From backwards boards to king-flipping, Hollywood can’t get chess right
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
What really worries me is that most of us have far more false experience of most of the world than we have real experience: how many of us know much about chess, or police work, or soldiering, or programming (okay, that one HN has down pretty well, I hope), or love (I hope most of HN has that one down at least a bit), or church, or business? And yet no doubt all of us have very strong opinions about these things, due in no small part to … the false movie experiences we've had.
Yes, somewhat more bizarre Hollywood influence is that people fall down[0] when they are shot (even though, bullet doesn't have enough kinetic energy to force it), just because they saw this happening in movies.
0. http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2013/07/why-do-people-f...
Your article is only about getting blown back by the impact which is generally reserved for only the cheesiest of 80s action movies.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iL52P2vH3l0 WARNING: Not excessively gruesome, but it is war footage
I've seen people playing with the board oriented wrongly, not more than a couple of times admittedly. Is the reason for it being so common in films that they've flipped the shot a lot of the time?
Most results that I found note that it probably does not affect the game that much. If you're planning to write down moves it may become confusing when someone with a correctly set up board tries to replay it.
If you set up the pieces the same way, you literally just play with different colors for the fields.
If you mirror your setup of pieces because you want the white queen to go to the white field, then you just play mirrored chess. Apply this transformation again to obtain the actual chess game.
As in, tip the king? I play chess professionally and I do it especially when it's a close game but I know I am losing and there is no point in playing (unimportant match in tournament, last game with no consequences etc).
I tip the king, shake my opponent's hand and walk away.
Probably our consulting fee is just too high for Hollywood.
My sister and my brother-in-law are both lawyers. They love this movie. Their professors all love this movie. And from earlier this week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13885659
She saw My Cousin Vinny, but long before she had studied law, so she doesn't remember it well enough to say.
http://lawandthemultiverse.com
Their take on "The Lincoln Lawyer": http://lawandthemultiverse.com/2011/05/27/the-lincoln-lawyer...
A funny thing; one movie I've seen called out on different occasions by naval veterans as actually getting a lot right, particularly in how people interact in the service, was the comedy Down Periscope.
And, it's not hard to get it "kind of right". At least have the thief plug in some kind of "transponder bypass" gadget and mechanically break the steering lock.
It never stopped being fun, as I would pretend I was in some kind of 'Gone in 60 seconds' situation, even though the car in question was a rusted-through Metro. And the looks I got from passers-by, especially in car parks, were priceless.
EDIT: And as they also broke the door lock, I could totally unlock it with a screwdriver.
My door lock worked fine, although I noticed that it was so ~crap~ that I could actually unlock it with the key of other cars of the same type. A couple field tests confirmed that I could unlock _other_ 2 CVs with my key as well, on a regular basis.
It was a diesel truck, but the glow plug igniter (or heater, whatever you call it) had gone out, so it was wired to a couple of toggle switches, so you had to flip one switch, wait like a minute or two, then flip a second switch, wait some more, then flip them off, then start up. They were in some kind of pull out tray (probably an old ash tray or the like) from the dash, and the original preheater would still turn on the light on the dash, but not actually heat the plugs, so it was a built in theft deterrent, since you couldn't actually start that way.
Then at some point, someone either ran over his keys or dropped them in a cement pour (I don't remember anymore), but he had to move the truck for some reason, so he busted the ignition cylinder, so he used a stubby screw driver he kept in the cup holder to start it.
The tailgate was kept up by two chunks of rebar slid through holes in the side of the truck into the tailgate. The bed of the truck was rebuilt out of recycled lumber and plywood from demolition work. Grill was rebuilt out of metal mesh that broke off one of his backhoes I think. That truck was a hell of a sight. Wish I had a picture of it.
The reason I'm curious is that every time I've looked inside a consumer-grade electronic lock, all of the "security" is in the part that's physically accessible to the user, and then there's just a pair of wires that goes to a relay or an I/O pin (+ground) in the main control system. i.e. it's generally trivial to just figure out what needs to be done with those two wires, and forget looking at the innards of the security mechanism entirely.
Caveat: I have only examined a handful of such devices, not conducted an extensive survey.
In this case, what I'm imagining is that since the car half of the transponder pair needs to be near the ignition switch[1], there's a decent chance that it's a complete module with maybe 3-4 pins connecting it to the rest of the car - power, ground, and either "key detected" pin or relay power.
Obviously it would be safer to have the module simply route signals between the ECU and the key, so that bypassing the lockout would require tampering with the ECU, but my limited experience described above makes me think there's a non-zero probability that at least some manufacturers went with the self-contained module approach.
[1] In at least some configurations. For cars where the transponder works anywhere near the vehicle, this would not be the case.
Edit: replaced asterisk with footnote indicator to avoid italics in the wrong place.
Anecdotal, but I hear most thefts now involve either stealing the key, or towing the vehicle, or simply stealing old cars without this tech.
Hollywood isn't in the business of accurate depictions.
It's easy to fall into the hole of uncanny valley if too much things just don't add up. Keeping things realistic can also add more non-manufactured conflict that makes content more interesting - e.g. see for example The Expanse, where a lot of conflict of the story also lies in the fact that the writers understood how space physics works.
Hmm, what do you mean? Isn't that the definition of accuracy?
At this point many things cannot be done in a realistic manner because it would break the viewers' suspension of disbelief...
Years ago when the BBC made a drama series about a cathedral choir they found it easier to take choristers and teach them to act than to teach actors to sing. Whilst the overall plots or concepts may still be greater than life there are directors that appreciate a bit of underlying accuracy.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ArtisticLicenseFi...
Then again, based on the very large index of TV Tropes pages called 'Artistic License - X', it's pretty clear that Hollywood movies (and other media) are usually inaccurate in their depictions of just about anything. It's entertainment, it doesn't have to be accurate (and in a lot of cases is usually better if it isn't).
I am sure we've had illegal positions come up as well, but that one I can understand.
Generally speaking, those Checkmates I miss are Queen or Rook sacrifices, or "Smothered Mates". There are plenty of checkmates that are obvious 10+ moves ahead... but if you aren't explicitly looking for a smothered mate, it tends to be hard to see IMO.
Every time there's a bridge scene I can't help but look for it and "fondly" remember my barcode development days.
I'm fairly certain when I was a kid that I made all those mistakes when setting up the board.
The only rule I can find is from RFC 1738 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt)
"The rightmost domain label will never start with a digit, though, which syntactically distinguishes all domain names from the IP addresses"