The Plumber Problem
hypercritical.co
hypercritical.co
The open bonnet is to expose the spring to air so it is kept cool and therefore has the correct force downwards on the seat. If you specify a closed-bonnet PSV (like the vast majority of PSVs) for steam service then the whole valve body can get up to the steam temperature, including the spring, and it doesn't lift until a much higher pressure than your bench test indicates.
Quite remarkable that they found someone to help them on this 5-second bit of animation who had experience with using steam in an industrial process plant or boiler, and not just a domestic plumber.
Probably a short enough list of depictions - does IMDb list them?
They hadn't insulated their piping, which would have led to condensate forming in deadlegs and causing steamhammer issues, but to be fair I don't believe the Mario Bros had designed or installed this system, and it was exploding at the time.
("Musta been a non-union job." - Super Mario Bros., 1993, looking at some pipework).
Unrelated kinda - does anyone remember seeing some videos of a guitarist basically PLAYING some speeches?
Like, there was a background of a speaker giving a speech or dialogue in a movie and this dude is PLAYING the speech with really weird jazz chords and they’re notated on the top of the screen.
Very weird and specific I know LOL
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3GY86ziPu8UJjggF4AxMKvRl...
I remember something similar for train emojis, but I couldn't find it from a quick search
Perfect example, you seem to be someone specialized in a field that would exist somewhere in the same vector map as plumbing. Not plumbing but pipes, so therefore it’s in the studios interest to ensure the specialized feel recognized as well. Had it been so obviously fake CSI Miami style, you might not feel the same about the movie, or maybe you’d not care and still enjoy the movie but you sure wouldn’t be in HN singing it’s praise. So it’s all upside for the studio to ensure you don’t get pulled out of the story or at the very least don’t talk to your friends who also live in the same vector map as you. Not saying it’s wrong as it’s cool to see effort put into the creation process but it’s definitely thought of ahead of time.
That was surprising. With a quick search about temperature and springs I found 3 items:
1 Spring constant descreases with temperature, not much at small increases but significant at much higher temperatures (that would make it open at lower temperatures than expected)
2 Spring gets longer at increased temperatures (that would make it open at higher temperatures)
3 Durability issues
Is effect 2 stronger than 1 at the relevant temperatures?
If there's a fixed relation between steam temperature and pressure it should be possible to design one to open at the correct pressure at the temperature that this pressur occurs at?
They call it the "cold differential set pressure".
You can calculate your own cold differential set pressure just as a cross-check against the vendor's calculation to make sure there are no misunderstandings but ultimately you should just use the vendor's value.
In the case of steam, because it is obviously non-toxic and non-flammable you can just let it go to atmosphere in an emergency, so the best thing is just to let the spring of the PSV be exposed to atmosphere rather than some variable operating temperature.
When I watched it at the cinema (in Athens) back in the day, apparently there was one more Spartan in the venue and we both stood up and shouted (using different words) something to the effect of: hey morons, you are going the wrong way, you should be marchin North!!
> the spartans start gyrating
There's a friend I've had for years. He's a physicist. I always ask him questions about physics. I've often referred to him as the smartest guy I know.
I have another friend, also a physicist. Less accomplished, but just as smart. Friend 2 hates Friend 1. Calls him an idiot. I generally dismissed it as arrogance or jealously.
Then, a few years ago, Friend 1 told me he'd been doing a lot of Python lately. I use Python a lot. Have for 15 years.
Over a group dinner, he was explaining a problem he was facing, specifically he was explaining how Python handles dictionaries. It was … very wrong. But he sounded like he REALLY knew what he was talking about.
It occurred to me that maybe Friend 2 was right all along. Friend 1 isn't that smart. He seems smart to me because I don't know physics. He's good at saying things that sound right. Maybe they are sometimes. But maybe they aren't sometimes, and it was that "sometimes he's wrong" thing Friend 2 picked up on, just like I picked up on the Python stuff.
Media, journalism, etc is likely the same way. 90% of the story can be right, or technically accurate, but if 1 fact is wrong, and you KNOW that fact, it's going to bother you. A lot, and will shade your opinion of everything else.
or... something.
Large language models.
What bothers me immensely more is the same but with human choices, motivations and character. There's no reason to try to understand characters as they increasingly make the most superficial or arbitrary decisions, pulled along by plot necessities rather than driving the story. The humans in recent movies feel like window dressing or set design.
"...oh you mean I could also just... give everyone enough food with a snap of the finger?"
A perennial problem in writing villains is characterizing them as insane and stupid (to explain why they do evil) but then in order to present a real threat to the hero they execute those evil and stupid plans with patience and intelligence.
Thanos has an army! An entire naval fleet assembled from centuries of constant war. He's a space Napoleon. That required skill, intelligence and considerable effort, as several characters tell us. And then after achieving the goal he spent so many years thinking about, he makes a dumb mistake, apparently without realizing it?
Same thing with the Joker in The Dark Knight (2008). Other characters say he's crazy. He himself says he's "just a dog chasing a car" with no plan or goals beyond causing chaos. Yet he is always executing complex plans which require precise timing? Not the behavior of a raving madman.
It's easier for me to believe in superpowers than to believe in people that have the psychological complexity of houseplants.
I enjoyed Unbreakable, Chronicle, Birdman, Fast Color, Freaks, etc.
You must not get out much then?
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 accuracy of the other articles being reported.
<https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsbe...>
Same. A few years ago, I worked at a large tech company that a certain well-known news organization likes to cover. After a few articles were published relating to work I was involved in, I found myself thinking "Nope, that's totally wrong" or "Technically correct but presented in a biased way". I decided to cancel my news subscription with them because I realized that they have a certain narrative they want to present to the public, and why should I trust any of their reporting on other topics if the one I was involved in firsthand was just completely wrong?
I have to believe that's not true. When Bill Gates or Warren Buffett sit down at their breakfast table, do they get fed the same diet of pablum that I do, as an Apple News subscriber? I doubt it. They presumably pay a ton of money for access to unfiltered, unbiased global intelligence.
But I have no idea how to get the newsfeed that people like that must have access to, regardless of cost.
1: https://www.businessinsider.com/bloomberg-reporters-compensa...
If you want just the facts so, try Reuters or AP, basically the source of the majority of news stroies we are fed by media (the exception being in-house investigated stories, but those are rarer by the day and flanked by so much filler articles that it is hard to filter the facts out). Also, professional inteligence organizations can be spectatularly wrong as well. Sometimes a lone, local jourbalist on the ground witj working internet for soke background research has it better. Local, because some random person from far away will lack the necessary backgroing and context to deliver more than some isolated, uninformed, highly objective opinion.
Whatever. Read the article. It contains direct quotes.
(Read the quote from the reporter carefully: the market isn't what's being manipulated. The news is... and by extension, the reader. The reader is who does the market-moving.)
What is your interest in carrying water for a company whose representatives admit to market-harming journalism practices? More important, what does such a company have to do with my expressed wish for an unbiased news source?
Musk is not an apparent functional illiterate like Trump, but he unfortunately has a long history of choosing poor information sources and reacting accordingly. (The "pedo guy" case comes to mind.) He cares less about accurate news than I do, that much is safe to say. So I doubt he takes advantage of whatever higher-quality sources might be available to him. Not when the latest missive from Catturd69 is free.
So I think that Gell-Mann Amnesia, while amusing, is overblown.
This isn't zero but it's not very common either. Usually, the domain in question is sufficiently subtle that you can't make a rigorous prediction from an untrustworthy media presentation at all; thus, the media accounts are effectively unfalsifiable (unless you go out and seek personal experience).
Is it really a big deal then? Experts really care about the details so they will notice inaccuracies, but does that mean that they really matter to the point that the entire notion of journalism and media itself should be discredited?
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.
> 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 vapor do.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Lee_Whorf#Career_in_f...
(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...
https://www.offshore-energy.biz/pablo-tanker-explosion-expos...
(Googling "oil tanker explosion" produces quite a few similar events)
I'm from Michigan, and I watched the movie "Fargo" a few years ago. In the opening shots of the movie, it is clearly actually very cold: you can tell because the snow flows like sand in the wind, rather than clumping together and sticking to things.
But in a bunch of scenes later in the movie, the actors are all bundled up and saying things like, "Wow, it's cold"; but my brain was like, "Why are they all bundled up? It's not cold at all!" I'm sure if I watched those scenes again I could tell what little things were telling me that; the lack of fog breath, the way the snow looked, etc. But clearly the weather had warmed up after they started shooting, and the directors didn't want to reschedule. "Nobody will know if it's actually cold or not!" Well, nobody from SoCal, but everyone from Fargo's latitude will, I guarantee you.
I grew up in a small village where a significant proportion of people ride, gaps in hedgerows where a number of horses have just passed through (eg a hunt) produce a wide band of hoofprints. But, I've never seen a route mainly used by horsedrawn carts.
Most of our bridleways look like slightly wider footpaths, but they're primarily used by pedestrians or bicycles and horse traffic is still relative little.
Anyway, ...
https://www.world-archaeology.com/features/crosstown-traffic...
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 problem and was basically a showstopper in terms of my ability to enjoy the movie.
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?
As a programmer, "Live Free or Die Hard", "Independence Day", and "Swordfish" are memorable examples of this sort of cinematic stupidity
Aside: Watched that movie twenty-two years ago and am still obviously triggered by it!
Generally they show extreme capabilities, similar to what machine learning can do now(Except it's implied that a lone genius coded it, rather that it being a trained model), in a world of highly flexible IoT type devices that can be repurposed to do anything via a pretty easy GUI.
I take it as a challenge. Using an app I wrote should feel like being on SeaQuest DSV. If there's a broken connector, can I make a software workaround? If I'm buying a product, what's the state of the art for that area?
Except hacking. Hacking scenes are just comedy.
Years ago, I used to be critical when it came to that sort of thing, then I realized that I was being critical of something with a clear purpose that's useful. And, that this was just a distraction from the often much more appalling flaws in mass media that can actually have real-world harms. I.e., flaws that give people the wrong idea about how things actually work in ways that can negatively impact their behavior.
"Independence Day" provides some exemplars of that, certainly. It is completely outclassed, however, by: https://www.salon.com/2023/02/05/the-core-science-entertainm...
These days, I see something like two axes, when it comes to flaws in movies (/ productions of any kind). One axis relates to "style" / "taste". For example, some people dislike works of the author Charles Dickens because he tends to spend a lot of time describing settings, preferring the works of someone like Shakespeare, who's typically much more "action-oriented". The other axis relates to factual / logical / structural issues, the worst in my estimation these days being in the "factual" part of this sort of "dimensionally reduced" axis (i.e., you could of course have 3 or more independent axes for what I've written).
I may not have much interest in something that has a style I'm not a fan of, but I only have a more realized reaction (something like negative, and I care to some degree) when the flaws are on that second axis.
She should try it - heh, save the annoyance for something "truly worthy" of it. :)
Medical shows have ventilators set up wrong, chest x-rays hung up backwards (L on R) and piss poor representations of CPR chest compressions. The main actor can often operate all sorts of specialist equipment, perform surgery and analyse results of complex tests. It’s almost universal.
Like "singing teacher reacts to <someone better at singing than they or any of their students will ever be>" kinda thing.
Wired and Vanity have some good videos in the vein of "Forensic scientist reacts to CSI" and etc. GameSpot has a good one reacting to firearms in various video games. There's too many medical ones to mention. I don't think I've found any entertaining coding related ones yet.
The job of a voice coach is to teach you to be a better singer, not to be better than you at singing.
Honestly, probably the worst thing I can recall is the first season of The Walking Dead when Rick hides inside of a tank turret. I was a tank commander back in my time. Do television writers really think there is that much space inside the turret?
I think that's why the author chose plumbers instead of rocket surgeons.
That's a sop to the actors who don't want to have their hair cut that way.
You'll see the same thing in historical dramas. The hairstyles betray the time when they were filmed.
And Star Trek had 1960's hairstyles and miniskirts.
For that you have also the UFO/SHADO series:
But if he asks to change a major plot point because it’s unrealistic, they won’t do it.
hacker opens an excel spreadsheet and types in a bunch of gibberish
"I'm in the mainframe."
Sure, there's 6502 assembly on the screen but the fact that it's some kind of valid hardware code invokes a kind of gritty realism to me. It might break immersion but it does it in a way that then brings me back in even more so at some level.
Imagine for example that it was Visual Basic or PHP. That would be hard for me to deal with in a way that 6502 assembly isn't? Especially given the time period of the film.
I think there's a kind of "atmospheric accuracy" that some details can invoke even if they're not strictly realistic. That is, I might know something is sort of unrealistic at some level (it's unrealistic that they'd be using 6502 assembly that far in the future, with machinery like the Terminator unit) but also feel like it's realistically grounded at another (there's some actual low-level hardware code involved).
A plumber might know that a certain type of pipe wouldn't be used in a specific setting in the film, but also know and appreciate that the pipe in the film is a sort of obscure pipe that is closely related to what would be used, and itself might be used in a very similar scenario.
A lot of what they do is social engineering, a lot of stuff references things that were actually part of the culture, and if you ignore the fancy graphics a lot of what is done is quite plausible even if not exactly as depicted.
Why, here it is!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PxTAn4g20U
this looks plausible enough.
But the 2nd law of thermodynamics requires that any energy harvested would be, by definition, less than the energy of the food required to sustain their bodies.
Therefore the plot makes no sense, because they should just shovel the food directly into the computer and skip the humans.
It's possible that the machines were advanced at some things but something that human bodies produced was something they couldn't directly synthesize.
Just like it would make no sense to explain the purpose of animal agriculture in human society as “extracting the animals’ energy”. Like you said, it’s the different form of energy (plus nutrients) that they can provide, not energy simpliciter.
I don't think anything substantive in the films is inconsistent with it (and the behavior of the agents throughout the films is suggestive of it), just the in-character exposition.
Which, to get really meta, you can explain as the filmmakers incorporating the inability of audiences to grasp, and projecting it into the film as an inability of the “free” humans to do so, so that (as part of the system of control it is established that Zion is) instead they were fed the “battery” story.
> Which, to get really meta, you can explain as the filmmakers incorporating the inability of audiences to grasp, and projecting it into the film as an inability of the “free” humans to do so, so that (as part of the system of control it is established that Zion is) instead they were fed the “battery” story.
Yeah and the original was already meta being a postmodern critique of society so it's a "yo dawg I heard you like meta..."
(And brain as thumb drive and braismns as networked processing units are maybe not equivalently difficult concepts for audiences.)
During and before the war, the machines were mostly solar-powered, so blocking out the sky was a last-ditch effort by humans to stop the machines that almost worked. But the machines developed a new form of fusion that used human bio-electricity as some sort of activation or catalyst. They weren't being used as energy directly.
Like, what else about a person is of any use to machines with that kind of power?
Every human is a prisoner of war, in the finest possible cell.
The machines are definitively - and canonically! - not.
They're effectively in a giant prison; within the prison, they're free to do whatever they want. They just can't leave.
Pretty much anything to do with physics, especially in sci-fi/space stories. Now I see everything as a typical human emotional drama with a science/space backdrop. Actual sci-fi where the plot directly ties into it is rare, and good ones rarer. It was actually better when sci-fi was niche and what there was, was trying to be good.
Even worse for me these days than this plumbers effect is bad acting. Once my mind gets into the reality of actors doing a job, getting this filmed, and played for me, it's hard to get back into the storyline even if it might be great, like trying to return to a dream when fully woken.
Or, we eat vegetables even though the energy in them is less than all the solar energy that falls on them.
But of course the calories in grass and sunlight aren't accessible to us. It's not impossible to imagine some parallel situation where human biology - perhaps genetically modified - is useful to transform some source of energy into a more usable form.
> MORPHEUS: Where did you hear about the laws of thermodynamics, Neo?
> (Pause.)
> NEO: ...in the Matrix.
> MORPHEUS: The machines tell elegant lies.
Paraphrased from https://hpmor.com/chapter/64
He was trying to be romantic but didn't actually know what the flower looked like in any real detail.
I guess good fiction requires a lot of research to maintain suspension of disbelief, perhaps more than writing about reality.
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 correctly, Michael Bay's response was something to the effect of "well, there would be no movie if that was the case so shut the hell up!"
Still makes me laugh.
Except for things related to the military, specifically uniforms.
If you have a modern military uniform in your show, then it has to be _perfect_. Any errors you make will be glaring to someone who wore that uniform and it will take them out of the show.
IME almost any other factual errors in a stage performance can be ignored by the audience. They're willing to overlook it because they know it's a show.
I started my career in CGI, I've acted, hosted TV shows, married an actor, made props, made movie vehicles, and produced a movie in Hollywood. I can literally watch nothing without critiquing the acting, casting, framing, lighting, stunts and CGI.
I guess the music is cool, though.
Now I instead say, "well, that's just bad/terrible writing."
It could have been done... if Indy knew the hour and minute the map room had been laid out, and it would only work twice a year. (Or once a year, if they had picked one of the solstices) Not exactly compatible with sneaking into the dig site under the noses of the Nazis.
Also: lack of scale would come into play. One would need much more precise dimensions of the staff, the height of the structure, and the angle of the sun's rays with much greater accuracy. Indy eyeballing it, as he does in the movie, wouldn't get him close to the location of the chamber. Indy and Sallah and crew would have needed to do a lot more digging and exploration to locate the Ark chamber (but of course, that wouldn't have made for a good movie, which is why such events are time-compressed).
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 Lasso, when Nate plays the violin - it’s legit and a great scene.
TwoSetViolin regularly review movies of both good and violin portrayal[0, 1]
Check Vernor Vinge's programmer-archaeologist profession.
Software can also have mistaken identity. Something that appears polished, is good software because not only did they make the thing do its function, but they even had time to do all this other stuff to make it look and feel great. The other possibility is that they did that work first, and the core function works just well enough that you can't readily tell it's completely broken inside if you go slightly off the beaten path.
That said, the more I learn about things like that, the less a sword seems practical in actual combat. Spears and (spiked) hammers are where it's at, with knives/dirks as backup worst case.
What really gets me so, is large battles. For some reason, it is cool to just break formation and charge a tightly packed enemy some 200 meters away. While screaming as loud as possible. Or the helmets in the last duel, hell, collored cloths over armor and insignias have exactly been developed in medival Europe to identify famous nobles and knights without seeing their faces... Plenty of occassions to show some famous actors in other scenes.
All of that is toped by the really bad writing we have in last cpuple of years. I mean TV took off with things like Breaking Bad. And the we got season 8 of Game of Thrones, to pick just one famous example...
Comment thread about digital audio/audio software: the comments are just clearly full of people who don't really know much about what they are writing about.
Anything else: wow, HN commenters are so knowledgeable and good at explaining stuff!
I think the main issue with the HN crowd, present company included, is that because they're good at learning they think they can quickly grasp the essentials for anything new.
Which is why there's like a revolving door of subjects that you suddenly get a lot of armchair experts about, going from currencies and investment banking to international conflict and politics, a short detour to amateur submarines, etc.
I think I read that The Big Bang Theory makes sure all the science is accurate. I wouldn't know.
How can writers focused on scientific accuracy create such ugly and unlikeable caricatures for their cast and embed so much anti-intellectualism in every episode?
The show isn't aimed at people they're caricaturing. And it was apparently tremendously successful, so whatever they're doing, they're doing it right.
Isaac Asimov saying is quoted for a reason...
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’
Just as terrible as the original from which it's a spin off. They actually had Jason Alexander and Ed Begley, Jr. on one of the episodes this week. I guess with enough money you can get almost anyone.
I think the fantasy city problem is at its worst in 3D video games, where you visit some impressive capital city, massive walls, towers...and enough housing for about a hundred people.
Anyway, with advancements in technology I'm sure we'll see proper cities to scale. It may not all be accessible though.
That and whichever druid spell makes the nearby farmland more fertile
I'd expect shop owners to have collectively figured out ways to deal with bards. Banks how to deal with invisibility, etc.
Now, granted the stratosphere is cold. But it’s also at very low pressure, and what happens to air when you compress it, say by moving it from the stratosphere to the ground? That’s right, it heats up. If you were to bring a packet of air down from the stratosphere, letting it heat adiabatically as it compresses to one atmosphere, I’d expect it to be hot enough to burn people rather than freezing them.
I rather enjoyed seeing Los Angeles being torn to pieces by multiple simultaneous super-tornadoes, though.
And it turned out to be deliberate because it was actually a cypher puzzle, and the chemicals encoded it. Still annoyed because it was solved in a cutscene by the protagonist with no opportunity to figure it out yourself, though.
The person I was watching it with is an actuary, and this kind of took all the joy out of what's otherwise a pretty good series.
If it’s a fantasy movie, I don’t care about bizarre effects. But something like Fast and Furious it’s just completely ridiculous to me. It’s just boring and lazy. Films like Grand Prix or Ronin have spectacular car scenes w/o being stupid.
In the beginning it's a city scene with policemen and carrie ann moss. And all of a sudden she does the unbelievable physics-and-belief- defying moves to escape.
I was like... this is NOT realistic.
But then I found out it is all a simulation, and I smiled and resuspended my disbelief.
Also they show earlier on at Area 51 our limited, but real, ability to control via software the alien devices.
I thought: Come on, you can use anything as an excuse for a malfunction event, why did you use that?
I think that at some level, when I’m consuming fiction, in the back of my head I’m learning the “rules” of that media. That creates a set of expectations about the boundaries of what can happen. Done well, a work can make a powerful impression by breaking the rules. That only works if the audience is aware of the rules in the first place.
A lot of movies go for verisimilitude. They’re trying to look and feel real, which can make the audience identify more with the characters. When you see a movie that does a lot of things right, it can be jarring when it gets something wrong. Suddenly you might be thinking - they could afford a hundred stylists, take over city streets to film, but they couldn’t get a plumber? It can take you out of the movie. The filmmaker doesn’t want to break the rules by accident.
Editing here because based on some replies my message wasn't clear: I was talking about expertise in plumbing exhibited by one of the protagonists, not someone watching the movie obviously.
That's the point, expertise in an area can completely distract from the plot entirely. I can't even watch anything medical-related with my wife since she'll get annoyed about inaccuracies and start complaining about them. Doesn't matter how unrelated to the actual plot it is.
Of course in a lot of cases expertise is needed. However that isn't important. The important part is you have more knowledge about something than the average person.
> Simon Orrell: My first exposure to “The Plumber Problem” was sitting in a theatre with my dad in 1973 watching “Emperor of the North” and my dad leans over to whisper, “They didn’t make culvert pipe like that back in the ’30s. It was plate, not corrugated.”
The Plumber (1979)
A young couple, living in a campus apartment complex, are repeatedly harassed by an eccentric plumber, who subjects them to a series of bizarre mind games while making unnecessary repairs to their bathroom.