Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Friday, October 16, 2009
Mid-semester Survey
This is to certify that I completed the anonymous mid-semester survey for Art/Physics 123 and am requesting the five points of extra credit.
As a student at San Jose State, I understand the university's Academic Integrity Policy (http://info.sjsu.edu/web-dbgen/narr/catalog/rec-2083.html)
As a student at San Jose State, I understand the university's Academic Integrity Policy (http://info.sjsu.edu/web-dbgen/narr/catalog/rec-2083.html)
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
The Physics of Sin City
The Physics of Sin City
Sin City is supposedly a world within our own. It is cast in treacherous ghetto settings, which mimic those we see in our heavily populated areas, although they are exaggerated versions. People are shot, raped, and tortured daily; survival of the fittest is the moral code. Those who choose to live here must be tough as nails. Literally. While the violence and action is enhanced beyond the norm, so too are the physical dynamics of the characters, allowing them to thrive in such depths. In most cases, the laws of physics hold to reality in Sin City, however, at times of heightened action they change to resemble things witnessed in fantasy and sci-fi stories. Because of the many examples present throughout the movie, we will follow Marv, the brutish and ugly protagonist, through his trials wherein he almost exhibits and imposes superhuman qualities. These scenes include the changeability of hard matter, the dynamics of falling, and the broken laws of inertia.
Let us introduce Marv. Above, we’ve described his personality and appearance, and now we should look at his physical traits. The man is not a superhuman. In a few cases we find evidence of this, such as when a woman with a personal vendetta against him, Wendy, ties him to a wooden chair. He is seen struggling against the ropes, which, unless he is simply choosing to remain captive, hold him effectively. Wendy also smacks him across the face with the butt of her handgun. Marv’s head whips back and he bleeds, in obvious pain. The scene sets him up as an ordinary human being. However, other scenes imply that he has incredible strength and endurance.
To define the changeability of matter, let us first look at the properties of the brick walls around which dozens of impact scenes take place. There are instances where these walls appear to have a solid mass. A car could not smash through one, as witnessed in one of the opening scenes, where it chases Marv down a narrow street. The car, a typically styled cop’s vehicle, was crushed all the way to its rear seat after ramming into the sidewall of a brick building. This should tell us that the brick-walled buildings in this area, even if only based on similar building codes, are indeed made of brick. However, scenes set in the same district would show otherwise. If we follow Marv, he takes us to an alley behind a bar. Here, he debilitates three mafia-type gang men, a couple of which get knocked upside the same type of reinforced brick wall. (Having been air born on the way to impact). This shows the sturdiness of the structure. But then Marv takes one by the back of the skull and drives his face into the brick. One would expect that the man’s head to crack on impact. If two other men could fly at this wall and be broken against it, this should be no different. But the wall crushes instead. The bricks collapse under the man’s face and he survives the hit, which, ironically, serves to make Marv look stronger. The properties of that wall must have been very brittle at that exact moment.
There’s the possibility that the walls had become old and degraded over time, but it isn’t likely that this would make much difference. The force of human flesh and bone would still be too small. There may also be documented cases of martial artists breaking through stacks of brick or through cinder blocks, but these are trained people who hit the stacks at their weakest point, when there is room for the stacks to break on the other side. These people would more easily be compared to Marv. Instead of using his fist to punch through the wall he is using a head. But if a martial artist were to place the equivalent of a skull between his hand and the cinderblock, the object would be broken before the block is reached. In the movie the scene is in slowed-motion, and it is clear that it is the skull that breaks through the wall.
There is another scene where Marv encounters a wall after he is captured by his nemesis and imprisoned. He is locked in a cell with one barred window, through which you can see that the wall is one foot thick and made of concrete. Marv grabs the bars of the window and pulls on them, in turn, ripping out a chunk of the wall surrounding the window. The mass of the wall can be seen as solid concrete where he broke out the chunk. In reality, people use wrecking balls and dynamite to break through that type of material. The wall itself would, again, have had to change properties for even the toughest human ligaments, muscles, and cartilage to simply pull it apart. Perhaps Marv got lucky and found a crack all the way around the opening? Then it would also have had to be brittle enough to break off chunks around the edges, because the piece he yanks out is both jagged and tapers out towards the outside of the cell. It would have been locked in place from the inside.
Another scene shows the phenomenon of changeable matter, but in the opposite way. In a scene where Marv dives into fall down the stairwell of a building, a wood railing becomes tough as steel when he latches onto it and swings himself over, stopping the fall. Instead of shattering, the wood creaks forward slightly and cracks a bit in the grip of Marv’s hands. The time it takes for Marv to reach the rail is difficult to judge because of the cut scene, but as he looks up we can see his followers chasing him down from at least four stories above. This would mean he fell at least forty-eight feet, if the stories are as they look: about twelve feet tall. According to our chart, falling over 49 feet he would accelerate to thirty-five miles an hour. Plus, he seems to have a build like many body-builders or professional wrestlers, which would make him up to 280lb, most of that being his dense muscle tissue. At that weight and speed, he would certainly hit with enough force to smash it, if not pull his own arms out of their socket. All of his weight is also born in the same spot. The rail tilts forward as he grips it, then shifts back as he uses his momentum, (so it appears), to swing back over it. There is a chance that the way Marv gripped the it slowed his impact-time somewhat, if he were a farther distance from the railing he might have rotated, giving the strength of his grip a chance to slow him out of the fall. But in the scene, he actually grips it from straight above with arms rigid. This would send his weight through the wood, if it were your everyday railing. There’s reason for suspicion though. It seems like the material is much tougher than wood, to be able to withstand the scene’s action.
Falling and impacting objects are also manipulated throughout the movie, as we can see in this same scene with Marv jumping over the banister and gripping the wood railing. In mid-air he seems to change vertical direction. Watch closely and it can be seen that when he leaps over the edge, he falls down the center of the stairwell, which looks to be twenty feet wide. When he grabs the handrail, he grips it from above, indicating he fell at an angle. This should not be possible unless, perhaps, he took a sprinting leap forward at fifteen miles per hour in the course of two steps and the banister he grabbed was on the other side of the building. The shot down the stairwell, however, shows him falling straight down, and the shot up it, after he lands, shows that he landed on the same side that he jumped from. He is also able to swing back up and over the rail onto the hall floor. This appears to be due to the momentum gained from the fall. In fact, it couldn’t have been possible for him to do so. The change in direction would have been too abrupt, as the railing, at about three feet tall, has a wall extending below it another three feet. There is not enough room to swing at all unless, after he smacks into the wall, Marv still has the strength and consciousness to use just his arms in pulling himself in a circular arc over the rail. That is difficult to imagine.
Right after this jump, Marv takes a second dive out the window and falls five stories, headfirst, into a pile of garbage. There are cases of people surviving falls this high by hitting trash bins, but in those cases, they are instructed to fall flat, on their backs, and into bins that are full. Marv’s dive is punctuated with a heavy thud, indicating he hit the pavement under the bags. He also went headfirst, wherein the impact against his skull would be deadly. But even if he had maneuvered to a safer position when falling, he’d have had to have a weight no more than a cat in order to hit the concrete without injury.
In another scene, across town, Marv encounters Wendy and her car, which hits him twice at about 40 to 50 miles per hour. (35” per frame). In each hit, Marv defies the laws of inertia and gravity. In the first shot she hits him straight on, and at his midsection. It should be that he either his legs bend backwards while his body collapses over the hood, or he is shoved forward, into a roll or skid. Not the case. He flies. The impact of the car seems to toss him vertically, allowing the car to drive directly under him before he splats against the pavement. While he’s down, flat on the ground, she hits him again. And again, he spins up into the air. In both scenes not only does he become airborne vertically, but he also spins and lands in the opposite direction he was hit. It is as if a person jumped out of a moving vehicle and landed behind the spot where they had leapt from. There is also a floating effect while Marv is in the air. He flies up, and while there, he spins violently and appears to hang. Even without counting frames it appears too long. It looks like a person doing flips on the moon. In each apex, he hangs two times longer than he should. Perhaps we could apply this floating effect to his falling scenes, and use that to explain how he survives.
Marv makes a good example of how Sin City’s laws of physics have been bent to emphasize action and traits. Everything that happens to him happens elsewhere in the movie, to characters of all different builds, interacting with all different structures. People have explosive strength and objects can become very strong or very weak in an instant. The movie is seemingly set in a normal universe, but physics are tweaked for effect. This “effect” would be a captivated audience that is so caught up in the plot, emotion, and action that, overall, the movie becomes enjoyable. How ironic that the things we would expect to be jolting or misleading actually help us in the storytelling.
Sin City is supposedly a world within our own. It is cast in treacherous ghetto settings, which mimic those we see in our heavily populated areas, although they are exaggerated versions. People are shot, raped, and tortured daily; survival of the fittest is the moral code. Those who choose to live here must be tough as nails. Literally. While the violence and action is enhanced beyond the norm, so too are the physical dynamics of the characters, allowing them to thrive in such depths. In most cases, the laws of physics hold to reality in Sin City, however, at times of heightened action they change to resemble things witnessed in fantasy and sci-fi stories. Because of the many examples present throughout the movie, we will follow Marv, the brutish and ugly protagonist, through his trials wherein he almost exhibits and imposes superhuman qualities. These scenes include the changeability of hard matter, the dynamics of falling, and the broken laws of inertia.
Let us introduce Marv. Above, we’ve described his personality and appearance, and now we should look at his physical traits. The man is not a superhuman. In a few cases we find evidence of this, such as when a woman with a personal vendetta against him, Wendy, ties him to a wooden chair. He is seen struggling against the ropes, which, unless he is simply choosing to remain captive, hold him effectively. Wendy also smacks him across the face with the butt of her handgun. Marv’s head whips back and he bleeds, in obvious pain. The scene sets him up as an ordinary human being. However, other scenes imply that he has incredible strength and endurance.
To define the changeability of matter, let us first look at the properties of the brick walls around which dozens of impact scenes take place. There are instances where these walls appear to have a solid mass. A car could not smash through one, as witnessed in one of the opening scenes, where it chases Marv down a narrow street. The car, a typically styled cop’s vehicle, was crushed all the way to its rear seat after ramming into the sidewall of a brick building. This should tell us that the brick-walled buildings in this area, even if only based on similar building codes, are indeed made of brick. However, scenes set in the same district would show otherwise. If we follow Marv, he takes us to an alley behind a bar. Here, he debilitates three mafia-type gang men, a couple of which get knocked upside the same type of reinforced brick wall. (Having been air born on the way to impact). This shows the sturdiness of the structure. But then Marv takes one by the back of the skull and drives his face into the brick. One would expect that the man’s head to crack on impact. If two other men could fly at this wall and be broken against it, this should be no different. But the wall crushes instead. The bricks collapse under the man’s face and he survives the hit, which, ironically, serves to make Marv look stronger. The properties of that wall must have been very brittle at that exact moment.
There’s the possibility that the walls had become old and degraded over time, but it isn’t likely that this would make much difference. The force of human flesh and bone would still be too small. There may also be documented cases of martial artists breaking through stacks of brick or through cinder blocks, but these are trained people who hit the stacks at their weakest point, when there is room for the stacks to break on the other side. These people would more easily be compared to Marv. Instead of using his fist to punch through the wall he is using a head. But if a martial artist were to place the equivalent of a skull between his hand and the cinderblock, the object would be broken before the block is reached. In the movie the scene is in slowed-motion, and it is clear that it is the skull that breaks through the wall.
There is another scene where Marv encounters a wall after he is captured by his nemesis and imprisoned. He is locked in a cell with one barred window, through which you can see that the wall is one foot thick and made of concrete. Marv grabs the bars of the window and pulls on them, in turn, ripping out a chunk of the wall surrounding the window. The mass of the wall can be seen as solid concrete where he broke out the chunk. In reality, people use wrecking balls and dynamite to break through that type of material. The wall itself would, again, have had to change properties for even the toughest human ligaments, muscles, and cartilage to simply pull it apart. Perhaps Marv got lucky and found a crack all the way around the opening? Then it would also have had to be brittle enough to break off chunks around the edges, because the piece he yanks out is both jagged and tapers out towards the outside of the cell. It would have been locked in place from the inside.
Another scene shows the phenomenon of changeable matter, but in the opposite way. In a scene where Marv dives into fall down the stairwell of a building, a wood railing becomes tough as steel when he latches onto it and swings himself over, stopping the fall. Instead of shattering, the wood creaks forward slightly and cracks a bit in the grip of Marv’s hands. The time it takes for Marv to reach the rail is difficult to judge because of the cut scene, but as he looks up we can see his followers chasing him down from at least four stories above. This would mean he fell at least forty-eight feet, if the stories are as they look: about twelve feet tall. According to our chart, falling over 49 feet he would accelerate to thirty-five miles an hour. Plus, he seems to have a build like many body-builders or professional wrestlers, which would make him up to 280lb, most of that being his dense muscle tissue. At that weight and speed, he would certainly hit with enough force to smash it, if not pull his own arms out of their socket. All of his weight is also born in the same spot. The rail tilts forward as he grips it, then shifts back as he uses his momentum, (so it appears), to swing back over it. There is a chance that the way Marv gripped the it slowed his impact-time somewhat, if he were a farther distance from the railing he might have rotated, giving the strength of his grip a chance to slow him out of the fall. But in the scene, he actually grips it from straight above with arms rigid. This would send his weight through the wood, if it were your everyday railing. There’s reason for suspicion though. It seems like the material is much tougher than wood, to be able to withstand the scene’s action.
Falling and impacting objects are also manipulated throughout the movie, as we can see in this same scene with Marv jumping over the banister and gripping the wood railing. In mid-air he seems to change vertical direction. Watch closely and it can be seen that when he leaps over the edge, he falls down the center of the stairwell, which looks to be twenty feet wide. When he grabs the handrail, he grips it from above, indicating he fell at an angle. This should not be possible unless, perhaps, he took a sprinting leap forward at fifteen miles per hour in the course of two steps and the banister he grabbed was on the other side of the building. The shot down the stairwell, however, shows him falling straight down, and the shot up it, after he lands, shows that he landed on the same side that he jumped from. He is also able to swing back up and over the rail onto the hall floor. This appears to be due to the momentum gained from the fall. In fact, it couldn’t have been possible for him to do so. The change in direction would have been too abrupt, as the railing, at about three feet tall, has a wall extending below it another three feet. There is not enough room to swing at all unless, after he smacks into the wall, Marv still has the strength and consciousness to use just his arms in pulling himself in a circular arc over the rail. That is difficult to imagine.
Right after this jump, Marv takes a second dive out the window and falls five stories, headfirst, into a pile of garbage. There are cases of people surviving falls this high by hitting trash bins, but in those cases, they are instructed to fall flat, on their backs, and into bins that are full. Marv’s dive is punctuated with a heavy thud, indicating he hit the pavement under the bags. He also went headfirst, wherein the impact against his skull would be deadly. But even if he had maneuvered to a safer position when falling, he’d have had to have a weight no more than a cat in order to hit the concrete without injury.
In another scene, across town, Marv encounters Wendy and her car, which hits him twice at about 40 to 50 miles per hour. (35” per frame). In each hit, Marv defies the laws of inertia and gravity. In the first shot she hits him straight on, and at his midsection. It should be that he either his legs bend backwards while his body collapses over the hood, or he is shoved forward, into a roll or skid. Not the case. He flies. The impact of the car seems to toss him vertically, allowing the car to drive directly under him before he splats against the pavement. While he’s down, flat on the ground, she hits him again. And again, he spins up into the air. In both scenes not only does he become airborne vertically, but he also spins and lands in the opposite direction he was hit. It is as if a person jumped out of a moving vehicle and landed behind the spot where they had leapt from. There is also a floating effect while Marv is in the air. He flies up, and while there, he spins violently and appears to hang. Even without counting frames it appears too long. It looks like a person doing flips on the moon. In each apex, he hangs two times longer than he should. Perhaps we could apply this floating effect to his falling scenes, and use that to explain how he survives.
Marv makes a good example of how Sin City’s laws of physics have been bent to emphasize action and traits. Everything that happens to him happens elsewhere in the movie, to characters of all different builds, interacting with all different structures. People have explosive strength and objects can become very strong or very weak in an instant. The movie is seemingly set in a normal universe, but physics are tweaked for effect. This “effect” would be a captivated audience that is so caught up in the plot, emotion, and action that, overall, the movie becomes enjoyable. How ironic that the things we would expect to be jolting or misleading actually help us in the storytelling.
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