House: 6x16 - "Black Hole": Discussion and Spoilers
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Didn't really care for this one. Too much special-effects stuff that felt gratuitously arty. The idea that the patient's subconscious miraculously knew the answer to her medical problem was silly, and the "cognitive imaging" machine was pure sci-fi. They pretty much threw credibility out the window here. And for no good reason. They could've left all that stuff out and just had House realize there was something the patient wasn't telling them and press her to reveal it. I mean, that used to be his whole philosophy, that everybody lies.
And the observable universe is not believed to be 94 billion light-years across or whatever the guy said in the first scene. The universe is 13.7 billion years old, so the observable part is 13.7 billion light-years in radius (because light from further away hasn't had time to reach us yet), or 27.4 billion ly across.
And the observable universe is not believed to be 94 billion light-years across or whatever the guy said in the first scene. The universe is 13.7 billion years old, so the observable part is 13.7 billion light-years in radius (because light from further away hasn't had time to reach us yet), or 27.4 billion ly across.
Procol Harum's "Whiter Shade of Pale" at the end definitely kicked it up a few notches, though.
Really, though, the entire episode revolved around that. Wilson lying about the furniture. Taub lying about his personal life. The lies of omission about the patient and her boyfriend. Yeah, maybe they could have simplified it down, but that's why I kinda glance over the medical part of the show; I know the writers are doing things to amp up the tension that have no bearing in reality.
Agreed. The actual case wasn't all that interesting by itself. We've had quite a few more interesting cases by now.
The observable universe is actually believed to have a diameter of approximately 94 ly. The point here is that the origin of that light has moved away from us while the photons in question traveled here.
Right, forgot a billion in there. What's the difference?
(BTW, for some reason, I don't feel "that's what she said" jokes work with light-years.)
Right, forgot a billion in there. What's the difference?
(BTW, for some reason, I don't feel "that's what she said" jokes work with light-years.)
The universe?
The universe may actually be infinite in size, so I don't think it cares so much how large our observable universe is.The universe?
I've often wondered how real the medicine is on HOUSE. I've assumed they had very good medical advisors since I've never heard cries against the show.
Tonight, using the machine that showed an image from the girl's mind, it actually had me wondering "Is there REALLY such a device? That's WILD!"
The above comments have brought me back to Earth and now I'm feeling put out. HOUSE is becoming a cartoon to me now.
I also wondered at House himself telling Taub something like "I'm proud of you" over how he fixed things with his wife, and then looking concerned when he saw Taub talking with the blonde at the end.
That's not House. That will NEVER be House. 'I'm proud of you'? Even if those weren't his exact words, it's close enough and that's not him.
Who wrote this episode? Who let it get filmed?
Tonight, using the machine that showed an image from the girl's mind, it actually had me wondering "Is there REALLY such a device? That's WILD!"
The above comments have brought me back to Earth and now I'm feeling put out. HOUSE is becoming a cartoon to me now.
I also wondered at House himself telling Taub something like "I'm proud of you" over how he fixed things with his wife, and then looking concerned when he saw Taub talking with the blonde at the end.
That's not House. That will NEVER be House. 'I'm proud of you'? Even if those weren't his exact words, it's close enough and that's not him.
Who wrote this episode? Who let it get filmed?
The universe may actually be infinite in size, so I don't think it cares so much how large our observable universe is.The universe?
Well the universe can stick it's thumb up its ass then.
I thought it was a decent episode and one of the more involved and "early seasons" feeling of the medical mystery. House helping Taub out with his wife was an interesting plot.
And the dad doing his son's girlfriend? Ew.
Decent episode, it'll be interesting to see what PD's medical reviews says about the "dream reading" machine.
In the OP I have a link to Polite Dissent's page that offers medical reviews on House (by a real-world doctor) and he offers interesting insight on House's medicine the review usualy makes it up by early the morning after a new episode airs.
Ummm... Actually, a machine like that DOES exist. I remember reading a news story about it several months ago, and when House first mentioned it, I knew exactly what he was talking about.
I thought it was a great episode. But I wouldn't expect any less from my lovely Kaptanes "ship".
I thought it was a great episode. But I wouldn't expect any less from my lovely Kaptanes "ship".
Cognitive Imaging
It seems it more-or-less exists but, yeah, House "embelished" it a bit but in another few years, as Forman said, who knows?
It seems it more-or-less exists but, yeah, House "embelished" it a bit but in another few years, as Forman said, who knows?
He didn't say, "I'm proud of you", he said, "Good for you".
In House terms, that's light years different, and not all that out of character.
But it doesn't work anything like what was depicted in the episode. It only reads patterns of brain activity, and the researchers were able to match certain consistent patterns of activity to the three different short films whose content they already knew. If the subject had been thinking about something unconnected to those short films, such as her boyfriend playing baseball, there's no way in hell that anyone could've been able to extrapolate what she was thinking from the machine's readouts, because they would've had no preselected baseline for comparison -- and it sure as hell wouldn't have shown moving images of a person playing baseball!!!!! That was just stupid. A complete misrepresentation of the science.
Actually, I recall very vividly reading or watching something about a device that was able to do something very similar to what was shown in the episode. As I recall they had someone look at a series of cards with numbers, letters, shapes or the like, then someone in another room looked at a monitor that was showing the person's 'minds eye'(they had to focus very hard to make it show what they wanted IIRC) who then was supposed to match up what they saw on the screen to the same set of cards. The method you talk about was referenced as an example of how limited the previous technology was. This would have been at least a year ago, maybe two.
^IIf something like that did exist, it would have to be using electrodes to read activity specifically from the brain's visual cortex. Abstract thoughts are not automatically encoded as images; visual information is a specific subset of cognitive processing. If they'd gone into her skull and laid a net of electrodes right on top of her visual cortex, then maybe something remotely like that could've been possible if they were using equipment specifically designed to register the activity of the visual cortex specifically. But you can't just use an fMRI scanner to read someone's actual thoughts and see them rendered on a screen as animated visual images of the thing she's thinking about. That's just stupid.