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  1. - Top - End - #61
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    Quote Originally Posted by factotum View Post
    I think that can be justified by saying that turning off fusion in the star would cause an immediate core collapse supernova, and a large portion of the star's mass would get blasted off into space, thus reducing the gravitational attraction of what's left. I seriously doubt the writer put that much thought into it, mind you!
    You would feel any change in gravitational pull only after the nova blast scrapes your planet clean. As long as the roughly spherical expanding cloud of plasma is within your orbit, nothing essential changes.
    In a war it doesn't matter who's right, only who's left.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Radar View Post
    You would feel any change in gravitational pull only after the nova blast scrapes your planet clean. As long as the roughly spherical expanding cloud of plasma is within your orbit, nothing essential changes.
    I think you'd notice it slightly before that. The net gravitational force might still be pointing int eh same direction at the same strength, but I think you'd start to notice if there are significant components pulling you in other directions as well, even if they sum to the same thing.

    But semantics aside, trying to trigger a supernova so you can do something funky gravitationaly on the planet you're on is just really, really stupid :P
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    For me, how much I get annoyed depends on how willing I am to suspend disbelief. So, if the film is rubbish from a dramatic standpoint, I'm more likely to notice the nonsensical science. Like in Pacific Rim, for example...
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    A weird trend I've noticed is that comedies seem more likely portray things accurately. Especially if they're not explicitly about the thing they're depicting. My guess is that "serious" media pieces need to make things seem exciting and comprehensive to the layperson. So they fudge science and we end up with something that seems silly to anyone that understands actual science.

    Comedies generally don't worry about making things seem exciting, they worry more about making things funny. Sometimes accurate portrayals subvert audience expectations and end up being funnier.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Eldan View Post
    There's a version on youtube where he brings on the actual actor to play through the scene with him.

    And as far as I'm concerned, Interstellar was horrendous. Like, they made a big to-do on making a movie where they paid attention to time dilation and working with scientists to get the look of a black hole right, mostly to get brownie points with nerdy reviewers, and then completely screwed up on science all over the rest of the movie.

    Love transcends space and time indeed.
    Wait, I thought the point was that the sufficiently advanced humans use Cooper to contact his daughter by using the blackhole to manipulate time.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Brother Oni View Post
    Interesting factoid I picked up while browsing reddit - apparently during the 80s and 90s, trigger discipline in the US military was generally 'if your safety's on, it's fine to have your finger on the trigger and your weapon pointed at someone'.

    After the early 2000s, it was much more in line with current 'finger's always off the trigger unless you're about to shoot and never point your weapon at something unless you plan to kill it'.

    Example:
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    Quote Originally Posted by Tvtyrant View Post
    My revolver has a safety, is single action and I keep the top chamber empty to prevent misfire, and I still wouldn't feel okay pointing it at someone. The chances of something going wrong is low but the possible consequences are too large to be comfortable with.
    Just about the dumbest thing I've ever heard IRL: "my safety is my finger and my brain."
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    I don't generally have any issues with entertainment not accurately representing reality (or even woefully misrepresenting), because I can distinguish between entertainment and reality. The issue is that there are too many badly educated people in the world who can't or just don't draw such distinctions. That is not entertainment's fault. If there is blame to be assigned then I say it is EDUCATION'S fault. And professionals who get worked up about ENTERTAINMENT not reflecting reality may as well be barking at the moon. Entertainment's aim is not now, never was, and never will be to actually educate, unless it happens to be convenient and someone cares to bother doing education's job for them in passing.

    JMO

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    Quote Originally Posted by Peelee View Post
    Just about the dumbest thing I've ever heard IRL: "my safety is my finger and my brain."
    Wasn't that an actual reply by a US marine in reference to his lack of trigger discipline and it's been referenced in Black Hawk Down?

    Quote Originally Posted by D+1 View Post
    I don't generally have any issues with entertainment not accurately representing reality (or even woefully misrepresenting), because I can distinguish between entertainment and reality. The issue is that there are too many badly educated people in the world who can't or just don't draw such distinctions. That is not entertainment's fault. If there is blame to be assigned then I say it is EDUCATION'S fault. And professionals who get worked up about ENTERTAINMENT not reflecting reality may as well be barking at the moon. Entertainment's aim is not now, never was, and never will be to actually educate, unless it happens to be convenient and someone cares to bother doing education's job for them in passing.
    Except propaganda and educational entertainment both exist and present their version of knowledge on a topic, so you can hardly say that entertainment is entirely blameless.

    Board rules prohibit me from getting into the more accurate examples of propaganda, so sticking with entertainment:

    For example, what if Sesame Street started teaching letters and numbers incorrectly? Its target audience are pre-schoolers up to 7 year olds, so it starts before they get any official education and looking into the impact of Sesame Street, one link indicates that 95% of all American preschoolers had watched the show by the time they were three years old in a a 1996 survey.
    Given the amount of effort the shows writers and producers put in (they have a curriculum and put a lot of effort into presenting multi-culturalism for example), it's most certainly not because it happens to be convenient for them to do so.

    On a smaller scale, in the UK, there's was a children's TV show called Something Special, which teaches Makaton, a form of sign language intended for children with learning difficulties and other special needs. It was popular enough that most children still know of the main character, Mr Tumble.


    On the other end of the scale, I remember seeing a trailer for a TV drama which linked the MMR vaccine to autism - a quick google search indicates it was called 'Hear the Silence'. Similarly the same subject of vaccines causing autism also appeared on an episode of Eli Stone (link).

    While it's not entertainment's fault for starting the initial link, it is most certainly entertainment's fault for helping spreading the message - compare how many people would read a scientific paper on a subject versus how many people who watch TV (the season of Eli Stone which had episode in question attracted 8.09 million viewers, while Hear the Silence gathered 1.2 million viewers on its initial screening) or read a newspaper.
    Last edited by Brother Oni; 2019-10-13 at 04:07 AM.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Brother Oni View Post
    Wasn't that an actual reply by a US marine in reference to his lack of trigger discipline and it's been referenced in Black Hawk Down?
    Was it? I never saw the movie or heard about the marine, but that may be where my friend got it from. Regardless of originality, he fully believed it, so it remains the dumbest thing I've ever heard in person.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Peelee View Post
    Was it? I never saw the movie or heard about the marine, but that may be where my friend got it from. Regardless of originality, he fully believed it, so it remains the dumbest thing I've ever heard in person.
    Here's the clip in question from Black Hawk Down. Apologies - I got the service wrong (Army, not Marines).

    Reading up on it some more, it seems like it's also a bit of artistic license to demonstrate the differences in attitude and certain liberties granted between the different Army branches (the CPT was a Ranger, while the SFC was Delta) and the friction that this generated between them at the time.

    That said, I found mention that the weapon in question (Colt 727 carbine variant of the M16A2) can only be put into 'safe' if cocked - if it's just been loaded and the chamber's empty, then it can't be put into 'safe'. I don't know enough about the weapon in question to say whether this is true or not.
    Last edited by Brother Oni; 2019-10-13 at 01:17 PM.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Brother Oni View Post
    Here's the clip in question from Black Hawk Down. Apologies - I got the service wrong (Army, not Marines).

    Reading up on it some more, it seems like it's also a bit of artistic license to demonstrate the differences in attitude and certain liberties granted between the different Army branches (the CPT was a Ranger, while the SFC was Delta) and the friction that this generated between them at the time.

    That said, I found mention that the weapon in question (Colt 727 carbine variant of the M16A2) can only be put into 'safe' if cocked - if it's just been loaded and the chamber's empty, then it can't be put into 'safe'. I don't know enough about the weapon in question to say whether this is true or not.
    It doesn't matter if the chamber is empty, only whether the internal hammer is cocked. It is possible to have a cocked hammer with an empty chamber, and then engage the safety. If the hammer is lowered on an empty chamber, the safety cannot then be engaged.

    These statements are of course relative to the system in question. This behavior is common to many of the trigger groups used in full, burst, and semi automatic versions of the M16 and AR-15.
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    where is the atropal? and does it have a listed LA?

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    Quote Originally Posted by Lvl 2 Expert View Post
    Doing science wrong can ruin a movie for me in extreme cases. Take the movie Lucy. It used the same tired "you only use ten percent of your brain" basis that Limitless did a few years prior. But I didn't mind when Limitless did it because they take this false concept and apply logic to what it might be like if the idea was true.
    The "use 10% of your brain" is more an associative fallacy than an outright lie. There have been numerous people that lost up to 90% of their brains before age 2 (and the brains didn't grow back) and went on to have normal intelligence. So the truth is that "you can overclock 10% of a human brain up to full power", but there is no clear method to "overclocking a full human brain" to that level. Don't forget that your brain needs something like half your calories (assuming no heavy manual labor or similar) and has to be cooled to 98.6 Fahrenheit (sorry for not knowing the metric), so even if you somehow "overclock unlocked" your brain, your body might have issues keeping up.

    Quote Originally Posted by DeTess View Post
    I actually encountered something interesting that's kinda there opposite of the usual gripes of things being unrealistic by being too big or too powerful or too fast or whatever. I was reading a sourcebook for a sci-fi rpg (Jovian Chronicles, for those interested) and it provided a neat time-line for the technological developments, starting at our own and diverging in the late 1990's. One of the first major differences was the practical application of fusion power in late 2007. 4 years later this led to the first deployment of fusion-powered spacecraft, a kind of space-shuttle-like craft which could "easily hoist nearly twenty tons of payloads into low Earth orbit and return to land near their launching point".

    Something about those numbers felt off to me, and it took only one quick google search to figure out what it was; Space-X's falcon 9 can lift 17 tons into low earth orbit (23 tons if it doesn't need to come back) and return to a location close to its launch point, all without the need of a fancy fusion-powered drive. Furthermore, the first falcon 9 launch took place in 2010, a year before those fusion-powered shuttles would take off (though the 17 tons to LEO is a configuration that only started flying a couple years later). For a change, a sci-fi writer ended up underestimating what could have been possible with the advanced tech introduced as part of the premise.
    Falcon launches cost somewhere around ~$60 million a pop (that's the price, and presumably most of it is going to cover SpaceX R&D) with the price of the fuel around $200k. Elon Musk claims that Starship (the next generation rocket) will launch 100 tons and not cost any more to launch. Fuel might be cheaper as it will be methane not RP1. Of course that is "literally methane" and not "natural gas" so it will also have to be purified before pumping into a rocket (although I suspect that the process involved in chilling it down to near freezing might allow them to feed natural gas in and the only liquid left will be methane).

    Fusion powered rocketry is potentially available now (without sustained positive powered fusion), but only for interplanetary power (it doesn't have enough thrust to lift off the ground). Even with a real (fully positive energy return) fusion power plant available, it doesn't look too likely any such rocket would lift off. And of course, fission is already available and perfectly capable of zipping you to Mars. And then there's Freeman Dyson's work on the Orion (the original, not NASA's reuse of that glorious name for a recent political venture) that showed how to launch arbitrary amounts of tonnage powered by nuclear explosions (hint: build the thing in Antarctica and the radioactive fallout won't be so awful).

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    Meaningless science in films called science fiction (but are really adventure movies set in space) don't bother me at all.

    The perfect example is Star Wars. A farm boy is given his father's magical sword by a retired knight who trains him in a mystical force, and the two set out to save a princess captured by the emperor's forces. This is the fantasy genre, just in a science fiction setting. Remember that when they actually tried to add a science fictional element (midichlorians to explain the Force), the fans revolted.

    I am far more likely to get annoyed by historical stories that get the culture and history wrong.
    Musketeer movies in which Richelieu is trying to become King in 17th century France.
    Revolvers in stories before the revolver was invented.
    A telescope in a Robin Hood movie.
    Cavemen and (traditional) dinosaurs together
    etc.

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    Quote Originally Posted by wumpus View Post
    Don't forget that your brain needs something like half your calories (assuming no heavy manual labor or similar) and has to be cooled to 98.6 Fahrenheit (sorry for not knowing the metric), so even if you somehow "overclock unlocked" your brain, your body might have issues keeping up.
    Most literature I see quotes the brain as using up approximately 20% of a person's RMR of about 1300 Calories, which works out to around about 300 Calories a day, with a variance of about 10% (link). Surprisingly, strenuous mental activity doesn't burn up that many extra Calories, although mental fatigue is a separate issue.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Jay R View Post
    Meaningless science in films called science fiction (but are really adventure movies set in space) don't bother me at all.

    The perfect example is Star Wars. A farm boy is given his father's magical sword by a retired knight who trains him in a mystical force, and the two set out to save a princess captured by the emperor's forces. This is the fantasy genre, just in a science fiction setting. Remember that when they actually tried to add a science fictional element (midichlorians to explain the Force), the fans revolted.

    I am far more likely to get annoyed by historical stories that get the culture and history wrong.
    Musketeer movies in which Richelieu is trying to become King in 17th century France.
    Revolvers in stories before the revolver was invented.
    A telescope in a Robin Hood movie.
    Cavemen and (traditional) dinosaurs together
    etc.
    In defense of the fans, that was a really stupid thing to add. They didnt mind the sci fi around anything else, but turning what was basically a religion and magic into a scientific thing instead rubbed people the wrong way. The reaction would have been similar if they talked about the hyperdrive fairy that opens a portal to hyperspace you use a specific device to summon. You dont turn established magic into science and you dont turn established science into magic. You can create a setting around both but switching halfway through is bad.
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    Quote Originally Posted by DeTess View Post
    I think you'd notice it slightly before that. The net gravitational force might still be pointing int eh same direction at the same strength, but I think you'd start to notice if there are significant components pulling you in other directions as well, even if they sum to the same thing.
    You don't feel individual components, just the net force - and while that can vary across you in extreme circumstances a star blowing up isn't one of them.
    Last edited by Knaight; 2019-10-15 at 04:04 AM.
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    Quote Originally Posted by wumpus View Post
    The "use 10% of your brain" is more an associative fallacy than an outright lie.

    Don't forget that your brain needs something like half your calories (assuming no heavy manual labor or similar) and has to be cooled to 98.6 Fahrenheit (sorry for not knowing the metric),
    If you used more than 10% of your brain you would have used the windows calculator to convert it to 37C.

    The people writing those stories should watch a documentary about CAT scanning brains.

    Quote Originally Posted by Brother Oni View Post
    Surprisingly, strenuous mental activity doesn't burn up that many extra Calories, although mental fatigue is a separate issue.
    Well that totally shuts down my daily excerise regime doesn't it? All that algebra for nothing.

    Quote Originally Posted by Traab View Post
    In defense of the fans, that was a really stupid thing to add. They didnt mind the sci fi around anything else, but turning what was basically a religion and magic into a scientific thing instead rubbed people the wrong way. The reaction would have been similar if they talked about the hyperdrive fairy that opens a portal to hyperspace you use a specific device to summon. You dont turn established magic into science and you dont turn established science into magic. You can create a setting around both but switching halfway through is bad.
    Doesn't the "explanation" also cause more difficult questions that pry apart the illusion? That's something I took away from it too. "The Force is everywhere" is mystical and openended, midicloreans quickly start gettings things confusing and requiring ever more answer to "yeah, but then...".

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    TV & Hollywood are forever electrocuting people by putting a cable into water that they are standing in - resulting in sustained sparks and smoke and dead victims.

    We all know electricity and water don't mix well, but water is far better at conducting electricity than we humans - the current will go to ground through the water, not through the victim.
    Where the danger really lies is if the wet person reaches out of their bath, pool, or whatever, and touches the live cable (or vice versa: cable touching a person in the water is the point). Then they pass the current through their body into the water - until the circuit breakers kick in, in about a millisecond, or until the fuses blow, in up to a second or so.

    So if you need to electrocute someone (please don't), you have to have the electricity hit the target, not the water.

    EDIT: Oh, and while I'm on the subject: "electrocute" strictly means "execution with electricity", being a portmanteau of electricity and execute. Shocking someone non-fatally with electricity shouldn't be called "electrocution" (but commonly is), and accidentally killing someone, or even murdering someone (as opposed to executing them) shouldn't really be called electrocution either.

    I'm an electrical safety certification engineer - Pedantry is kind of my job. Yeah, I know I did it too, but that's languages for you: forever changing.
    Last edited by Altair_the_Vexed; 2019-10-15 at 06:04 AM. Reason: afterthoughts

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    Quote Originally Posted by snowblizz View Post
    Well that totally shuts down my daily excerise regime doesn't it? All that algebra for nothing.
    Well, it was fun, wasn't it?
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    Quote Originally Posted by Altair_the_Vexed View Post

    EDIT: Oh, and while I'm on the subject: "electrocute" strictly means "execution with electricity", being a portmanteau of electricity and execute. Shocking someone non-fatally with electricity shouldn't be called "electrocution" (but commonly is), and accidentally killing someone, or even murdering someone (as opposed to executing them) shouldn't really be called electrocution either.
    After I read this I spent like half an hour trying to come up with ways to apply this same formation to other means of death. So far the best I've got is 'bullecute' for being shot.

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    Quote Originally Posted by tyckspoon View Post
    After I read this I spent like half an hour trying to come up with ways to apply this same formation to other means of death. So far the best I've got is 'bullecute' for being shot.
    Put to death by hanging: noosecute
    Put to death in the French Revolution: guillocute
    Put to death by injection: pharmacute
    Put to death by handbag: persecute
    Put to death at long distance: telecommute
    Put to death by reading dull books: prosecute
    Burned at the stake: barbecute
    Put to death by a former spouse: execute


    Meanwhile, back at the topic, two of my biggest gripes are:
    Using a gun to open a lock (the most likely result it to jam it so it cannot open), and
    Using gasoline explosions when the situation is clearly dynamite, or anything else that has a totally different look.
    Last edited by Jay R; 2019-10-15 at 02:20 PM.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Jay R View Post
    Meanwhile, back at the topic, two of my biggest gripes are:
    Using a gun to open a lock (the most likely result it to jam it so it cannot open), and
    Using gasoline explosions when the situation is clearly dynamite, or anything else that has a totally different look.
    A shame really, since other types of explosions can look really cool. The thing is, fireballs are most likely easier to arrange safely then an honest detonation, since you can make them with virtually no shockwave. At the same time it is really ludicrous how everything is explosive in action movies.

    And also on the topic of explosions.
    In a war it doesn't matter who's right, only who's left.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Jay R View Post
    Put to death by hanging: noosecute
    Put to death in the French Revolution: guillocute
    Put to death by injection: pharmacute
    Put to death by handbag: persecute
    Put to death at long distance: telecommute
    Put to death by reading dull books: prosecute
    Burned at the stake: barbecute
    Put to death by a former spouse: execute
    I never knew death could be so cute.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Peelee View Post
    I never knew death could be so cute.
    Death by datemurderer: meetcute
    Death by flying cow: meatcute
    Death by being strangled by your own landing equipment: paracute
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    Quote Originally Posted by snowblizz View Post
    If you used more than 10% of your brain you would have used the windows calculator to convert it to 37C.

    The people writing those stories should watch a documentary about CAT scanning brains.


    Well that totally shuts down my daily excerise regime doesn't it? All that algebra for nothing.


    Doesn't the "explanation" also cause more difficult questions that pry apart the illusion? That's something I took away from it too. "The Force is everywhere" is mystical and openended, midicloreans quickly start gettings things confusing and requiring ever more answer to "yeah, but then...".
    That's exactly when they discovered it, once CAT scans existed (roughly the 1980s). The brains were there, but up to 90% of was completely inactive.

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    Quote Originally Posted by wumpus View Post
    That's exactly when they discovered it, once CAT scans existed (roughly the 1980s). The brains were there, but up to 90% of was completely inactive.
    90% of your skeletal muscles are inactive at almost any time as well, (in fact probably a lot closer to actually inactive than the dark spots on a brain scan,) and I've never heard anyone theorizing about what you could do if you could use more than 10% of your muscles.
    The Hindsight Awards, results: See the best movies of 1999!

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    Default Re: Professionals Annoyed By Entertainment

    Quote Originally Posted by Radar View Post
    A shame really, since other types of explosions can look really cool. The thing is, fireballs are most likely easier to arrange safely then an honest detonation, since you can make them with virtually no shockwave. At the same time it is really ludicrous how everything is explosive in action movies.

    And also on the topic of explosions.
    My favorite example currently. True Lies
    "Interdum feror cupidine partium magnarum Europae vincendarum"
    Translation: "Sometimes I get this urge to conquer large parts of Europe."

    Quote Originally Posted by Nerd-o-rama View Post
    Traab is yelling everything that I'm thinking already.
    "If you don't get those cameras out of my face, I'm gonna go 8.6 on the Richter scale with gastric emissions that'll clear this room."

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    Default Re: Professionals Annoyed By Entertainment

    Quote Originally Posted by Lvl 2 Expert View Post
    90% of your skeletal muscles are inactive at almost any time as well, (in fact probably a lot closer to actually inactive than the dark spots on a brain scan,) and I've never heard anyone theorizing about what you could do if you could use more than 10% of your muscles.
    Strongmen and lifters do talk about mind muscle connection though, where your nerves are naturally afraid to fire hard enough to fully utilize your muscles and you teach them to do so. The limiters involved come off in a crises, like carrying 7ft sharks with your nephews arm in their gut to shore by running through the ocean.
    Quote Originally Posted by The Glyphstone View Post
    Vibranium: If it was on the periodic table, its chemical symbol would be "Bs".

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    Default Re: Professionals Annoyed By Entertainment

    Quote Originally Posted by Jay R View Post
    Meanwhile, back at the topic, two of my biggest gripes are:
    Using a gun to open a lock (the most likely result it to jam it so it cannot open)
    I'd agree that the way Hollywood depicts it, you'd be very lucky to force open a padlock by shooting it.

    In reality, it depends on the type of lock, the type of gun and how you're shooting the lock.

    Pistol cartridges on a decent padlock, best way is to shoot from the top down at the body, forcing the shackle apart.

    Anything more serious has to tread a fine line between over-penetrating and doing nothing to the lock and completely destroying the lock.

    The Box o' Truth had a go at shooting various padlocks with different sized rounds and a shotgun with breaching shells is the only sure fire way to open a lock with a single shot.

    With house doors, especially internal, non-fire door ones, you just need to damage the lock, then kick the door down. External doors tend to be more solid, or at least the ones we have in the UK do.

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    Quote Originally Posted by wumpus View Post
    That's exactly when they discovered it, once CAT scans existed (roughly the 1980s). The brains were there, but up to 90% of was completely inactive.
    Um, no. The 10% myth has existed since the early 1900s. There are several articles about it (for example, Wikipedia and Snopes) but from the BBC Web Site:

    So how can an idea with so little biological or physiological basis have spread so widely? It is hard to track down an original source. The American psychologist and philosopher William James mentioned in The Energies of Men in 1908 that we “are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources". He was optimistic that people could achieve more, but he does not refer to brain volume or quantity of cells, nor does he give a specific percentage. The 10% figure is mentioned in the preface to the 1936 edition of Dale Carnegie’s best-selling book How to Win Friends and Influence People, and sometimes people say that Albert Einstein was the source. But Professor Della Sala has tried to find the quote, and even those who work at the Albert Einstein archives can find no record of it. So it seems this might be a myth too.
    Warning: This posting may contain wit, wisdom, pathos, irony, satire, sarcasm and puns. And traces of nut.

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