Snakes

Last week I was watching a movie with some friends called snakes on a plane. In my opinion not such a great movie but kinda funny. The premise is that a high powered criminal has put exotic snakes on a place, laced flowers with pheromones (snake stank) to excite the snakes and make them aggressive. So for any that don't know, pheromones make animals aggressive because it it what is release when a female is in heat causing the male to seek it out for mating purposes. In this response things like snakes become aggressive as well. Now the premise behind this is that the snakes get out and go all over the plane and bit most of the people etc.. Stuff you all can figure out for a movie. The problem comes in on several levels. First of many is the snakes they choose. They are almost all exotic snakes which is fine however snakes hibernate when temperatures get cold or relatively cold because they are cold blooded. Exotic snakes especially. The belly of a plane while pressurized remains cold at elevations of 30,000 ft which would cause the snakes to bed down. Next the speed at which some move. There is a scene where an  anaconda is moving through the plane and falls due to weight, the passengers throw a dog to keep it away all sounds plausible but the speed at which it moves is way to fast, anacondas move slow due tot he weight association and after attacking the dog and eating it, it still attacks a man and eats him very fast. This si another problem because anacondas eat slow due to swallowing the prey whole it takes several hours, sometimes even days depending on size. The last thing i want to bring up is the landing. Upon landing, the FBI has employed the help of an expert in snakes and there anti venoms. This is fine except they manage within a short time to identify and acquire all the anti venom needed to treat the survivors on the plane. They do this by finding the guy who put the order together and taking his anti venom. The problem is the quantity. In the movie they mention that for most snakes the U.S. does not even carry the anti venom and to think that one guy has stored enough to treat all the potential victims that may have been bitten is just absurd.

There are several more things that I will leave up to you to find and inquire about but these should get yall started.

Explosions or something like it.

Another thing that is in many movies and is wrong but enjoyable to watch is explosions in space. Many of us know that this is false but we still constantly see it in many movies. In my senior design class my group and I have worked on a project that deals with explosions. Explosions are different than deflagration and different than combustion. the main difference is the rate in which they occur, meaning the time and speed at which they occur.
An explosion is a rapid increase in volume and a release of energy in an extreme manner
Deflagration is a combustion at a subsonic level meaning slower than the speed of sound
Combustion is slower than both and deals with burning in general
technically, deflagration and combustion are in the same category and deflagration is faster or (high/ fast combustion) but there is a difference.

With that said, all these have a key similarity which is they need fuel. In space the presence of oxygen as fuel is non existent meaning when the ship or whatever blows up, you wouldnt see the grand "light show" that we call and explosion occur. Now I understand that there could be oxygen or fuel present by the bomb or on the ship etc.. however it would not in most cases be enough to trigger the huge flames and what not that is seen in the movies, that part of the explosion requires much more fuel to continue a burn and in space it is just not very realistic.

Lasers

Staying on the topic of of Sci Fi movis, there is another topic that is funny. Slow moving Lasers. Now I am no laser expert but that fact they they are slow moving is the fallacy here. Lasers move at the speed of light and in many movies, (star wars, independence day etc) they show the laser moving slow moving and visible. Now in some cases they could be visible I suppose (once again not an expert) but in space where there is no air particles for the laser to reflect off of, you wouldn't see the light show that you do in the movies. Now I will be the first to admit that it made the movie much more enjoyable to watch with the lasers being shown however the science behind it is not sound and just wouldn't make sense.

A little background, lasers are devices that emit light through optical amplification.
wikipedia has what seems like a good article discussing the science of lasers with some background that can be found at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasers

Planets....

I came across an interesting article this week that explores my topic well and there is a post that I really enjoyed.
It deals with star wars which as yall know is a favorite of mine. It talks about how all the planets in the movie are not only "simple" by nature but they all have different weather climates. For instance there is a Forrest planet, an ice planet, a desert planet etc... Also the simple comes in for all the planets supporting all different life forms because apparently they all breath oxygen. The fact is that unless they were all like earth with the atmospheric structure etc it would not support all life without compensation for breathing. Another is the climate it is pretty weird that each planet is different in climate. It the previous is true that the atmosphere is similar to earths, we all know that different climate regions occur so it is hard to make the leap that each planet (or moon) would be only one climate as far as forrest or ice or desert. Just some thoughts on an interesting post I read.

Video Post

Video Post - This is a video post explaining one of the posts from my blog along with watching a short clip of the movie clip that was chosen.

Choosing the right car

So again with the gold but in reality a lot of films use gold because of its worth. In the movie the italian job, they again are stealing gold. to transport the gold, they outfit mini coopers by using weights to simulate the weight of the gold and then make the modifications to the suspension, chasis etc.. to be able to handle and manuver while still keeping good horsepower. This ll is plausable from a standpoint of being able to make the necessary modifications to the select components. The problem in this example is that the weight either the gold or the steel plates would not be supported by the frame. Many cars today are made with a unibody design. this design is widely used but is much weaker in design than a straight frame which today is used primarily in industrial equipment or in some trucks. the flaw in the unibody design is that under those weight conditions, the unibody design would crimp and fracture due to design.

The unibody design is can be best described by the carfax site. The link is http://www.carfax.com/car_buying/car_frames.cfx.

Basiclly the detailed information is in the link but for an overall assesment, The unibody design is a cast uniform frame that is a mold. This creates weak spots in the design when loading because you take away the potentially stress releasing sites that comes from assembling the body in several pieces.

How much do you think you have??

I was watching an old movie the other day that many of yall know, Die Hard with a Vengence. The premise of this movie if you havent seen it is terrorists come and rob the federal reserve in New York by a series of games with the police. Good movie with some science flaws. The one I am going to address in this post deals with gold. They steal roughly 140 billion dollars of gold from the federal reserve by loading it into dump trucks and simply driving it out if the city to be loaded on a boat and home free, sounds plausable. There is one scence where they say that in each dump truck there is 13 billion dollars of gold per dump truck. Now we all know that dump trucks are made to haul large loads. the average city dump truck you see on a day to day basis will haul somewhere in the neighborhood of 26 metric tons. As many of my posts before have shown, gold weights much more than most people think. So here i am gong to lay out some basics and show the calculations so that anyone can follow and so we are all on the same page.

• Metric ton = 2,204.6 Lbs (Standard Ton = 2,000 Lbs.)
• Standard Dump Truck = 57,319.6 Lbs, 26 tons ( Standard = 52,000 Lbs, 26 tons)
• Troy Ounce of Gold = 31.1035 grams
• Troy Lb of Gold = 373.26 grams/Lb
• Todays current gold rate is about $1400 dollars per troy ounce of gold

Using these calculations above, we can calculate that the weight per each dump truck is about equal to:

• $1,400/31.1035 = 45.01 $/g
• In this case they said they had 13 billion per truck to equal 13,000,000,000/45.01 = 2.8E8 grams
• 2.8E8/1E6 = 288

This number means that each truck would be hauling 288 metric tons ( 634,924.8 Lbs) which by previous statement of standard dump truck is way too high. To put it in perspective, a mine hauler (industiral mine dump truck) hauls in the ballpark of these loads.

To conclude, it just is not possible for a standard dump truck to haul 13 billion dollars worht of gold in one load by todays gold prices, the movie was made in 1995 when the price of gold was roughly $385 which means this number would be even larger and even more outside the realm of possible.

Weight...What????

So many of us have heard the old joke what weights more a pound of feathers or a pound of something??? Now there are commercials that are addvertizing things like whats heavier, a lb of gold or a lb of feathers?. Most people right off the bat answer this thinking a pound s a pound, which seems like a very plausable answer I mean 1 pound should be equal to 1 pound makes sense. In reality for most things this is a correct statement, but in the case of precious metals, this is in fact a false statement. When talking about precious metals, a different weighing scale is used. The standard Avoirdupois scale is used when weighing standard things like feathers, tables, chairs etc.... This is a system based off 16 oz. or 454.6 grams. When dealing with precious metals the Troy scale is used which is based off of 12 oz. or 373.24 grams. This is a common misnomer when dealing with weght. In this context 1 Avoirdupois pound is equal to 1.21 Troy pounds. Moral of the story I guess is the next time someone asks a what weights more question try not to be to hasty to answer because the 1 pound equals 1 pound answer may just be wrong (even though its on T.V.)