{"id":1582,"date":"2007-07-12T09:53:55","date_gmt":"2007-07-12T09:53:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2007\/07\/12\/revenge-of-the-humorless-dorks\/"},"modified":"2007-07-12T09:53:55","modified_gmt":"2007-07-12T09:53:55","slug":"revenge-of-the-humorless-dorks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2007\/07\/12\/revenge-of-the-humorless-dorks\/","title":{"rendered":"Revenge of the Humorless Dorks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Via <a href=\"http:\/\/backreaction.blogspot.com\/2007\/07\/today-on-arxiv.html\">Backreaction<\/a>, I find that there&#8217;s a paper on the Arxiv titled &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/0707.1167\">Hollywood Blockbusters: Unlimited Fun but Limited Science Literacy<\/a>,&#8221; whose authors feel that the best way to counter bad pop-culture science is with equations:<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/467\/files\/2012\/04\/i-5f7e1f5489767a1b8e7634d9a191c358-movie_dork.jpg\" alt=\"i-5f7e1f5489767a1b8e7634d9a191c358-movie_dork.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>(That&#8217;s from a section discussing the bad physics in the ending of the first <cite>Spiderman<\/cite> movie. There are places where the math is thicker, but this gives a sense of the subject as well.)<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a fairly long paper (28 pages, single column), and analyzes seven silly movie scenes in some detail. I normally hate this sort of thing, as I think it needlessly contributes to the reputation of scientists as humorless dorks&#8211; after all, there are many, many reasons to object to <cite>The Chronicles of Riddick<\/cite> without needing to bring thermodynamics into the discussion.<\/p>\n<p>They have an interesting take on it, though, approaching the various movie scenes as &#8220;Fermi Problems,&#8221; and going through order-of-magnitude estimates to demonstrate the implausibility of the situations shown. In the alternate universe where I have infinite free time to develop a ten-week course around the idea of Fermi problems (tentative title: &#8220;The Science of Guesswork&#8221;), this would make a great final project assignment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Via Backreaction, I find that there&#8217;s a paper on the Arxiv titled &#8220;Hollywood Blockbusters: Unlimited Fun but Limited Science Literacy,&#8221; whose authors feel that the best way to counter bad pop-culture science is with equations: (That&#8217;s from a section discussing the bad physics in the ending of the first Spiderman movie. There are places where&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2007\/07\/12\/revenge-of-the-humorless-dorks\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Revenge of the Humorless Dorks<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1582"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1582\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}