Chaos Theory

Swimming like Scrooge

"How many dollar bills would it take to fill up an average size bathtub?"

Wha...?

Women on antidepressants may benefit from Viagra.

This looks fun

Chocolate cake in 5 minutes.

Big Box of Inappropriate

Heh heh heh.

"We already added a little rhyme from my childhood that I taught her a while back to say when people eyeball her in public, so her device will now say "Stare stare, booger bear. Take a picture, I don't care." (When she's old enough, perhaps she'll replace it with "What are you looking at, assmonkey?") At lunch yesterday (at a Mexican restaurant, naturally), she asked me to add "Beans, beans, the magical fruit. The more you eat, the more you toot." Clearly, I am a fine, fine influence on my child. Her teachers are going to be so proud."

Aw.

Still no cure for Alzheimer's.

Heroine or secret doper?

Can you be that good at age 41 without cheating? Oy.

Could Batman exist?

Here comes the science.

"What have comic books and movies told us about Batman's physical abilities?
There's a quote from Neal Adams, the great Batman illustrator, who said Batman would win place or show in every event in the Olympics. Probably if I were Batman's handler, I'd put him in the decathlon. Although Batman is shown in the comics as being the fastest and the strongest and all these other things, in reality you can't actually be all of that at once. To be Batman properly, what you really need to do is be exceptionally good at many different things. It's when you take all the pieces and put them together that you get the Batman.

 

What's most plausible about portrayals of Batman's skills?
You could train somebody to be a tremendous athlete  and to have a significant martial arts background, and also to use some of the gear that he has, which requires a lot of physical prowess. Most of what you see there is feasible to the extent that somebody could be trained to that extreme. We're seeing that kind of thing in less than a month in the Olympics.

 

What's less realistic?
A great example is in the movies where Batman is fighting multiple opponents and all of a sudden he's taking on 10 people. If you just estimate how fast somebody could punch and kick, and how many times you could hit one person in a second, you wind up with numbers like five or six. This doesn't mean you could fight four or five people. But it's also hard for four or five people to simultaneously attack somebody, because they get in each other's way. More realistic is a couple of attackers.

 

How long would Bruce Wayne have to train to become Batman?
In some of the timelines you see in the comics, the backstory is he goes away for five years—some it's three to five years, or eight years, or 12 years. In terms of the physical changes (strength and conditioning), that's happening fairly quickly. We're talking three to five years. In terms of the physical skills to be able to defend himself against all these opponents all the time, I would benchmark that at 10 to 12 years. Probably the most reality-based representation of Batman and his training was in Batman Begins.

How would all those beat-downs have affected his longevity?
  Keeping in mind that being Batman means never losing: If you look at consecutive events where professional fighters have to defend their titles—Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, Ultimate Fighters—the longest period you're going to find is about two to three years. That dovetails nicely with the average career for NFL running backs. It's about three years. (That's the statistic I got from the NFL Players Association Web site.) The point is, it's not very long. It's really hard to become Batman in the first place, and it's hard to maintain it when you get there."

Cyborg penis story!

Don't say I didn't warn you. Also talks about male contraception.

Drunk driving with Gene Weingarten

Weeks ago, Gene posted this: (All links Washington Post)

"This afternoon, for a column, I am going to do something highly unusual.   Your job is to guess what it is.   
Here are your hints:
1.   It’s going to be fun for me. 
2.   It’s kind of naughty, but in a way The Post has authorized.
3.   It’s a legitimate, interesting, reasonable  idea for a humor column.
4.   My ego is a little bit wrapped up in the results.
5.   The results might be such that I cannot write about this at all."

Here's what he did:

"Driving sober, I did swell. Then I drank a third of a bottle of the pinot -- I would describe it as "impetuously insouciant" -- and tried again. How'd I do, professor? "You drove at higher speed, but showed better handling of the car and held the lane well. There were no incidents."
You betchum! This was easy. So I drained the pinot in the next five minutes -- I'd describe it as "extremely red" -- and sauntered back into the Buick. At this point, according to the regulations in most states, I was a DUI waiting to happen.
Inside the car, things were going good. Goodly. The only thing I noticed was that I seemed to be humming a tune, "In the Year 2525," which was annoying, but nothing like guys puking out the window. I did great. Right, doc?
"You ran a red light and almost hit a pedestrian."
Okay, sure. But otherwise . . .
"You managed to keep the car in lane, but there were many deviations from the center line. You drove much faster. There were no crashes."
Doc said it himself! No crashes! I drank half of the second bottle, which I would describe as "definitely wet," then strode manfully into the car. For some reason, I don't remember all that much of the last two sessions except that, when I got out, I felt I hadn't done all that badly. Considering. I did have to close one eye to see that Prof. Eskandarian had only one head.
"You ran off the road after a curve. You crashed into a bus. You killed a pedestrian. You had a frontal collision with a car driving in the opposite direction in the other lane. You killed a bicyclist. As the test ended, you were beginning a dangerous maneuver that might have caused a rollover if it had continued."
Now I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that when completely zitfaced, I was a dangerous driver. But that's not what I was thinking. I felt I had performed pretty well, but that the machine had malfunctioned, registering errors where there were none. I remember writing these indignant impressions right into my notebook, which I am looking at right now.
It says, quite distinctly: "Lat plobey col pobber, ferl engs."

This week's chat:

"There is a story behind this column. It's about the process of big time journalism. When I first proposed the idea to Tom the Butcher, he was very concerned about one possible result: What if I continued to ace the test, well into staggering drunkitude? "Well," I said, "I can make that funny."
"I'm sure you can," he said, "but I will not publish it."

Scientists Prevent Brain-Cell Suicide to Keep Birds Singing

And how this might relate to Alzheimer's.