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- Elizabeth Barrette (
ysabetwordsmith) wrote,
Elizabeth Barrette
ysabetwordsmith
- Mood:
busy
Watch "En Flash"
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Managed Retreat
I'm pleased to see someone else admitting that not all cities can stay where they are. This article gives several examples of how cities could adapt…
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Conformity
Here's an article about conformity and evil. Now, we know that most humans are contextual and that evil spreads readily. But it leaves out…
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Killer Asteroids
There are a lot of them, and without advance preparation, Earth is defenseless. We need to get the Umbrella up.
July 9 2014, 08:21:57 UTC 6 years ago
July 11 2014, 17:40:03 UTC 6 years ago
(Watched the video before posting - ruined the mood for what I thought about. Nevertheless, I'm going to share anyway.)
You mention problems of speedsters, which makes me feel like adding a pondering of my own. There's an interesting thing about "speedsters" in the Flash caliber. If they don't do something very funky, there's a... problem with running that fast.
Two problems really.
The first is, the earth is *curved*. Run fast enough, and your feet no longer touch the ground. This might be what saves most of them from the second problem, which is the really big one.
ESCAPE VELOCITY IS A MISNOMER - IT'S A SCALAR QUANTITY.
Once you hit about 25,000 miles per hour, you'd better have Superman, Green Lantern, or some similarly powered hero to bring you back down to earth - literally.
I'm not trying to be a killjoy, but I've seen people "fact checking" the Flash, and they say "can he really run up the side of building? Yes, briefly..." "can he really run across water?" Sure, under certain circumstances," and none of them that I saw ever touched on these two critical bits.
That's been an idea that's been churning in my head recently about a realization.
"Wait a minute. That's not possible."
"No for normal humans, no."
"No, you don't get it - it's *NOT POSSIBLE*. Look, Spider-man's fast, and has a sense of what's happening, but he's had literally a hundred thousand bullets shot at him over the years. If the odds of a bullet hitting him are one in a thousand, he's running at probability around e to the minus 100. That doesn't happen[1]!"
"But it did - there he is, swinging overhead."
"Yeah. That's what scares the fuck out of me."
[1] proving that the speaker isn't a Bayesian - this would prove, to a Bayesian, that the probability couldn't possibly be one in a thousand for precisely the reason cited - but that raises its own questions of how low the probability of a bullet hitting Spider-man could be, and how that could be possible[2]
[2] Am I going too geeky here? I think so.
July 14 2014, 03:47:17 UTC 6 years ago
July 12 2014, 17:42:23 UTC 6 years ago