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)
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, amine 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.
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.)
A movie that came out in 2009 called 2012 portrays the end of the world in a series of cataclysmic events that spawn from many factors. How "real" is this.... well, on another show called "Conspiracy Theory" also profiled the 2012 disaster. This all stems from the Mayan calender, Nostradamus, and some other predictions that people are taking as certain ending of days. If you ask me this is nothing more than another Y2K being blown way out of proportion. Below are 2 clips, one is the 2012 movie and the other is the conspiracy theory show.
The conspiracy theory show is part 1 of 6 on youtube so if you want to see the entire thing just search for it. In the show, they show contractors that are selling "condos" built in old missile silos that will supposedly house the occupants from a numerous amounts of dangers for an extended time. Scientifically this is somewhat possible to design but is in the hypothetical realm as far as we have never tried many of the methods they discuss. the other thing is that each condo is selling for a cool 50 million a piece which excludes many in the world. This is one reason it is on a conspiracy show, the fact that they are catering to the rich and famous and not humanity is a certain question that no one is willing to answer. Personally this is yet another reason to me that this is another Y2K and a quick way for many to get rich. Hollywood in this case personifies the scare tactic that many take as science and is just crap overall.
So many people have seen the movieI Robot that came out in 2004. It is based on the thought that A.I. has become a thing that humans utilize as commonly as cell phones. Pretty far off right.?? Maybe not. Recently, IBM released what they call Watson. Watson was released this year to compete on jeopardy. Watson, while being a computer performed almost without flaw when compared to tries of the past. The last "super computer" to do something like this to my knowledge is the computer that defeated the chess champion of the world which at the time was impressive however can not compare to Watson. recently, Nova profiled the Watson story:
In this story they show how the concept at first was over looked and the challenge was accepted by IBM engineers. Watson competed on jeopardy and won against the two most successful people ever to be on the show. Not just did Watson win, he landslid-ed them. The most impressive part to me about this is that Watson was not connected to the internet like many suspect, he was solely contained.
Are we at the point of the I Robot movie, not quit but Watson is one step closer and has now revolutionized the thought and process of how to pursue A.I. and where the bar can now be reset.
On the same show that Stan Lee does on super humans, there is yet another episode that catches the eyes of many. One of Stan Lee's characters,Bullseyeis is able to use almost any object as a lethal projectile, be it weapons like shuriken and sai or seemingly harmless objects like playing cards and pencils. He is one of Daredevil's chief foes and serves as an antithesis to the hero by showing what one might become when blessed with keener abilities than most. His aim is uncanny, at a nearly preternatural level. This is yet again an example of something most people say this can't or doesn't happen.
When you think about what it takes to pull a weapon, aim using your eyes, hands and mind, pull the trigger and put the gun back. Scientifically, the video mentions that Bob Munden (fastest gun in the world) can pull, draw, and fire than a human can blink which is 3/10th of a second to blink. Pretty fast! Also in the video Bob Munden does two shots in a split second giving it the sound of one shot. Another fascinating part of this is how he aims. This in my mind can be equated to that of a computer. Bob's eyes and hands some how work together like a targeting system programmed with electronics. The helmet systems in helicopters and other equipment have a site that is controlled with the eye and then aims the gun on the piece of equipment. Bob's brain and hands work together to accomplish this making him literally the fastest gun in the world. For a good laugh, watch the video and see Bob get measured with an accelerometer. they have to use an accelerometer because the human eye cannot see this occur. This also makes Bob "super human" with the speeds he hits and with the accuracy. A "Modern Bullseye" if you will
On a show I have been watching recently by Stan Lee who is famous for comics such as X-Men, Daredevil, and much more has a show called Stan Lee's Super Humans. This show is about real people who posses "super" human abilities. This is one I found particularly interesting on echo location.Echo Location is the ability animals such as bats and dolphins use to see and communicate. Stan Lee has set out on this quest to find people with abilities that are considered super human and relate to his comic characters. For those who don't know, Stan Lee's character Daredevil is a man who is blind but uses sensor sight or echo location to see his surroundings. Many say that this is not possible, or it is fiction and made up and rightfully so when one considers what it takes to see. From his movie many thought this is cool but this is fiction for daredevil and it is just part of his super human ability. Well, there is proof on several shows, Stan Lee's included.
This is a clip from a different show showing how someone is really using echo location. pretty fascinating when you consider that the human eye is made up of three coats, enclosing three transparent structures. The outermost layer is composed of the cornea and sclera. The middle layer consists of the choroid, ciliary body, and iris. The innermost is the retina, which gets its circulation from the vessels of the choroid as well as the retinal vessels, which can be seen in an ophthalmoscope. Within these coats are the aqueous humor, the vitreous body, and the flexible lens. The aqueous humor is a clear fluid that is contained in two areas: the anterior chamber between the cornea and the iris and exposed area of the lens; and the posterior chamber, behind the iris and the rest. The lens is suspended to the ciliary body by the suspensory ligament (Zonule of Zinn), made up of fine transparent fibers. The vitreous body is a clear jelly that is much larger than the aqueous humor, and is bordered by the sclera, zonule, and lens. They are connected via the pupil.[2]
he retina has a static contrast ratio of around 100:1 (about 6½ f-stops). As soon as the eye moves (saccades) it re-adjusts its exposure both chemically and geometrically by adjusting the iris which regulates the size of the pupil. Initial dark adaptation takes place in approximately four seconds of profound, uninterrupted darkness; full adaptation through adjustments in retinal chemistry (the Purkinje effect) are mostly complete in thirty minutes. Hence, a dynamic contrast ratio of about 1,000,000:1 (about 20 f-stops) is possible.[3] The process is nonlinear and multifaceted, so an interruption by light merely starts the adaptation process over again. Full adaptation is dependent on good blood flow; thus dark adaptation may be hampered by poor circulation, and vasoconstrictors like alcohol or tobacco. The eye includes a lens not dissimilar to lenses found in optical instruments such as cameras and the same principles can be applied. The pupil of the human eye is its aperture; the iris is the diaphragm that serves as the aperture stop. Refraction in the cornea causes the effective aperture (the entrance pupil) to differ slightly from the physical pupil diameter. The entrance pupil is typically about 4 mm in diameter, although it can range from 2 mm (f/8.3) in a brightly lit place to 8 mm (f/2.1) in the dark. The latter value decreases slowly with age, older people's eyes sometimes dilate to not more than 5-6mm. (compliments of wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_eye). So the movies in this case seem unlikely but it is an actual possibility for humans to use echo location.
