Actually, it rotates 360 degrees in roughly a day (usually a little more than a day because the precession isn't 100% at typical latitudes). The one in Paris does 360 degrees in 32.7 hours, or 11 degrees of precession per hour.They were doing that pendulum thing when I was attending Texas A&M back in the day. I was taking a...okay, this will date me...Fortran IV course (waits for laughter to stop) at the engineering building and they had it hanging from the ceiling in the building's atrium swinging all semester. I was under the impression it was supposed to rotate around a full 360 in a year. I don't know why that would be, though. Someone that probably didn't know told me that.
It doesn't. The rotation of the water in the toilet is caused by angled jets of water that impart a spin; the same toilet would spin the same way in the Southern Hemisphere.I still have a hard time understanding how the rotation of the earth could affect my toilet. I understand something big like a hurricane, but a toilet????
Bingo. Anyone can write a mystery novel if you are allowed to just introduce crap to make the reader surprised. The rule is that you have to have seen the answer already, preferably the whole time, and just failed to add it all up.A number of times, the story relied on unfair surprise elements - as in we as viewers were given absolutely no indication something critical to the plot had been done at a time we could/should have known, nor could we have reasonably expected it to happen. This, in storytelling, is cheating. A good thriller may make such critical subtleties subtle indeed, and identifiable on second (or even third) viewing, but "deus ex machina" solutions are a sign the author wrote himself into a corner he couldn't get out of without making stuff up.
The firing pin is exceptionally stupid since the first thing that would have been done in a real criminal investigation was to test fire the gun. When the planted sniper weapon fails to go bang, the investigators would be left scratching their heads.The firing pins, audio recorder, and a few other little things crucial to our hero's survival just kinda magically appeared after the fact as if we all should have known/expected, but we (a reasonable audience) didn't.
Seen it. The whole gate falls down, after it lands on/drapes over/scratches up the car driving through it. The chain did not break, but the gate deformed until the hinges broke. All in all, it was much less pretty than the movies, but it worked just as easily. A chain-link anything is not going to deny a 2-ton can driving 40 MPH.Some day I want to drive a car thru a chained chain-link gate. So many movies (not all!) show it so easy that I want to see how likely it is.
Yep. Great read. I want to see the movie, but am not expecting it to be as good as the book.
The washtub would have to be perfectly round to thousandths of an inch, the drain perfectly straight, the approach to the drain perfectly radially symmetrical, and all preexisting water motion resulting from filling/washing completely damped, in order for Coriolis to determine the spin direction, if it would spin at all. The effect is vanishingly minor on short distance scales (1 to 2 ft radius). It only becomes noticeable at radii measured in hundreds or thousands of feet.benEzra, water draining freely through a drain hole will rotate clockwise in the northern hemisphere and CCW "down south". Same rotation opposition for tropical storms.
I learned this from my grandmother's old washtub. The whirlpool would begin, I'd stir it the opposite way and when I quite interfering, the original rotation would resume. Years later, I learned about the Coriolis force that similarly affects tropical storms. And trade winds.
Okay, know, it's Hollywood. But, being Hollywood, I was looking for technicals in that movie I could take issue with. I suspect more than I noticed was wrong with it.
Excellent! Not sure that's good enough to assure what's depicted in the movie, but certainly enough to make the story viable.The platform can aim to 0.2 MOA precision.
Nope, they clearly show the action and it's an M82. He doesn't even reach up to recock it on each shot, they just dub a cocking noise over the action.
But if you could build a perfect washtub and tested it under lab conditions, you might get it to go one way at northern latitudes and the other way at southern latitudes, and drain straight down with no spin near the equator.