When I watch a television show or a movie, I like to get caught up in it. Producers want to generate that experience, so watching a well-made production should be a win-win experience. Science fiction productions are especially difficult for a producer to create, because it is harder to maintain the viewer's suspension of disbelief. Not only do producers have to semi-realistically portray fictitious events, science fiction viewers tend to catch technical errors that might slip past typical viewers (or typical editors). When errors are ridiculous, the suspension of disbelief is snapped and the producer's efforts are in vain.
For example, I remember watching Star Trek: The Next Generation when the series was fairly new and being shocked when a member of the crew scanned a planet and announced the planet's temperature was about negative 280 degrees centigrade. Absolute zero is approximately negative 273 degree centigrade. I don't remember much else about that episode, but I still remember the writers were unaware of basic high-school physics. Of course, picking on Star Trek is easy. The Federation can beam people on Borg cubes at will, but has trouble figuring out how to destroy the same cubes. Hmmm, why not beam aboard some of that anti-matter the Feds use in their engines and let physics do the rest? But picking on Star Trek is like catching fish in a barrel and I'll refrain from other examples before too many Trekkies start emailing me protests.
Friday night I was home with my wife. It had been a busy week, so we vegged out in front of the TV and watched John Doe. I've seen a few of these, and they are usually entertaining. But Friday's episode was horrible. I won't bother summarizing the plot, but Doe and his friends have four items in a briefcase. Each one of the four has an altered barcode with 14 characters instead of the normal 12. According to the show, each bar code contains a vast amount of data, but the data is only useful if the information is entered in a particular order. The characters can't try every possible combination because it would take over 40 years to do so. But Doe figures out the correct order and it takes the computer mere seconds to make sense of the data.
OK, reality check. Each altered barcode contains 14 characters. 4 x 14 = 56 characters. Using barcodes - that were read with normal scanners - to store vast amounts of information is ridiculous. This paragraph takes up more than 56 characters...
But even if we assume Doe had found four magic barcodes that could store vast amounts of information, the whole scenario still falls apart. Given four items, that all must be used, there are only 24 possible combinations (4! = 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 24). Even assuming it took the computer 1 minute to analyze each (and it took less than that for the proper combination), it would take less than 24 minutes to solve the problem even if the proper combination was the last one tried. So much for 40 years.
Well, now you can see why I don't watch much television. I haven't yet gone to a movie this year either, but I might go see The Core. According to National Geographic, the science isn't that bad. Even though I don't believe the loss of the Earth's magnetic field would be immediately catastrophic, the rest of the review looked promising. I might be able to suspend my disbelief long enough to enjoy the movie.
