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The Plumber Problem

hypercritical.co

181–190 of 253 posts

Re: The Plumber Problem

#181

My wife is a physician and it drives her crazy. It often manifests as a scene like: Doctor 1: This patient has severe hepatitis, we need to get them into surgery stat! Doctor 2: You mean they have an inflammation of their liver? Which is truly the dumbest possible way for a doctor to respond in the real world, though obviously can be necessary for exposition to the viewer. As a programmer, "Live Free or Die Hard", "I…

arrgh - swordfish really got to me

The thing that bugged me the absolute most and destroyed by suspension of disbelief completely was Hugh Jackman couldn't type a coherent sentence on a keyboard if his life depended on it (and it did in several scenes). It looked at times like he was just bouncing all ten fingers up and down on the keyboard like a kid just going bang, bang, bang on a piano.

Aside: Watched that movie twenty-two years ago and am still obviously triggered by it!

Re: The Plumber Problem

#182
post #11

This applies to the real world as well. I've had a couple of times when I've been closely involved in an event that was covered in the national newspapers. Both times the stories were presented with major factual inaccuracies and with clear bias. I've brought this up in conversation a few times over the years and quite often a similar experience was reported by others. Yet everyone still seemed happy to trust the acc…

And yet we manage to keep ourselves reasonably informed. I subscribe to one of the major papers, and avail myself to a variety of mainstream sources. I can count on the fingers of one hand the times, over multiple decades, that I've ever looked back on an issue and felt that I had actually been misinformed. "You made one tiny mistake so your entire organization is discredited" would have been an unreasonable reaction…

Saddam had current stockpiles of WMDs. (No, he'd long ago gotten rid of them.)

The attackers on the US compound in Benghazi were regular folks upset about the film "Innocence of Muslims". (They were organized Islamist militants, including groups affiliated with Al-Qaeda.)

"Hands up, don't shoot!" (There's no evidence Michael Brown ever said that.)

Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation. (The contents have been repeatedly authenticated.)

Those are four massively popular lies that the media told over 20 years, of which you should be aware. I regularly see media outlets peddle falsehoods that they have been told are false, but I don't know what your specific knowledge is.

> So I think that Gell-Mann Amnesia, while amusing, is overblown.

I think you're proving it true right now.

Re: The Plumber Problem

#183
post #7
post #3

At the end of the movie Gladiator(2000), Maximus has a vision of being reunited with his family as he walks through a field of wheat. However the wheat is clearly a modern dwarf variety. These weren't developed until the mechanization of agriculture in the 20th century. Ancient varieties would have been taller because the stalks were used as a building material.

https://comicbook.com/thewalkingdead/news/the-walking-dead-s...

Yeah, I wonder how folks in post-apocalyptic worlds keep their hair trimmed so well.

Re: The Plumber Problem

#184

Part of the movie “American Gangster” was filmed in the neighborhood I lived in. When I watched it, the breaks in continuity versus actual physical reality were so distracting that I had to turn it off within the first ten minutes. I’m sure for anyone who didn’t literally live on the block where they were filming, this is an issue they would have never ever ever noticed, but for me it felt very much like a plumber pr…

For me, the Star Trek movie with the giant, desert, canyon in the middle of Iowa was a real “WTF?” I can’t believe that only Iowans were bothered by that. If you have ever driven across Iowa, I am certain your view of corn fields was wholly uninterrupted by canyons.

In all of the shots I can find of that scene, the canyon is clearly a quarry with blocks cut out by wire saw (filmed in a quarry in Vermont). I guess the historic quarries in Iowa are filled in with water to create artificial lakes by now, but that's something that only Iowans would really know.

Re: The Plumber Problem

#185
post #135

My version of this problem is when there are violin scenes in movies/TV shows. It’s immediately clear when someone is not in sync with the music, has bad form, and generally just doesn’t know how to play. It just zaps me out of the scene. However, if the scene/actor actually knows how to play, then it’s an awesome surprise and I have even more respect for the scene. The most recent example of the latter is in Ted Las…

Grew up in a musical family although no violinists, but just the way he adeptly adjusted the violin just before he started playing startled me. I turned to my wife and said, "Nate can play!"

Re: The Plumber Problem

#186

Funny, I got plumber-problem'd by this article. > In Speed 2, a plot point involves a laden oil tanker about to collide explosively. My wife, native to a major oil port city, couldn’t follow the plot because she could tell the tanker was empty just by looking at it, so she didn’t understand why everyone was saying it would explode. Wait a minute. Full oil tanks don't explode, but empty oil tanks full of hydrocarbon v…

No, oil takers have an inert gas system to ensure that the tanks are not explosive, empty or full. They pump non-flammable flue gases into the tanks to displace oxygen.

(This was a plot point in the novel "The Devil's Alternative" which I read probably 40 years ago but my brain remembers random things :-)

Details: https://www.marineinsight.com/marine-safety/protection-again...

Re: The Plumber Problem

#187

I once saw the movie Armageddon in the movie theatre onboard a drilling rig. The heads of everyone in the audience collectively exploded watching the drilling scenes (both on earth and in space). Fun fact: In the DVD commentary, there's a point where Ben Affleck asks Michael Bay why it would be easier to train drillers to become astronauts than it would be to train astronauts to become drillers. If I remember correct…

My biggest problem with the movie was why did they need to bring a gatling gun to an asteroid?

Re: The Plumber Problem

#190
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Doylist explanation is that of course the human brains are being used as computing substrates; the energy explanation is a symptom of how little the Zion people actually know about the world.

An alternative explanation is that the machines aren't using the humans for anything ; they're just devoted to the most ethical treatment of these billions of people who believe themselves to be at war, and the only way to capture them and keep them sane is to hook them up to virtual reality and keep them complacent. Every human is a prisoner of war, in the finest possible cell.

Neo and almost everyone else was born in the Matrix; they weren't captured in war.
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