Bad science in fiction Hall of Shame

[kerbiloid]

Counterpart s02e01.

Not that a science, but a programming.

This is their chat window with subtitles of what we hear.
(Subtitles are from the movie, I just placed them into a single screenshot.
And the characters are special agents, they aren't programming)

Spoiler

 

Edited December 10, 2018 by kerbiloid

[wumpus]

17 hours ago, DDE said:

Unauthorized sandwiches aren't comparable to attempted murder, don't you think?

I think some NASA types were a bit shocked at some cosmonauts (in space) punching each other (source: Packing for Mars), but it wasn't seen by the crew or ground control as a big deal.  As long as the space gun stays in place no one had to worry.

[DAL59]

I just got a copy of "worlds in collision".  OH BOY.  Literally nothing in this book makes any sense.  

[DAL59]

How did Aquaman get from the sahara to Sicily?

[Superfluous J]

2 hours ago, DAL59 said:

How did Aquaman get from the sahara to Sicily?

Haven't seen the movie, but I assume he swam

[kerbiloid]

3 hours ago, DAL59 said:

How did Aquaman get from the sahara to Sicily?

He is a Conan of Dothraki, he can.

[ARS]

One of the most frequently potrayed bad science in movies and fiction (especially those that sets in post-apocalyptic world) is how the fuel survives for a very long time. In Real Life, gasoline is a very refined and volatile product. Creating usable gasoline (or any other petroleum-based fuel) requires extracting petroleum from the ground, and separating the various elements of it by carbon chain in an oil refinery. Gasoline is meant to be used soon after production, and has a usable shelf life of about 3-5 months. With fuel stabilizer, you can get a few more months out of it, but no matter what you add or how you store it, storing it for more than a year is out of the question. After that, it starts to break down and vaporize, becoming completely unusable (and also reducing to gunk that has to be cleaned out of the engine). But in today's modern world of nigh-ubiquitous motor vehicles, this is rarely a real problem. In fiction, on the other hand, gasoline is just an eternally lasting fuel liquid that can sit anywhere for any period of time, and be as usable as the day it was refined. This is common in post-apocalyptic fiction, where everyone is still driving around in cars long after any refineries would stop producing. If such a post-apocalyptic world did occur in reality, we would be able to drive around for a few months, but afterwards, every gas-powered vehicle on the planet would be 100% useless. This doesn't only happen in post-apocalyptic fiction either. Sometimes people find a vehicle that goes for years or even decades unused, and they turn the key and it immediately turns on and works perfectly. Ignoring the fact that OTHER parts of the vehicle would need restoration (especially oil and other lubricants, which should be dried up), the gasoline still in the tank would be completely unusable and that vehicle is going nowhere.

[magnemoe]

1 hour ago, ARS said:

One of the most frequently potrayed bad science in movies and fiction (especially those that sets in post-apocalyptic world) is how the fuel survives for a very long time. In Real Life, gasoline is a very refined and volatile product. Creating usable gasoline (or any other petroleum-based fuel) requires extracting petroleum from the ground, and separating the various elements of it by carbon chain in an oil refinery. Gasoline is meant to be used soon after production, and has a usable shelf life of about 3-5 months. With fuel stabilizer, you can get a few more months out of it, but no matter what you add or how you store it, storing it for more than a year is out of the question. After that, it starts to break down and vaporize, becoming completely unusable (and also reducing to gunk that has to be cleaned out of the engine). But in today's modern world of nigh-ubiquitous motor vehicles, this is rarely a real problem. In fiction, on the other hand, gasoline is just an eternally lasting fuel liquid that can sit anywhere for any period of time, and be as usable as the day it was refined. This is common in post-apocalyptic fiction, where everyone is still driving around in cars long after any refineries would stop producing. If such a post-apocalyptic world did occur in reality, we would be able to drive around for a few months, but afterwards, every gas-powered vehicle on the planet would be 100% useless. This doesn't only happen in post-apocalyptic fiction either. Sometimes people find a vehicle that goes for years or even decades unused, and they turn the key and it immediately turns on and works perfectly. Ignoring the fact that OTHER parts of the vehicle would need restoration (especially oil and other lubricants, which should be dried up), the gasoline still in the tank would be completely unusable and that vehicle is going nowhere.

Gasoline yes, know that the one used for outboard engine did not work well the next season, yes it had added oil in it, my scooter worked well enough because it had an simpler engine. Chain saws also work well on old gasoline. 

Diesel on the other hand last for decades. at least in underground tanks who don't get heated and cooled so much. 
On the other hand an modern diesel engine might not like it but it worked without problem for old tractors. 

[kerbiloid]

Some engines (can't remember which of them exactly, but probably diesel) can use a rapeseed oil. Sometimes the injector hole should be broadened a little for that.
Early airplanes were using castor oil as a fuel.

Afaik, gas/petrol lifetime depends on its  octane rating. The higher - the worse. Low-octane can last for two maybe three years iirc.

Edited January 3, 2019 by kerbiloid

[DAL59]

In Divergent, 1/5th of the population is lawyers.  

[Gargamel]

8 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Some engines (can't remember which of them exactly, but probably diesel) can use a rapeseed oil. Sometimes the injector hole should be broadened a little for that.
Early airplanes were using castor oil as a fuel.

It is possible to run production diesel engines on cooking oil, like the ones that fast food joints use daily, without any modification to the engine.  It is better to make modifications, but they can run on straight vegetable oil.   

12 minutes ago, DAL59 said:

In Divergent, 1/5th of the population is lawyers.  

That's really scary, as with some light googling, it seems .4% of the US population are lawyers.  I wonder though, that if in the story, they would all be lawyers, or just associated with the legal trade?  But even then, I can't imagine more than a 10x increase (at the extreme) in the number of people who work in the law.  That's just an absurdly high value. 

[DAL59]

19 minutes ago, Gargamel said:

That's really scary, as with some light googling, it seems .4% of the US population are lawyers.  I wonder though, that if in the story, they would all be lawyers, or just associated with the legal trade?  But even then, I can't imagine more than a 10x increase (at the extreme) in the number of people who work in the law.  That's just an absurdly high value. 

Just in legal trade.  However, Divergent is an isolated society with a population of half a million.  So they have 100,000 legal workers for their tiny city.  Did I mention that another 100,000 do nothing but work in the government/management?  

[Tonka Crash]

9 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Early airplanes were using castor oil as a fuel.

Castor oil was used as a lubricant in WWI era rotary engines like oil is added to modern 2-stroke engine fuel not as a fuel by itself.

 

24 minutes ago, Gargamel said:

It is possible to run production diesel engines on cooking oil, like the ones that fast food joints use daily, without any modification to the engine.  It is better to make modifications, but they can run on straight vegetable oil.  

I worked at a small town McDonald's back in the '80s. There was an old hippy that we would occasionally find "stealing" the used oil from our storage tank in back of the store he used for his truck. The owner didn't care because at that time you had to pay someone to haul it away, now it's something you sell for reprocessing.

[AngrybobH]

16 hours ago, ARS said:

One of the most frequently potrayed bad science in movies and fiction (especially those that sets in post-apocalyptic world) is how the fuel survives for a very long time

This is problem I find almost unacceptable in movies or tv shows mostly because I am a mechanic. That and the fact that modern vehicles, with all their computers, draw a considerable amount of amperage even when off. Most modern vehicles won't have enough power to start after sitting in as little a 4 days. 2 weeks and even '90s cars won't start.

14 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Diesel on the other hand last for decades

Except that there are molds, fungus, and bacteria that can live in diesel. These can easily overwhelm the filter system that filters to 3 microns. Anything above 3 microns that gets into the injectors can damage them permanently because of small parts and insanely high pressures (200MPa). Also diesel engines can run(starting is harder though) on transmission fluid, motor oil, used cooking oil, etc but you have to be careful to check the PH. Too far from neutral can also damage the injectors and HP pump.

14 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Afaik, gas/petrol lifetime depends on its  octane rating. The higher - the worse. Low-octane can last for two maybe three years iirc.

Depending on storage, you can get water into the fuel from thermal cycling cracking and/or overwhelming seals(gasoline expands and contracts quite a bit). Water accelerates the separation of gasoline and what stays behind is basically lacquer that WILL require new parts to fix and there is water in your fuel already(more than you might think). Think about the problem of cleaning an 8mm ID, non-straight, 2 meter long piece of plastic (or soft metal) that is completely filled with solid dried lacquer without overbending or puncturing the part. Also, a vehicle fuel tank is not a good long term storage solution. It is open to atmosphere with the only interference being the activated charcoal evaporative emission canister, so water vapor is getting in.

[kerbiloid]

6 hours ago, Gargamel said:

7 hours ago, DAL59 said:

In Divergent, 1/5th of the population is lawyers.  

That's really scary, as with some light googling, it seems .4% of the US population are lawyers.  I wonder though, that if in the story, they would all be lawyers, or just associated with the legal trade?  But even then, I can't imagine more than a 10x increase (at the extreme) in the number of people who work in the law. 

Maybe total population of their clients had decreased six times, so those 4% became ~25%.

54 minutes ago, AngrybobH said:

Depending on storage, you can get water into the fuel from thermal cycling cracking and/or overwhelming seals(gasoline expands and contracts quite a bit). Water accelerates the separation of gasoline and what stays behind is basically lacquer that WILL require new parts to fix and there is water in your fuel already(more than you might think). Think about the problem of cleaning an 8mm ID, non-straight, 2 meter long piece of plastic (or soft metal) that is completely filled with solid dried lacquer without overbending or puncturing the part. Also, a vehicle fuel tank is not a good long term storage solution. It is open to atmosphere with the only interference being the activated charcoal evaporative emission canister, so water vapor is getting in.

I mean closed canisters, not the fuel tank.
 

[roboslacker]

11 hours ago, DAL59 said:

Just in legal trade.  However, Divergent is an isolated society with a population of half a million.  So they have 100,000 legal workers for their tiny city.  Did I mention that another 100,000 do nothing but work in the government/management?  

Do they at least have a fifth dedicated to food production?

[DAL59]

4 hours ago, roboslacker said:

Do they at least have a fifth dedicated to food production?

Yes.  1/5th food production, 1/5 lawyers, 1/5 police, 1/5 government,  1/5 researchers.  That is definitely a well thought out society /s.  Also, what are the researchers doing?  They don't explore, they don't expand, they believe they are the only humans left, they don't have space travel, they don't have robots... so what are the 100,000 researchers doing?

[roboslacker]

1 hour ago, DAL59 said:

so what are the 100,000 researchers doing?

reversing the polarity, of course.

[magnemoe]

2 hours ago, DAL59 said:

Yes.  1/5th food production, 1/5 lawyers, 1/5 police, 1/5 government,  1/5 researchers.  That is definitely a well thought out society /s.  Also, what are the researchers doing?  They don't explore, they don't expand, they believe they are the only humans left, they don't have space travel, they don't have robots... so what are the 100,000 researchers doing?

1/5 lawyers could make sense on something like the capital planet in the Mote in the Goods eye universe there the capital was an water world. Population is imperial court, politicians, lobbyist, military and obviously lawyers and the rest including farmers support them. Still 20% farmers is high for an technological civilization, US has 4% and is an major food exporter. 

For an insulated population 20% lawyers and you either had universal replicators a long time and strong copyright laws or an serious Venezuela like problem. 
Both probably end in an revolution but the first one probably work out pretty well as in some people get killed.  

 

[kerbiloid]

A free urban researcher accepts crowdfunding.

Spoiler

 

[ARS]

In Die Hard 2, there's some:

1. If you have even a cursory knowledge of airports and how commercial airliners works, the entire plot will fall flat on its face. It relies on the whole cast not knowing that all of those airliners flying around without a working runway can just fly to another airport. The movie tries to explain this by saying that the nearest other airport is shut down because of the snowstorm, but if those airliners are carrying enough fuel to circle the sky for two hours, they can just fly to an airport further away. For reference, the film takes place in Washington, D.C., which has two nearby airports that are actually mentioned in the film: Dulles International (the target of the terrorist plot) and Reagan National (the one that's shut down). With the Mid-Atlantic United States being the most densely-populated region in the country, there are at least a dozen major airports within 300 miles of DC that an airplane can reach in two hours with fuel to spare (Baltimore International, for instance, which isn't that much further away from Dulles than Reagan), not counting the various military airbases that would gladly receive commercial airliners' request to land in the event of an emergency.

2. There's a scene where the hero claims that the criminals were carrying "Glock 7" handguns that are invisible to airport scanners because they are made of porcelain rather than metal. Even accepting this ludicrous premise (a real Glock is about 87% steel in reality and cannot get through an X-ray or metal detector, and the action of firing a bullet creates too much pressure for the barrel or chamber, even of a handgun, to be made of anything but metal), anyone would know that bullets are also made of metals such as lead, and would thus set off metal detectors regardless of what the gun carrying them is made of. This is also ignoring that airport scanners don't just look for metal, but shape as well. A non-metallic gun will still show up, and though it won't be as bright as a metallic one, anything gun-shaped will raise eyebrows.

3. The climactic scene of the hero lighting a trail of aviation fuel to blow up the plane also contains three particularly bad science about how the aviation fuel behaves: One, aviation kerosene is very difficult to ignite unless first vaporized (such as in the fuel injectors of a jet engine, or in a plane crash). A pool of aviation kerosene lying on a tarmac runway is unlikely to ignite under cold and windy conditions depicted in the film. Two, even a trail of gasoline which is far more flammable still burns at such a slow rate that you could overtake it at a brisk walk, making it impossible for a trail of fire to catch up with a plane which is accelerating to take-off speed.And three, even if the burning fuel did catch up to the taxiing plane and the flame reached the open fuel tank, it is almost impossible for that to cause an explosion of the fuel as depicted in the movie since there would not be the required fuel-to-air mixture for explosive combustion (and the rapid air flow would probably blow the flame out anyway).

Also, Dulles International Airport is constantly referred to as being in Washington, D.C. when it is actually in Virginia, dozens of miles away. And the airport in the movie looks nothing like the real thing.

[DDE]

6 hours ago, DAL59 said:

That is definitely a well thought out society /s.

And you could leave it at that. The dystopian YA fiction series it was emulating made very little sense (regrettably, Bad Comedian doesn't add English CCs to his rips... unless it's Company of Heroes 2), it makes even less sense.

Quote

So, to avoid the mistakes of the past, they split society into five Factions. But you can also pick any of them.

So, they have rules, but you're also free to do whatever you want? They have totalitarianism, but also freedom?

Remind me, what were they doing to avoid the mistakes of the past? Introduced a pointless and decorative Faction test?

 

[Gargamel]

3 hours ago, ARS said:

the action of firing a bullet creates too much pressure for the barrel or chamber, even of a handgun, to be made of anything but metal

There are working designs for a pistol from a 3d printer. not just hypothetical.  They can only be fired a fwe times before repairs need to be made, but combining those with ceramics would make for a long lasting gun that would not be detected by a metal detector.  But, as you said, an X ray machine should pick up the shape.   

[DAL59]

1 hour ago, DDE said:

Bad Comedian

Unrelated, but if all his videos are in Russian, why are half of the video titles in English?

[wumpus]

On 12/21/2018 at 8:06 AM, DAL59 said:

I just got a copy of "worlds in collision".  OH BOY.  Literally nothing in this book makes any sense.  

I think I remember someone (Carl Sagan?) saying that he knew the orbital mechanics were garbage, but was intrigued by the linguistics side.  Then he talked to a linguist who knew the linguistics bits were garbage but was intrigued by the orbital mechanics.

Isn't that a "accept the Bible as an accurate record and attempt to provide a mechanism to make it work" book?  I think that there's a reason that anything that tries to use that argument now tends to veer off into assuming things like a flat Earth...