From here:
Because finding a contaminated sample of cells, extracting the DNA, successfully amplifying a clean PCR, genotyping or sequencing it, and editing your perfectly clear and uncontaminated results always takes about ten minutes. And nothing ever fails. Ever. They must pray to the PCR Gods more than I do. Oh, and not to mention they have a genetic database of every human on earth to compare their DNA to. Even if BLAST ever did grow that large, it would take hours, if not days of computational time to find the correct match.
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Yeah, now whenever I watch CSI with my dad, he’ll just turn to me and ask, “That’s nothing like how it actually works, is it?” Nope.
And as a side note, you know you’ve been working on your honors thesis too long when a graph jam graph annoys you. The Y axis is horrible, and there are no error bars! I can definitely go from tissue sample to sequence data in 3 days if everything works perfectly, and I’ve also had it take up to two months (stupid low sodium clean up procedure!). …I’m a nerd.
Being an aerospace engineer ain’t remotely like what ya see in the movies, neithers. Is much less white lab coats and going insane from suppressed nerdrage.Shoot, them medias cain’t even do housewives accurately.
And this is why you can’t watch movies about history with me. “Romans in Britain in 476? No, they evacuated in 401 and then again in 409. That sword is wrong. He’d have a spatha, not a high dark ages broadsword. Why does he have chainmail? I don’t understand. Commodus was a good emperor, goddamnit. He didn’t die in the arena and he sure as hell reigned longer than six months. ARRRRRRGHHHHHHH” *head asplode*
Two words: Jurassic Park.That was really silly.
Oh God, you can’t watch Jurassic Park with me either. Or Gattaca. Or anything with bad genetics, really.
Or mothers. Parents on tv have lives outside of raising children. Totally unrealistic!
Commodus wasn’t exactly a emperor, dude. You could probably make a better case for Nero being an okay guy than you could someone who tied footless people together and beat them with a club.
We should have an angry-biologist inaccurate movie-watching party sometime. I love mocking the bad science, but most of my friends don’t really appreciate it….
Commodus was the Emperor of Rome from 177-192, in joint rule with Marcus Aurelius from 177-180. I would say that ruling Rome for 12 years alone counts as being Emperor.
Yo, Veritas, let’s hang out together and trash Hollywood history movies together. I’m a 12th-century buff rather than Late Imperial (though I’m good enough to take your points). For instance, watch crusades history with me and I go, “Hey, Saladin wasn’t a sexy hardass, he was a weedy nerd; when he tried to cut Reynald’s head off he just nicked him and someone else had to take over.”
Hey man, I’m down for that. I specialize in 19th C North America and forward, but I have many scattered interests. Any history movie is fun to heckle. My favourite (least favourite?) is The Last Samurai.
As a statistics geek Graph Jam *sigh* has also been known to drive me into outright agony.
If you’re ever in Scandihoovia, consider yourself invited. BBB. I don’t know enough about Meiji-ishin to heckle TLS, other than for the way the protagonist of films about exotic histories has to be a white Westerner. I greatly fear me that people took “the last samurai” to refer to Tom Cruise rather than Saigo Takamori.My nomination: what a Usenet group I hung with used to refer to as “The Movie That Must Not Be Named”. Begins with a B and starred a certain Australian Catholic whackjob.
Where in Scandinavia, mate? And yes. That movie, I still enjoyed, but not because it was historically accurate – because I was drunk.
This is why I love Firefly, and why the Suits At Fox didn’t get it at all:1. In space, no one can hear you. At all. Period.2. In a couple centuries of exploration/colonization we don’t find any rubber-suit BEMs.3. A laser pistol powerful enough to do any real damage will suck the batteries dry before it can do any real damage.4. If you’re colonizing a completely undeveloped planet a long way from home, you’re better off minimizing the SuperUltraGinchy HiTech machinery because if it breaks you can have a long wait for the next supply ship full of replacements. But if you bring horses and other draft animals along, you always have replacements on the way, and they don’t use exotic fuels (the Suits never got the horses).
Bergen, Norway. Alas, I can’t show you my webbed feet on the Net…. And you?
Nova Scotia, Canada. I’d like to go to Bergen sometime. Sounds like a party.
I love this (related) cartoon from XKCD: http://xkcd.com/683/
Inhumane tortures of subjects was pretty universal for Roman emperors. Also, ‘good emperor’ and ‘good person’ aren’t nessecarily referring to the same traits. A good person behaves ethically, a ‘good emperor’ might be used to discuss political sucesses. For example, Queen Elizabeth of England might be called a ‘good queen’ because of political sucess and relatively low level of social unrest, while still not being a great person, what with the executions and religious based slaughter and all.
I dislike the graph because it has discrete values for the x-axis but displays as a connected set. Data of this sort seems far better suited for bar graphs.
And crap like this is why I’m a terrible person to watch movies with too.
You should be used to the climate, then. Parties in this burg you’ll have to find on your own, I don’t go out, except into the forest. We have rocky mountains between our suburbs, country that in say the UK would be a national park.
I could get blast searches faster than days. Minor algorithm change. No biggy. I dare you to load millions of DNA sequences into my hacked postgres database.
Actually there was at least one ep a few yrs ago where there were guys recording stuff, to make some “show” based on following them around, and …that annoying nerdy guy (not that nerdy & annoying go together but, he was!) who does (or did?) most of the testing stuff was in there and he was running some test and he kept looking around for them because he wanted them to see, and the other guy (I forget who it was, maybe Warrick? iuno) was like, Dude that takes hours, they’re not going to sit around here staring at it! Okay so it was ages ago and I don’t know the exact dialogue but, still.Anyway I think most people are aware of that, but it’s a show, it’s entertainment. How entertaining WOULD it be to sit there and stare at them running tests for hours? Not so much. It’s not meant to portray real life, except in the broader sense. “Cops/forensic scientists catch criminals by examining these sorts of things and using these sorts of tests” kinda deal. I dunno, it bugs me when people pick apart fiction as well, being fiction. I have far more problems with people in movies/shows acting like idiots just so a certain incident can happen. THAT is what should be realistic, the way people act, not the fictional problems they’re solving. If a person with a gun doesn’t shoot the gun just so they can end up bit by some zombie-esque thing, or a person with a taser and a knife stands there screaming in horror as some freak grabs the other person from the roof of the elevator while his arm is RIGHT THERE in front of her to stab and taze away, just so they can all be caught again, etc etc. Don’t make characters act like idiots just to get your end result. Have them be real and FIND a way to achieve it! But making things go quicker so they can actually be done in the course of a 47 min tv show? Yes, that is more than acceptable. heh.
As Ben up there says, the graph should be a bar graph, not a line. The Y-axis is pseudo logarithmic so it’s not too bad, but your desire for error bars would suggest having to watch a lot of CSI for multiple samples. Bleurgh.
People need to learn more science; it’s that simple. My mother and I both want to vomit every time we hear the word “organic” being used to mean “living”; no, it means there’s carbon, living or not! Just last night, I saw that my package of decaffeinated tea advertised the tea as “naturally decaffeinated”. Err, I don’t think there’s a natural way of decaffeinating tea, other than perhaps letting bacteria decompose it. I assume they meant that the decaffeination process involved carbon-dioxide rather than solvents, and I’ll grant that that’s a superior method, but still, having carbon-dioxide dissolve the caffeine in your tea leaves is still pretty artificial, regardless of how safe it is or how many carcinogens it doesn’t impart or how many antioxidants it doesn’t unfortunately break down. My mother works for the USFDA, and she wants to scream every time she hears that an herbal supplement is natural and therefore safe. And she is wont to respond, “Yeah, but rattlesnake venom is natural too.”
Y2K as a coder….Even as much as 6 months out I was pretty sure my video player and fridge were safe. And i was likewise pretty sure neither would explode just because the year reset to 1900.
Don’t forget that all pictures and videos can be “enhanced” by miraculous photo programs without said pics/videos dissolving into blurry little pixels. As seen here-
My wife is a big fan of Diagnosis Murder where Dick Van Dyke, a doctor, solves crimes helping out his son, a copMy questionsDo doctors have too much spare timeDoesn’t his son get pissed off that dad keeps solving his crimesHas Dick Van Dykes son, who plays his son in the tv show ever been in a tv show Dick Van Dyke wasn’t in Answer NoI’m still looking for the software that manages to retrieve addtional pixels that weren’t collected when the photo/video was originally taken the guy that authorised the purchase of hundred of ltttle lasers so they could track bullet paths instead of handing them a big ball of string.a guy who can put together those 3d simulations in less than a couple of weeks the cops use to show the guy with tyre tracks on him was hit by a carthe episode where they need to do one of those flying zooms up a person.s rectum
I was looking for Boobquake info for religiongonecrazy.com for http://www.religiongonecrazy.c… and I stumbled into this thread.I’ve taken a year of Forensics Science classes at Purdue with Professors Haskell, Williams, and Tate. We would watch an episode of CSI in the class and write entire pages with lists of errors in the episode. Also in the class and in the Purdue Forensic Science Club, you got to go to Professor Haskell’s farm to ride in renovated half-track tanks, do target practice there, and talk around the campfire roasting smores. It’s good stuff.Professor Haskell has been around the world, testified in Canadian murder trials, and was given the key to Canada.MAD TV CSI Parody:
MAD TV CSI Mayberry:
CSI China Mad TV:
I’ll mention some other things about pseudoscience.I’ve watched NUMB3RS twice. I’ve seen some things in it that I don’t agree with. They don’t explain Byzantine Math very accurately.I majored in Computer Graphics Technology. You can’t do this with Computer Graphics with a straight face unless you have a gigapixel camera at that resolution:
Also, computer graphics take much longer.If you’ve played Unreal Anthology and certain other computer games, you get to go to extrasolar planets. Actually, the nearest star except for the Sun is 4.3 light years away. It would take 4.3 years at the speed of light to reach the star or well over 10,000 years at the speed of the Voyager Spacecraft.I like the movie Contact. I think its Jen’s favorite movie too. A signal from space would be weaker than where it started. We talked about this in the radio class. With special software, you can bounce signals off of meteor trails or the Moon, but the signal gets weaker.My second favorite pseudoscience UFO story was in The encyclopedia of UFOs. A crazy man said that he saw a UFO land, aliens stepped out, and telepathically told him that they were from Venus. The bigger problem with that story is that Venus’ atmosphere is about 91% sulfur compounds and about 460 degrees. You’d be dead instantly on Venus. I don’t believe in telepathy either.My favorite pseudoscience UFO story is Ancient Aliens from The History Channel. It’s entertaining, but I don’t believe it.