Factual mistakes in shows and books

What confuses me is, doesn't Steve have to have superhuman endurance to be able to power those limbs? I would think he would get exhausted at super-speed if not.

 

no - he as a miniature nuclear power source - it featured in an ep where he had to test an underwater breathing apparatus.

 

The sometimes-comedy website Cracked.com has a few articles on how Hollywood doesn't understand technology, which are good for a laugh.

Or, if you have a spare rest-of-the-day you can check out the TVTropes article* on Critical Research Failure.

(*Followed by several dozen "ooh, this looks interesting" articles.)

 

And that powers his entire body, does it? Not just his cybernetic limbs?

 

The only way to explain the abilities we see in the show is to assume the rest of his body is augmented at the nano-level, perhaps with something moving down from his arm--spine--and two legs. Those are the bulky sections--but everything in his body needs a boost.

 

I can't get past the title: "</scorpion>"

It's an XML closing tag. It indicates the end of an element. Where's the opening tag? An XML parser would stop processing the document right there. And what are they trying to say? "The End of Scorpion"? Why is there even a series if it's already over? It's pretty clear the person who created the title graphic wanted something that looked technical, but didn't actually know anything about XML.

The people who made the movie "<harmony/>" got it right. It's a self-closing tag, so the title represents the entire element. The movie even features a fictional XML-based markup language.

 

For me it depends on how much the show implies realism.

If it's a show where medicine is just a backdrop for the drama or something, I don't care if it's accurate. But if it's a kind of show with the kind of forensic exposition that's designed to sound like it's telling the audience about something real, then it's more important to be accurate.

And I'll forgive things like where DNA results come back in ten minutes, because really nobody wants to say "Now...in six weeks we will know if he's the killer or not."

Like most people, social realism is more important to me in fiction than technical realism. (Except in the case I described where they say it like it's real.)

I only saw the first three or four episodes of Numb3rs. I remember one episode where there were three criminals the cops were trying to get to talk and the mathematician designed a system to calculate who is more likely to break based on how much they have to lose. And I remember, instead of just relating this information to the cops, he got all three together in the same room and explained the scores to them. They were trying to get criminals to betray each other and they confronted all three of them together in the same room, and got one to crack by explaining to him why he would crack. That kind of thing is much worse than technical inaccuracies, in my opinion.

 

Also on TV robots never seem to have any power source and can run indefinitely.

 

That sounds a lot like the Prisoner's Dilemma...

 

Yes, which depends first and foremost on the prisoners being questioned in separate rooms.

 

...and on the prisoners behaving rationally, which is where game theory fails to predict real-world outcome unless the systematic behaviour patterns of humans are taken into account.

 

Going back to illustrations of stars, rainbows, etc.: It irritates me when a crescent moon is shown with a star between the ends of the crescent. That's saying there are stars between the Moon and Earth - which is, of course, not true.

 

That's down to artistic liberty, more or less. I guess they feel the need to convey what space is all about in the small space they do have by including a bit of everything, even if it's not technically correct.

 

Or they can't handle what otherwise looks like "dead space" in the center of the Moon.

Many years ago I made a set of bookends in plastic canvas. The original pattern had stars between the points of the crescent, and I decided, nope - not in my version. So I changed the pattern to make it clear that part of the moon was lit and part of it was dark.

 

I was reading a Voyager book once that said the phaser beams were blue when everyone knows they're orange.

Totally ruined it.

 

@King Daniel Beyond, it would actually be cool to see a show do somewhat realistic laser weapons, where you can only see particles light up in the beam rather than the beam itself, and the hull where the beam hits gets lit up so brightly that you only see the damage after the beam turns off or moves away. Someone looks out a window at the enemy ship, they see lots of sparkly, twinkly points of light, like fairy dust, then they're engulfed in light, and finally it goes dark again and there's a hole in the ship with glowing, sizzling metal edges.

 

I've always wondered why, in space operas that do an almost direct transferance from WWII/Age of Sail navy tropes, that they have this compulsion to make the beams look visible in space. Cannonballs and shells aren't visible either, so if somebody's firing lasers at you what you would probably see instead is a flash of light and a puff of gas from the gun's cooling system; the first sign that you've been hit is when a big chunk of your ship flashes red hot and then explodes.

 

If I had to film the look of a laser hit. I'd get some low res camera--like the old PXL-2000, and have a painted cardboard tube with someone holding a flame inside it to char it--while hitting the tube with a timing light--accompanied by some harsh metallic "slapping" sound. The point of view would be from within a pulse-Orion battleship watching a washed out image of a missile tube slowly destroyed--the noise from internal machinery.

That's what I see in my mind at least.

 

One of the weirdest continuity fails I've ever seen is in two Franklin the Turtle books.

In Franklin In The Dark, he can take his shell off and tote it around behind him on a string. In a later book, Franklin Goes to the Hospital, he needs surgery to put a pin in his broken shell so it will grow back together.

Which is it: permanently attached or not?

 

Because lasers look cool.

The problem I have (and this also applies to personal phaser battles) is that the beams always take a visible amount of time to reach their target. Logically, since laser and phaser beams are made of light, the beam should be instantaneous.

The only time I've ever seen this done correctly is the 29th-century phaser in VOY's "Future's End".