Seems that bad movie science is something we just have to live with. It's as if the writers spent thousands of hours, over years and years, learning to write instead of becoming scientists.

We can't forget the contributions of novelists, comic book writers, and videogame creators, but the film writers are the most visible ones.

A few of my favorites:

• Acid will dissolve solid objects: Not usually, no. Most acids are relatively weak and get used up as they react. There are “superacids” that do behave somewhat like movie acids, but they're so dangerous that we can't actually store them in anything except Teflon. And even superacids don't eat through metal as fast as movie acid (though fluoroantimonic acid comes close). Of course, if you're talking about eating through sponge or a person, that's another matter.
• Volcanoes can erupt at a moment's notice: Well, sure, if by “a moment's notice” you mean a matter of months. Scientists are getting pretty good at predicting eruptions—not to the point of pinning it down to a specific day or time, but they can usually give you a heads up that something is likely to happen weeks or months ahead. Also, a volcano definitely WON'T be forming in Los Angeles any time soon.
• Magic cures: Vaccines generally take years to develop. One guy certainly can't cook one up in a few hours.
• Diamond swords: Diamond may be the hardest naturally occurring material on Earth (other than Lonsdaleite, which is basically a diamond variant), but this does NOT mean that diamond would make a good material for a sword. While it is hard, diamond is also incredibly brittle and would probably break the first time you hit anything with it.
• Literally anything involving computer hackers: Hollywood hasn't the foggiest idea how computers work, far as I can tell.
• Movie fires are all smokeless: In real life, fires in an enclosed space produce so much smoke that you can't see a thing. Even a small fire in an oven will blind you completely with the smoke. Trust me on that one.
• Planets that only have one climate: Wouldn't actually work in real life. A planet with an atmosphere will always have different climates. There's an enormous list of reasons why, ranging from the obvious (temperature variations by latitude) to the obscure (lack of sufficient oxygen production in certain biomes, like deserts, to maintain a breathable atmosphere).
• Lasers that move at visible speeds: Nope. Just nope.

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Quotable

Oh, Yard Ramp Guy...are you star struck?

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

— from “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”

Thinking 'bout making a rich sandwich

Have you ever made food from scratch? If you said yes, you're probably thinking of cooking bread from flour and yeast and so on.

You probably aren't thinking of growing the wheat, harvesting it, milling it, and all that jazz. One guy in Minnesota, however, decided to actually cook a chicken sandwich from scratch. It took him six months and cost him $1,500.

Little bit ridiculous, right? We’ve evolved our modern society toward specialization in order to reduce the workload on people and prevent us from having to do such outrageous things.

The most interesting aspect of this is, of course, the salt: the guy from Minnesota had to fly to the West Coast to harvest his salt. If he wanted to be a purist, he would have needed to either walk all the way to the ocean or build his own airplane from scratch.

Obviously, that’s too much work for a YouTube video.

If he wanted to be even more of a purist, he would have needed to build all his tools himself. No stove; rather, an open fire. And no metal pot; he would have needed to fashion his own cookware instead. You can see how quick the absurdity things would’ve gotten.

So where am I going with all this?

I made me a sandwich…for $3.45

Believe it or not, I wanted to talk about survivalists. The typical survivalist strategy is to master a certain number of survival skills and to accumulate massive amounts of resources for survival purposes.

The missing ingredients? Almost everything, really. Our society has accumulated unbelievably huge quantities of knowledge dedicated toward merely keeping civilization running, mostly in the form of working professionals.

If someone were to make all of society's doctors disappear, we wouldn't be able to just set a bunch of people to the books and expect them to become doctors in a decade or so. Civilization reconstruction is a problem of a magnitude more significant than assembling a sandwich from scratch.

Any society emerging from survivalists in the wake of the collapse of civilization is going to be fairly primitive, by necessity.

And just to reassure Maggie and the kids and my gaggle of grandkids: I'm not investing in survivalist gear. Modern civilization is pretty durable. Gambling on it failing seems like way too much of a sucker bet to me.

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Quotable

Hey, Yard Ramp Guy: you might want to put one of your loading docks in a safe bunker, just in case…

“The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.”

— Aristotle

Fun with numbers & patterns

How did the statistician die on his camping trip? He tried fording a river that was three feet deep on average.

I suspect most of us know that statistics can be misleading, but they're still one of the most important tools we have for understanding the world around us. Just ask any baseball fan. Or meteorologist. Or political analyst. (Actually, maybe not political analysts. Best to just slowly back away and not make eye contact with them.)

One of the biggest problems with statistical data actually comes from one of our greatest strengths: our pattern recognition ability. No computer in the world comes close to our ability to spot patterns, but sometimes that very ability backfires on us.

We often start looking for patterns in the data that aren't actually there. An absurd example is the correlation between pirates and global warming—as the number of pirates goes down, global temperatures go up. Sports superstitions are another good example: my favorite team won when I wore my lucky hat, so they'll lose if I don't wear it while they're playing.

Even if you entirely avoid the false pattern recognition pitfall, you still have a lot to consider.

McCoy: Searching for Patterns

Humans also tend to remember the negative more often than not: when the weatherman's wrong, you remember that better than all the (many more) times he’s been right. Commercial weather channels often artificially inflate low chances of rain—say, from 5-10% up to 20%—so that if it doesn't rain it seems like a nice bonus. And if it does rain, well, 20% isn't nearly as low risk as 5%. We like it when errors fall in our favor.

So you're keeping your eyes open for suspect statistics. Great. Now you just have to keep on the lookout for the possibility that the people presenting the statistics are deliberately misleading you. Assuming they haven't just made up the data entirely (less common than you'd expect, since it's so easy to mislead with real data), you've still got to worry about them changing the scale of one of the axes of a graph, switching the axis themselves, or using one of a thousand different tricks within the math behind the data.

A quick example of another trick people can play with data: I recently saw a chart that was supposed to show Victorian England as a safer place to live than the modern day by comparing crimes per capita.

The problem with that? Society's definition of a crime. Crimes that we legislate against and prosecute tend to change over time. We currently have more laws today than at any other point in our history, so it's not surprising that we have more criminal charges per capita. In my example, what historians and criminologists actually use for comparison is murders per capita, because that's always a crime. By that metric, we're a lot safer than Victorian England. (Among other things, muggers today are less fond of garroting their victims.)

It's easy to play tricks like this—using categories of data that seem comparable but really aren't.

How can you look out for statistical shenanigans, if they're so easy to pull off? First, and easiest, try to stick with reliable, well known publications with solid reputations. (Of course, if you're far to one side or the other on the political spectrum, you're probably convinced they're a tool of the other side.)

Second, and much more difficult: Educate yourself. Learn to read data in a discerning matter and familiarize yourself with the subject matter. A good book to start with is Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise.

Of course, you could just look for data and news sources that agree with what you already think. Confirmation bias is fun!

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I kid a lot with my pal Jeff at The Yard Ramp Guy. And now, also this: I'm seriously proud of my friends and colleagues at that fine company on their receiving the Blue Star award from Bluff Manufacturing, which has recognized them as a Gold Dealer of Excellence. Absolutely fitting, and absolutely right.

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Quotable

Okay, enough mush. Dear Yard Ramp Guy, statistically I stay quotable each week more than you (but who’s counting?).

“There are lies, damned lies, and statistics."

— Mark Twain

Some science results in vital, society-altering work. Think about our creating vaccines, researching earthquakes, and discovering new construction materials.

Other science makes valuable contributions to our understanding of the universe around us—theoretical physics or marine biology, for example—and these very often produce society-altering work.

Then, of course, there is the science that doesn't quite have the same sort of impact, like magnetically levitating a frog or creating a chemical recipe to partially unboil an egg.

The Ig Nobel Prize is given out each September, around the time of the real Nobel prizes. It's broadcast every year on the Friday after Thanksgiving on NPR's program “Science Friday,” which makes for a much better use of my time than hunting Black Friday deals.

The awards either criticize (awarding a prize in “science education” to the Kansas State Board of Education for their stance on teaching evolution in schools) or to gently rib scientists for absurd research (testing the “five second rule” for eating food off the ground, which they proved to be false).

A few of my favorites:Discovering that the word “huh” or an equivalent seems to exist in every language.

• Realizing that if you attach a weighted stick to the rear end of a chicken, it then walks in the same way that dinosaurs were thought to have walked.
• Measuring the friction between a banana skin and a shoe, and a banana skin and the floor, when we step on the banana.
• Investigating whether cat ownership is mentally hazardous (I could have answered that).
• Testing how reindeer react to seeing humans disguised as polar bears.
• Finding that some people could run on water, if that water were in the Moon's gravity instead of Earth's.
• Discovering the biochemical process by which onions make people cry.
• Figuring out that leaning to the left makes the Eiffel Tower seem smaller.
• Calculating the balance of physical forces inside a human ponytail
• Discovering a way to extract vanillin (the active component of vanilla) from cow dung.

All of my favorites are in the real-but-absurd science category: the awards given out to people doing homeopathy or predicting the end of the world are grin-worthy…but not all that interesting.

The absurd science category sometimes becomes relevant: Sir Andre Geim won both the Ig Nobel Prize (he was the one to levitate the small frog with magnets) and the Nobel Prize for his work on graphene.

And the Ig Nobel award-winning study showing that malaria mosquitoes are attracted to Limburger cheese has been used to create large-scale mosquito traps in strategic locations in Africa.

Mostly, though, I just find that the real science is funnier.

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Quotable

Yes, Yard Ramp Guy—I remain blog relevant. You?

“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ (I found it!) but ‘That's funny…’"

— Isaac Asimov

Do I look like I'm playing games?

When I was a little kid, I hated board games. Absolutely did not like them. Especially Monopoly.

Risk I could tolerate about once or twice a year. Chess and checkers I could tolerate. That was the extent of the games we had (so maybe my choices were too limited). On rare occasions, I'd get to try a game someone else owned, but there weren't a lot out there (so maybe I come from a place where people didn’t play board games).

Things stick with us. These days, I’m surprised every time I see someone's board game collection (so maybe everyone’s not like me).

We're in a veritable board game renaissance right now. Most estimates put the number published each year in the thousands.

Of course, a huge chunk of these games are still terrible. Many are incredibly complicated and take hours—or even days—to play. Which, I suppose, is just fine for those with that kind of free time, but most of us don't have such free time. Other games are spat out quickly…or are just mediocre rip-offs of another game.

Bored.

Still, and muffling my rant just a bit, there are probably a gaggle of good new games published every year.

I’ve picked up a few over the years that I've grown to like, mostly for my kids and grandkids. My favorite is one I bought for my grandkids: Master Labyrinth. I still drag it out whenever they come over, and I'm probably more excited to play it than they are.

While I was reading about board games, I decided to hunt down the oldest.

Senet, Backgammon and The Royal Game of Ur are more than 4,000 years old. Go is about 2,500 years old, and Parcheesi is nearly 2,000. Tafl, a Viking ancestor of chess, is some 1,600 years old.

Yes. Humans have been playing games for fun for a long, long time. For better or worse. Mostly worse, I say.

This isn't just an old man rambling on and on about board games. Because I refuse to admit to being old…until I retire.

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Quotable

Oh, Yard Ramp Guy, still on topic with a quotation:

“I can see how he (Sandy Koufax) won twenty-five games. What I don’t understand is how he lost five.”

— Yogi Berra