Math Goes to the Movies

Chapter 18 Money-Back Bloopers

Chapter 18 Money-Back Bloopers It’s pretty hard for a movie with math to totally avoid bloopers. However, some are simply unforgivable, or are forgivable and just really, really funny. In this chapter, we’ve collected some of the best. 18.1 Boosting the Computer In the Star Trek episode “Court Martial” (1967), Captain Kirk comes up with a brilliant idea: CAPTAIN KIRK: Gentleman, this computer has an auditory sensor. It can, in effect, hear sounds. By installing a booster we can increase that capability on the order of one to the fourth power. 18.2 Playing the Percentages In Alien Hunter (1987), the mathematician Julian is calculating the chances: SHELLY: It still could be hidden in the protein. KATE: You know how unlikely that is. JULIAN: How unlikely? What are the odds? SHELLY: 99.999 to the infinite. JULIAN: But not 100. In the second episode of the TV series FlashForward (2009), the FBI is pondering the chances of everyone on the planet blacking out at exactly 11 a.m. (Pacific time): AGENT: There are 60 minutes in an hour, 60 seconds in a minute. So the chances of something happening at exactly the top of any hour are 1 in 3600. It’s reassuring to know that the FBI are on the case. 199 200 18 Money-Back Bloopers In The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Major Warden is deciding whether Commander Shears should take some practice parachute jumps before the big mission: WARDEN: They say if you make one jump you’ve only got 50% chance of injury, two jumps 80%, and three jumps you’re bound to catch your packet. The consensus of opinion is that the most sensible thing for Major Shears to do is to go ahead and jump and hope for the best. SHEARS: With or without a parachute? They’re in the middle of a war, so one can understand they’ll go with rough and ready calculations. However, assuming that the chance of getting injured on any jump is independent of the other jumps, the percentages should be 50%, 75%, and 87.5%. And, one would hope that the benefit of practice is that the later percentages would be lower. In The Arrival (1996), Ilana and her fellow climate scientist are discussing the increases in certain gases: ILANA: 700% increase over the last five years. How can that be? SCIENTIST: My very question. Just how accurate is this data you sent us, Ilana? ILANA: Well, that’s hard to say. We cobbled it together from ground stations, weather balloons, Uncle Earl’s aching corns. Some of your own numbers are in there. SCIENTIST: Well, you’ve obviously got some ratty data. ILANA: We checked this as best we could. Fig. 18.1 Some brilliant combining of percentages in the The Arrival. 18.3 The Curse of Pi 201 Their data may well be ratty, but not nearly as ratty as their method of combining percentages (figure 18.1). 18.3 The Curse of Pi Apparently, almost any movie that tries to nail down more than a few digits of the decimal expansion of π is doomed to fail. In Donald in Mathmagic Land (1959) the birdlike pi creature recites: “π is equal to 3.14159265389747, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.” Oddly, the last two digits are wrong, and it should be 3.141592653589793 . . . In The Virgin Suicides (1999), a classroom displays what are supposed to be the first forty-seven digits of π; sadly, things already go wrong after the eleventh digit. The title sequence of the movie π (1998) has thousands of digits scrolling across the screen, clearly meant to be digits of π, but only the first nine digits are correct. And the grand prize goes to Never Been Kissed (1999), with an earth-shattering three correct digits (figure 18.2): Fig. 18.2 π (more or less) in Never Been Kissed. Another interesting attempt occurs in Kate Bush’s song “Pi,” from her album Aerial (2005). It’s a beautiful song, but her attempt to recite the first 138 digits of π goes awry: 3. 1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 5028841971 6939937510 5820974944 5923078164 0628620899 8628034825 3421170679 8214808651 3282306647 0938446095 5058223. All the underlined digits are missing. But it’s a weird song, so maybe it’s just that the deeper meaning was lost on us. 202 18 Money-Back Bloopers It seems that π can also curse movies in other ways...