).
I may not have much interest in something that has a style I'm not a fan of, but I only have a more realized reaction (something like negative, and I care to some degree) when the flaws are on that second axis.
She should try it - heh, save the annoyance for something "truly worthy" of it. :)
Medical stuff is often worth avoiding if you have even a passing knowledge. I’m a radiographer, and pretty much useless at anything except driving a magnet, but it still bugs me.
Medical shows have ventilators set up wrong, chest x-rays hung up backwards (L on R) and piss poor representations of CPR chest compressions. The main actor can often operate all sorts of specialist equipment, perform surgery and analyse results of complex tests.
It’s almost universal.
Oh, I usually watch the ones where there's someone in the show doing chest compressions on a person's neck at 30bpm. Or where Dr. House makes some ridiculous prediction based on evidence that would be inaccurate in the real world.
Wired and Vanity have some good videos in the vein of "Forensic scientist reacts to CSI" and etc. GameSpot has a good one reacting to firearms in various video games. There's too many medical ones to mention. I don't think I've found any entertaining coding related ones yet.
Comment thread about digital audio/audio software: the comments are just clearly full of people who don't really know much about what they are writing about.
Anything else: wow, HN commenters are so knowledgeable and good at explaining stuff!
I think the main issue with the HN crowd, present company included, is that because they're good at learning they think they can quickly grasp the essentials for anything new.
Which is why there's like a revolving door of subjects that you suddenly get a lot of armchair experts about, going from currencies and investment banking to international conflict and politics, a short detour to amateur submarines, etc.
Same, but for me it is any story about agriculture or food production. I don’t even open those comment threads any more, it isn’t worth the aggravation.
The technical faults with movies don't bother me anymore, because my expectations are basically zero.
What bothers me immensely more is the same but with human choices, motivations and character. There's no reason to try to understand characters as they increasingly make the most superficial or arbitrary decisions, pulled along by plot necessities rather than driving the story. The humans in recent movies feel like window dressing or set design.
Yes, this drives me crazy. I particularly hate the trope where the plot hinges on two characters having a huge misunderstanding that would be resolved by a 5 second conversation.
Or the "problem that would be resolved by a 5 second phone call" trope. I always thought it was funny how long it lasted even after cell phones became ubiquitous.
What bothered me the most about this was Thanos destroying the stones after. He should realize that the snap is something that will need to be done regularly if he wants to actually keep population down. Halving the galaxy once accomplishes nothing
Are we not supposed to think that Thanos is deranged? I thought it was pretty obvious that his goal is comically evil (no pun intended) and his motivation so singular that it’s pointless to even think of him as an individual with a personality who could be persuaded or even influenced by emotion. He’s literally just a force of nature that’s going to kill half of the life forms.
Thanos is the worst villian since Negan in Walking Dead. Both made me stop caring for the franchise. Which is a pitty really, since writing, and the villain, were really good in Captain America Civil War. Actually, Zemo was the best villain in tue whole MCU, since Loki is not truely a villain IMHO.
>Are we not supposed to think that Thanos is deranged?
A perennial problem in writing villains is characterizing them as insane and stupid (to explain why they do evil) but then in order to present a real threat to the hero they execute those evil and stupid plans with patience and intelligence.
Thanos has an army! An entire naval fleet assembled from centuries of constant war. He's a space Napoleon. That required skill, intelligence and considerable effort, as several characters tell us. And then after achieving the goal he spent so many years thinking about, he makes a dumb mistake, apparently without realizing it?
Same thing with the Joker in The Dark Knight (2008). Other characters say he's crazy. He himself says he's "just a dog chasing a car" with no plan or goals beyond causing chaos. Yet he is always executing complex plans which require precise timing? Not the behavior of a raving madman.
Marvel movies are the worst about this for me. The adult characters use adult mannerisms and delivery, but the actual dialog and what they're saying is so cartoonishly simple and childlike that I can't suspend my disbelief when watching grown adults talk and act that way.
It's easier for me to believe in superpowers than to believe in people that have the psychological complexity of houseplants.
You have to find a way to not think of it as behaving, but acting like the characters they’re meant to portray. If they weren’t comic book characters, literally two dimensional :), then it’d be different. Maybe live action superhero films just aren’t your jam?
What's interesting is that you could think of it as a variant of the plumber problem, but where your area of expertise is human behavior and experience.
I still don’t like the stupid Hans plot in Frozen. I cannot make that character make sense no matter how I convolute myself. I just have to ignore it entirely.
> In Speed 2, a plot point involves a laden oil tanker about to collide explosively. My wife, native to a major oil port city, couldn’t follow the plot because she could tell the tanker was empty just by looking at it, so she didn’t understand why everyone was saying it would explode.
Wait a minute. Full oil tanks don't explode, but empty oil tanks full of hydrocarbon vapor do.
I believe that's only true when the substance in question has flammable vapors. I.e. gasoline, but not oil or diesel. I suppose in the latter case, it would probably not explode on collision whether empty or full. But if liquid leaked out in the crash, I guess it could then combust.
No, oil takers have an inert gas system to ensure that the tanks are not explosive, empty or full. They pump non-flammable flue gases into the tanks to displace oxygen.
(This was a plot point in the novel "The Devil's Alternative" which I read probably 40 years ago but my brain remembers random things :-)
In the movie 300, after Leonidas and the 300 decide to march North towards Thermopylae. The valley & mountains in the background are REALLY from Sparta, Grecet. The producers made had sent crews to take enough photos and videos of the valleygt to accurately portrait the landscape. It was eerie to watch the movie (I grew up in Sparta) and see the mountains all around as they really are. BUT (big but here) they march SOUTH while they should be marching NORTH.
When I watched it at the cinema (in Athens) back in the day, apparently there was one more Spartan in the venue and we both stood up and shouted (using different words) something to the effect of: hey morons, you are going the wrong way, you should be marchin North!!
Honestly, my brain turned off the moment I remembered that Spartains were known for their heavy armor and not for dressing up like Chippendales dancers / male strippers.
Similar - I downloaded and watched "The Way" while I was about 2/3 the way through the Camino de Santiago. There's a scene where the group walks in front of a landmark I recognized from a few days prior - but the group is walking the wrong direction. Hey, wait a minute...
That's a kind of funny one, where being more accurate made it worse: if they just had entirely made-up scenery, it probably would have bothered you a lot less!
That's why you use comic sans for example mockups: Suspension of disbelief so no one nitpicks the placeholder font as wrong and we all agree this is a pretend diagram.
As for the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, I remember exactly how/when I noticed it. In high school, there was a football game at our school which was technically a trade school with all the shop classes but also with good academics. Apparently there was this supposed rivalry between our school and another nearby trade school. The reports of the event described it like there was chaos and rampant vandalism and some violence. I was there the whole time. At most there was some left-over litter on the field from people having fun. That's when I learned the value of printed words in newspapers. I stopped reading them, except as entertainment or the classifieds.
Software can also have mistaken identity. Something that appears polished, is good software because not only did they make the thing do its function, but they even had time to do all this other stuff to make it look and feel great. The other possibility is that they did that work first, and the core function works just well enough that you can't readily tell it's completely broken inside if you go slightly off the beaten path.
Part of the movie “American Gangster” was filmed in the neighborhood I lived in. When I watched it, the breaks in continuity versus actual physical reality were so distracting that I had to turn it off within the first ten minutes.
I’m sure for anyone who didn’t literally live on the block where they were filming, this is an issue they would have never ever ever noticed, but for me it felt very much like a plumber problem and was basically a showstopper in terms of my ability to enjoy the movie.
For me, the Star Trek movie with the giant, desert, canyon in the middle of Iowa was a real “WTF?” I can’t believe that only Iowans were bothered by that. If you have ever driven across Iowa, I am certain your view of corn fields was wholly uninterrupted by canyons.
In all of the shots I can find of that scene, the canyon is clearly a quarry with blocks cut out by wire saw (filmed in a quarry in Vermont). I guess the historic quarries in Iowa are filled in with water to create artificial lakes by now, but that's something that only Iowans would really know.
In the movie San Andreas, the character parachutes into AT&T Park in San Francisco, then casually strolls a few blocks and is suddenly in Chinatown without breaking a sweat. Chinatown is miles away and up a pretty steep hill.
Had the same issue with „Before Sunrise“, set in Vienna. Hawke and Delpy walk from one cut to the next in minutes, what IRL would have taken them half an hour on public transport.
This is a much larger issue than just a media related one.
There's a friend I've had for years. He's a physicist. I always ask him questions about physics. I've often referred to him as the smartest guy I know.
I have another friend, also a physicist. Less accomplished, but just as smart. Friend 2 hates Friend 1. Calls him an idiot. I generally dismissed it as arrogance or jealously.
Then, a few years ago, Friend 1 told me he'd been doing a lot of Python lately. I use Python a lot. Have for 15 years.
Over a group dinner, he was explaining a problem he was facing, specifically he was explaining how Python handles dictionaries. It was … very wrong. But he sounded like he REALLY knew what he was talking about.
It occurred to me that maybe Friend 2 was right all along. Friend 1 isn't that smart. He seems smart to me because I don't know physics. He's good at saying things that sound right. Maybe they are sometimes. But maybe they aren't sometimes, and it was that "sometimes he's wrong" thing Friend 2 picked up on, just like I picked up on the Python stuff.
Media, journalism, etc is likely the same way. 90% of the story can be right, or technically accurate, but if 1 fact is wrong, and you KNOW that fact, it's going to bother you. A lot, and will shade your opinion of everything else.
This is a really common trap that smart people fall into, thinking that just because you know everything about one field, your huge brain must be able to quickly understand just about anything.
This is an interesting example of a broader phenomenon to me. I'm not sure if there is a name for it or not but it goes something like this:
Sure, there's 6502 assembly on the screen but the fact that it's some kind of valid hardware code invokes a kind of gritty realism to me. It might break immersion but it does it in a way that then brings me back in even more so at some level.
Imagine for example that it was Visual Basic or PHP. That would be hard for me to deal with in a way that 6502 assembly isn't? Especially given the time period of the film.
I think there's a kind of "atmospheric accuracy" that some details can invoke even if they're not strictly realistic. That is, I might know something is sort of unrealistic at some level (it's unrealistic that they'd be using 6502 assembly that far in the future, with machinery like the Terminator unit) but also feel like it's realistically grounded at another (there's some actual low-level hardware code involved).
A plumber might know that a certain type of pipe wouldn't be used in a specific setting in the film, but also know and appreciate that the pipe in the film is a sort of obscure pipe that is closely related to what would be used, and itself might be used in a very similar scenario.
For decades, computers in movies, despite writing text to the screen, would make a sound like an ASR-33 electro-mechanical tty ka-chunking out each character.
A lot of what they do is social engineering, a lot of stuff references things that were actually part of the culture, and if you ignore the fancy graphics a lot of what is done is quite plausible even if not exactly as depicted.
In the "NCIS" series in most episodes at some point the IP address of a hacker or however of a wanted person is found and it is invariably a 192.168.1.x one.
I witnessed the converse of this in the recent Mario Brothers movie. There is a scene where steam piping is about to overpressure and it shows a pressure safety valve lifting. Well that pressure safety valve is an accurately drawn ASME I BPVC open-bonnet PSV with test lever.
The open bonnet is to expose the spring to air so it is kept cool and therefore has the correct force downwards on the seat. If you specify a closed-bonnet PSV (like the vast majority of PSVs) for steam service then the whole valve body can get up to the steam temperature, including the spring, and it doesn't lift until a much higher pressure than your bench test indicates.
Quite remarkable that they found someone to help them on this 5-second bit of animation who had experience with using steam in an industrial process plant or boiler, and not just a domestic plumber.
On reflection they might have just googled "steam safety valve" and copied the first image they saw, they probably didn't need an expert involved.
They hadn't insulated their piping, which would have led to condensate forming in deadlegs and causing steamhammer issues, but to be fair I don't believe the Mario Bros had designed or installed this system, and it was exploding at the time.
Reminds me of the YouTube channels that try to play what the animated piano or guitar is playing, and it’s almost always wrong. But sometimes, in surprising situations, it was animated correctly.
Unrelated kinda - does anyone remember seeing some videos of a guitarist basically PLAYING some speeches?
Like, there was a background of a speaker giving a speech or dialogue in a movie and this dude is PLAYING the speech with really weird jazz chords and they’re notated on the top of the screen.
There are services that exist to hunt down any scene details like this and at this point is pretty standard. The thinking behind it is that even though most people won’t notice or care, the ones that dk notice will care, and if it’s wrong then it could be the single defining thing that pulls them out of the story. That and the pressure of the film industry in general and bringing bad press to a film. There’s always someone who notices every mistake and then they take to twitter over and on the other end of that message is some poor art director or continuity coordinator who’s losing their shit.
Perfect example, you seem to be someone specialized in a field that would exist somewhere in the same vector map as plumbing. Not plumbing but pipes, so therefore it’s in the studios interest to ensure the specialized feel recognized as well. Had it been so obviously fake CSI Miami style, you might not feel the same about the movie, or maybe you’d not care and still enjoy the movie but you sure wouldn’t be in HN singing it’s praise. So it’s all upside for the studio to ensure you don’t get pulled out of the story or at the very least don’t talk to your friends who also live in the same vector map as you. Not saying it’s wrong as it’s cool to see effort put into the creation process but it’s definitely thought of ahead of time.
> If you specify a closed-bonnet PSV (like the vast majority of PSVs) for steam service then the whole valve body can get up to the steam temperature, including the spring, and it doesn't lift until a much higher pressure than your bench test indicates.
That was surprising. With a quick search about temperature and springs I found 3 items:
1 Spring constant descreases with temperature, not much at small increases but significant at much higher temperatures (that would make it open at lower temperatures than expected)
2 Spring gets longer at increased temperatures (that would make it open at higher temperatures)
3 Durability issues
Is effect 2 stronger than 1 at the relevant temperatures?
If there's a fixed relation between steam temperature and pressure it should be possible to design one to open at the correct pressure at the temperature that this pressur occurs at?
Yes definitely - the vendors of the PSVs will calculate for you a special compensation factor that allows you to test the PSV at normal room temperature, but still have it open at its set pressure when it is at a higher operating temperature.
They call it the "cold differential set pressure".
You can calculate your own cold differential set pressure just as a cross-check against the vendor's calculation to make sure there are no misunderstandings but ultimately you should just use the vendor's value.
In the case of steam, because it is obviously non-toxic and non-flammable you can just let it go to atmosphere in an emergency, so the best thing is just to let the spring of the PSV be exposed to atmosphere rather than some variable operating temperature.
My brother has this problem but for all films. He was a producer, so his field of expertise is film. As a result, I can enjoy a wide range of film and TV series that he finds unwatchable because "the casting is terrible" or "the lighting is all wrong".
It's terrible when you've worked in films, or on films, because you've had experience in almost every production domain and it really messes with your head when watching movies.
I started my career in CGI, I've acted, hosted TV shows, married an actor, made props, made movie vehicles, and produced a movie in Hollywood. I can literally watch nothing without critiquing the acting, casting, framing, lighting, stunts and CGI.
I really loved the sci-fi series Colony on Netflix, and I said to my brother "hey this has such a good story check it out" and within 10 minutes he was like "the lighting looks like days of our lives and the actors are all too good looking forget it"
This plumber problem is not just for movies. It's very difficult to go along with any narrative when its errors offend your competence. It's also why technically competent people tend not to prevail in narrative driven companies or institutions, which is pretty much all of them. Just watch the movie and sustain the dissonance.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 277 ms ] threadThat said, the more I learn about things like that, the less a sword seems practical in actual combat. Spears and (spiked) hammers are where it's at, with knives/dirks as backup worst case.
What really gets me so, is large battles. For some reason, it is cool to just break formation and charge a tightly packed enemy some 200 meters away. While screaming as loud as possible. Or the helmets in the last duel, hell, collored cloths over armor and insignias have exactly been developed in medival Europe to identify famous nobles and knights without seeing their faces... Plenty of occassions to show some famous actors in other scenes.
All of that is toped by the really bad writing we have in last cpuple of years. I mean TV took off with things like Breaking Bad. And the we got season 8 of Game of Thrones, to pick just one famous example...
I grew up in a small village where a significant proportion of people ride, gaps in hedgerows where a number of horses have just passed through (eg a hunt) produce a wide band of hoofprints. But, I've never seen a route mainly used by horsedrawn carts.
Most of our bridleways look like slightly wider footpaths, but they're primarily used by pedestrians or bicycles and horse traffic is still relative little.
Anyway, ...
https://www.world-archaeology.com/features/crosstown-traffic...
Editing here because based on some replies my message wasn't clear: I was talking about expertise in plumbing exhibited by one of the protagonists, not someone watching the movie obviously.
That's the point, expertise in an area can completely distract from the plot entirely. I can't even watch anything medical-related with my wife since she'll get annoyed about inaccuracies and start complaining about them. Doesn't matter how unrelated to the actual plot it is.
Of course in a lot of cases expertise is needed. However that isn't important. The important part is you have more knowledge about something than the average person.
> Simon Orrell: My first exposure to “The Plumber Problem” was sitting in a theatre with my dad in 1973 watching “Emperor of the North” and my dad leans over to whisper, “They didn’t make culvert pipe like that back in the ’30s. It was plate, not corrugated.”
The Plumber (1979)
A young couple, living in a campus apartment complex, are repeatedly harassed by an eccentric plumber, who subjects them to a series of bizarre mind games while making unnecessary repairs to their bathroom.
I think I read that The Big Bang Theory makes sure all the science is accurate. I wouldn't know.
How can writers focused on scientific accuracy create such ugly and unlikeable caricatures for their cast and embed so much anti-intellectualism in every episode?
The show isn't aimed at people they're caricaturing. And it was apparently tremendously successful, so whatever they're doing, they're doing it right.
Isaac Asimov saying is quoted for a reason...
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’
Just as terrible as the original from which it's a spin off. They actually had Jason Alexander and Ed Begley, Jr. on one of the episodes this week. I guess with enough money you can get almost anyone.
Check Vernor Vinge's programmer-archaeologist profession.
I've brought this up in conversation a few times over the years and quite often a similar experience was reported by others. Yet everyone still seemed happy to trust the accuracy of the other articles being reported.
<https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsbe...>
Same. A few years ago, I worked at a large tech company that a certain well-known news organization likes to cover. After a few articles were published relating to work I was involved in, I found myself thinking "Nope, that's totally wrong" or "Technically correct but presented in a biased way". I decided to cancel my news subscription with them because I realized that they have a certain narrative they want to present to the public, and why should I trust any of their reporting on other topics if the one I was involved in firsthand was just completely wrong?
I have to believe that's not true. When Bill Gates or Warren Buffett sit down at their breakfast table, do they get fed the same diet of pablum that I do, as an Apple News subscriber? I doubt it. They presumably pay a ton of money for access to unfiltered, unbiased global intelligence.
But I have no idea how to get the newsfeed that people like that must have access to, regardless of cost.
1: https://www.businessinsider.com/bloomberg-reporters-compensa...
If you want just the facts so, try Reuters or AP, basically the source of the majority of news stroies we are fed by media (the exception being in-house investigated stories, but those are rarer by the day and flanked by so much filler articles that it is hard to filter the facts out). Also, professional inteligence organizations can be spectatularly wrong as well. Sometimes a lone, local jourbalist on the ground witj working internet for soke background research has it better. Local, because some random person from far away will lack the necessary backgroing and context to deliver more than some isolated, uninformed, highly objective opinion.
Whatever. Read the article. It contains direct quotes.
(Read the quote from the reporter carefully: the market isn't what's being manipulated. The news is... and by extension, the reader. The reader is who does the market-moving.)
What is your interest in carrying water for a company whose representatives admit to market-harming journalism practices? More important, what does such a company have to do with my expressed wish for an unbiased news source?
Musk is not an apparent functional illiterate like Trump, but he unfortunately has a long history of choosing poor information sources and reacting accordingly. (The "pedo guy" case comes to mind.) He cares less about accurate news than I do, that much is safe to say. So I doubt he takes advantage of whatever higher-quality sources might be available to him. Not when the latest missive from Catturd69 is free.
So I think that Gell-Mann Amnesia, while amusing, is overblown.
This isn't zero but it's not very common either. Usually, the domain in question is sufficiently subtle that you can't make a rigorous prediction from an untrustworthy media presentation at all; thus, the media accounts are effectively unfalsifiable (unless you go out and seek personal experience).
Is it really a big deal then? Experts really care about the details so they will notice inaccuracies, but does that mean that they really matter to the point that the entire notion of journalism and media itself should be discredited?
The attackers on the US compound in Benghazi were regular folks upset about the film "Innocence of Muslims". (They were organized Islamist militants, including groups affiliated with Al-Qaeda.)
"Hands up, don't shoot!" (There's no evidence Michael Brown ever said that.)
Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation. (The contents have been repeatedly authenticated.)
Those are four massively popular lies that the media told over 20 years, of which you should be aware. I regularly see media outlets peddle falsehoods that they have been told are false, but I don't know what your specific knowledge is.
> So I think that Gell-Mann Amnesia, while amusing, is overblown.
I think you're proving it true right now.
Honestly, probably the worst thing I can recall is the first season of The Walking Dead when Rick hides inside of a tank turret. I was a tank commander back in my time. Do television writers really think there is that much space inside the turret?
I think that's why the author chose plumbers instead of rocket surgeons.
That's a sop to the actors who don't want to have their hair cut that way.
You'll see the same thing in historical dramas. The hairstyles betray the time when they were filmed.
And Star Trek had 1960's hairstyles and miniskirts.
For that you have also the UFO/SHADO series:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO_(British_TV_series)
But the 2nd law of thermodynamics requires that any energy harvested would be, by definition, less than the energy of the food required to sustain their bodies.
Therefore the plot makes no sense, because they should just shovel the food directly into the computer and skip the humans.
It's possible that the machines were advanced at some things but something that human bodies produced was something they couldn't directly synthesize.
Just like it would make no sense to explain the purpose of animal agriculture in human society as “extracting the animals’ energy”. Like you said, it’s the different form of energy (plus nutrients) that they can provide, not energy simpliciter.
I don't think anything substantive in the films is inconsistent with it (and the behavior of the agents throughout the films is suggestive of it), just the in-character exposition.
Which, to get really meta, you can explain as the filmmakers incorporating the inability of audiences to grasp, and projecting it into the film as an inability of the “free” humans to do so, so that (as part of the system of control it is established that Zion is) instead they were fed the “battery” story.
> Which, to get really meta, you can explain as the filmmakers incorporating the inability of audiences to grasp, and projecting it into the film as an inability of the “free” humans to do so, so that (as part of the system of control it is established that Zion is) instead they were fed the “battery” story.
Yeah and the original was already meta being a postmodern critique of society so it's a "yo dawg I heard you like meta..."
(And brain as thumb drive and braismns as networked processing units are maybe not equivalently difficult concepts for audiences.)
During and before the war, the machines were mostly solar-powered, so blocking out the sky was a last-ditch effort by humans to stop the machines that almost worked. But the machines developed a new form of fusion that used human bio-electricity as some sort of activation or catalyst. They weren't being used as energy directly.
Like, what else about a person is of any use to machines with that kind of power?
Every human is a prisoner of war, in the finest possible cell.
The machines are definitively - and canonically! - not.
They're effectively in a giant prison; within the prison, they're free to do whatever they want. They just can't leave.
Pretty much anything to do with physics, especially in sci-fi/space stories. Now I see everything as a typical human emotional drama with a science/space backdrop. Actual sci-fi where the plot directly ties into it is rare, and good ones rarer. It was actually better when sci-fi was niche and what there was, was trying to be good.
Even worse for me these days than this plumbers effect is bad acting. Once my mind gets into the reality of actors doing a job, getting this filmed, and played for me, it's hard to get back into the storyline even if it might be great, like trying to return to a dream when fully woken.
Or, we eat vegetables even though the energy in them is less than all the solar energy that falls on them.
But of course the calories in grass and sunlight aren't accessible to us. It's not impossible to imagine some parallel situation where human biology - perhaps genetically modified - is useful to transform some source of energy into a more usable form.
> MORPHEUS: Where did you hear about the laws of thermodynamics, Neo?
> (Pause.)
> NEO: ...in the Matrix.
> MORPHEUS: The machines tell elegant lies.
Paraphrased from https://hpmor.com/chapter/64
I think the fantasy city problem is at its worst in 3D video games, where you visit some impressive capital city, massive walls, towers...and enough housing for about a hundred people.
Anyway, with advancements in technology I'm sure we'll see proper cities to scale. It may not all be accessible though.
That and whichever druid spell makes the nearby farmland more fertile
I'd expect shop owners to have collectively figured out ways to deal with bards. Banks how to deal with invisibility, etc.
As a programmer, "Live Free or Die Hard", "Independence Day", and "Swordfish" are memorable examples of this sort of cinematic stupidity
Aside: Watched that movie twenty-two years ago and am still obviously triggered by it!
Generally they show extreme capabilities, similar to what machine learning can do now(Except it's implied that a lone genius coded it, rather that it being a trained model), in a world of highly flexible IoT type devices that can be repurposed to do anything via a pretty easy GUI.
I take it as a challenge. Using an app I wrote should feel like being on SeaQuest DSV. If there's a broken connector, can I make a software workaround? If I'm buying a product, what's the state of the art for that area?
Except hacking. Hacking scenes are just comedy.
Years ago, I used to be critical when it came to that sort of thing, then I realized that I was being critical of something with a clear purpose that's useful. And, that this was just a distraction from the often much more appalling flaws in mass media that can actually have real-world harms. I.e., flaws that give people the wrong idea about how things actually work in ways that can negatively impact their behavior.
"Independence Day" provides some exemplars of that, certainly. It is completely outclassed, however, by: https://www.salon.com/2023/02/05/the-core-science-entertainm...
These days, I see something like two axes, when it comes to flaws in movies (/ productions of any kind). One axis relates to "style" / "taste". For example, some people dislike works of the author Charles Dickens because he tends to spend a lot of time describing settings, preferring the works of someone like Shakespeare, who's typically much more "action-oriented". The other axis relates to factual / logical / structural issues, the worst in my estimation these days being in the "factual" part of this sort of "dimensionally reduced" axis (i.e., you could of course have 3 or more independent axes for what I've written).
I may not have much interest in something that has a style I'm not a fan of, but I only have a more realized reaction (something like negative, and I care to some degree) when the flaws are on that second axis.
She should try it - heh, save the annoyance for something "truly worthy" of it. :)
Medical shows have ventilators set up wrong, chest x-rays hung up backwards (L on R) and piss poor representations of CPR chest compressions. The main actor can often operate all sorts of specialist equipment, perform surgery and analyse results of complex tests. It’s almost universal.
Like "singing teacher reacts to <someone better at singing than they or any of their students will ever be>" kinda thing.
Wired and Vanity have some good videos in the vein of "Forensic scientist reacts to CSI" and etc. GameSpot has a good one reacting to firearms in various video games. There's too many medical ones to mention. I don't think I've found any entertaining coding related ones yet.
The job of a voice coach is to teach you to be a better singer, not to be better than you at singing.
Comment thread about digital audio/audio software: the comments are just clearly full of people who don't really know much about what they are writing about.
Anything else: wow, HN commenters are so knowledgeable and good at explaining stuff!
I think the main issue with the HN crowd, present company included, is that because they're good at learning they think they can quickly grasp the essentials for anything new.
Which is why there's like a revolving door of subjects that you suddenly get a lot of armchair experts about, going from currencies and investment banking to international conflict and politics, a short detour to amateur submarines, etc.
What bothers me immensely more is the same but with human choices, motivations and character. There's no reason to try to understand characters as they increasingly make the most superficial or arbitrary decisions, pulled along by plot necessities rather than driving the story. The humans in recent movies feel like window dressing or set design.
"...oh you mean I could also just... give everyone enough food with a snap of the finger?"
A perennial problem in writing villains is characterizing them as insane and stupid (to explain why they do evil) but then in order to present a real threat to the hero they execute those evil and stupid plans with patience and intelligence.
Thanos has an army! An entire naval fleet assembled from centuries of constant war. He's a space Napoleon. That required skill, intelligence and considerable effort, as several characters tell us. And then after achieving the goal he spent so many years thinking about, he makes a dumb mistake, apparently without realizing it?
Same thing with the Joker in The Dark Knight (2008). Other characters say he's crazy. He himself says he's "just a dog chasing a car" with no plan or goals beyond causing chaos. Yet he is always executing complex plans which require precise timing? Not the behavior of a raving madman.
It's easier for me to believe in superpowers than to believe in people that have the psychological complexity of houseplants.
I enjoyed Unbreakable, Chronicle, Birdman, Fast Color, Freaks, etc.
You must not get out much then?
> In Speed 2, a plot point involves a laden oil tanker about to collide explosively. My wife, native to a major oil port city, couldn’t follow the plot because she could tell the tanker was empty just by looking at it, so she didn’t understand why everyone was saying it would explode.
Wait a minute. Full oil tanks don't explode, but empty oil tanks full of hydrocarbon vapor do.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Lee_Whorf#Career_in_f...
(This was a plot point in the novel "The Devil's Alternative" which I read probably 40 years ago but my brain remembers random things :-)
Details: https://www.marineinsight.com/marine-safety/protection-again...
https://www.offshore-energy.biz/pablo-tanker-explosion-expos...
(Googling "oil tanker explosion" produces quite a few similar events)
When I watched it at the cinema (in Athens) back in the day, apparently there was one more Spartan in the venue and we both stood up and shouted (using different words) something to the effect of: hey morons, you are going the wrong way, you should be marchin North!!
> the spartans start gyrating
Software can also have mistaken identity. Something that appears polished, is good software because not only did they make the thing do its function, but they even had time to do all this other stuff to make it look and feel great. The other possibility is that they did that work first, and the core function works just well enough that you can't readily tell it's completely broken inside if you go slightly off the beaten path.
I’m sure for anyone who didn’t literally live on the block where they were filming, this is an issue they would have never ever ever noticed, but for me it felt very much like a plumber problem and was basically a showstopper in terms of my ability to enjoy the movie.
There's a friend I've had for years. He's a physicist. I always ask him questions about physics. I've often referred to him as the smartest guy I know.
I have another friend, also a physicist. Less accomplished, but just as smart. Friend 2 hates Friend 1. Calls him an idiot. I generally dismissed it as arrogance or jealously.
Then, a few years ago, Friend 1 told me he'd been doing a lot of Python lately. I use Python a lot. Have for 15 years.
Over a group dinner, he was explaining a problem he was facing, specifically he was explaining how Python handles dictionaries. It was … very wrong. But he sounded like he REALLY knew what he was talking about.
It occurred to me that maybe Friend 2 was right all along. Friend 1 isn't that smart. He seems smart to me because I don't know physics. He's good at saying things that sound right. Maybe they are sometimes. But maybe they aren't sometimes, and it was that "sometimes he's wrong" thing Friend 2 picked up on, just like I picked up on the Python stuff.
Media, journalism, etc is likely the same way. 90% of the story can be right, or technically accurate, but if 1 fact is wrong, and you KNOW that fact, it's going to bother you. A lot, and will shade your opinion of everything else.
or... something.
Large language models.
hacker opens an excel spreadsheet and types in a bunch of gibberish
"I'm in the mainframe."
https://www.pagetable.com/?p=64
Sure, there's 6502 assembly on the screen but the fact that it's some kind of valid hardware code invokes a kind of gritty realism to me. It might break immersion but it does it in a way that then brings me back in even more so at some level.
Imagine for example that it was Visual Basic or PHP. That would be hard for me to deal with in a way that 6502 assembly isn't? Especially given the time period of the film.
I think there's a kind of "atmospheric accuracy" that some details can invoke even if they're not strictly realistic. That is, I might know something is sort of unrealistic at some level (it's unrealistic that they'd be using 6502 assembly that far in the future, with machinery like the Terminator unit) but also feel like it's realistically grounded at another (there's some actual low-level hardware code involved).
A plumber might know that a certain type of pipe wouldn't be used in a specific setting in the film, but also know and appreciate that the pipe in the film is a sort of obscure pipe that is closely related to what would be used, and itself might be used in a very similar scenario.
A lot of what they do is social engineering, a lot of stuff references things that were actually part of the culture, and if you ignore the fancy graphics a lot of what is done is quite plausible even if not exactly as depicted.
Why, here it is!
https://slashdot.org/story/35036
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PxTAn4g20U
this looks plausible enough.
Also they show earlier on at Area 51 our limited, but real, ability to control via software the alien devices.
The open bonnet is to expose the spring to air so it is kept cool and therefore has the correct force downwards on the seat. If you specify a closed-bonnet PSV (like the vast majority of PSVs) for steam service then the whole valve body can get up to the steam temperature, including the spring, and it doesn't lift until a much higher pressure than your bench test indicates.
Quite remarkable that they found someone to help them on this 5-second bit of animation who had experience with using steam in an industrial process plant or boiler, and not just a domestic plumber.
Probably a short enough list of depictions - does IMDb list them?
They hadn't insulated their piping, which would have led to condensate forming in deadlegs and causing steamhammer issues, but to be fair I don't believe the Mario Bros had designed or installed this system, and it was exploding at the time.
("Musta been a non-union job." - Super Mario Bros., 1993, looking at some pipework).
Unrelated kinda - does anyone remember seeing some videos of a guitarist basically PLAYING some speeches?
Like, there was a background of a speaker giving a speech or dialogue in a movie and this dude is PLAYING the speech with really weird jazz chords and they’re notated on the top of the screen.
Very weird and specific I know LOL
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3GY86ziPu8UJjggF4AxMKvRl...
I remember something similar for train emojis, but I couldn't find it from a quick search
https://youtu.be/qn0jtZwpe8A
Perfect example, you seem to be someone specialized in a field that would exist somewhere in the same vector map as plumbing. Not plumbing but pipes, so therefore it’s in the studios interest to ensure the specialized feel recognized as well. Had it been so obviously fake CSI Miami style, you might not feel the same about the movie, or maybe you’d not care and still enjoy the movie but you sure wouldn’t be in HN singing it’s praise. So it’s all upside for the studio to ensure you don’t get pulled out of the story or at the very least don’t talk to your friends who also live in the same vector map as you. Not saying it’s wrong as it’s cool to see effort put into the creation process but it’s definitely thought of ahead of time.
That was surprising. With a quick search about temperature and springs I found 3 items:
1 Spring constant descreases with temperature, not much at small increases but significant at much higher temperatures (that would make it open at lower temperatures than expected)
2 Spring gets longer at increased temperatures (that would make it open at higher temperatures)
3 Durability issues
Is effect 2 stronger than 1 at the relevant temperatures?
If there's a fixed relation between steam temperature and pressure it should be possible to design one to open at the correct pressure at the temperature that this pressur occurs at?
They call it the "cold differential set pressure".
You can calculate your own cold differential set pressure just as a cross-check against the vendor's calculation to make sure there are no misunderstandings but ultimately you should just use the vendor's value.
In the case of steam, because it is obviously non-toxic and non-flammable you can just let it go to atmosphere in an emergency, so the best thing is just to let the spring of the PSV be exposed to atmosphere rather than some variable operating temperature.
I started my career in CGI, I've acted, hosted TV shows, married an actor, made props, made movie vehicles, and produced a movie in Hollywood. I can literally watch nothing without critiquing the acting, casting, framing, lighting, stunts and CGI.
I guess the music is cool, though.
Now I instead say, "well, that's just bad/terrible writing."