CSI Miami throws science out the window, again

In article .com,
SFTV_troy wrote:

Mason Barge wrote:
"Rich" wrote in message

I had a physics teacher that told us if a 1" ball bearing were dropped
off the Empire State building it would go 7 feet into the ground. He
didn't understand the concept of terminal velocity.


I used to hear the same sort of rumors about a penny dropped edge-first. In
truth, it might bend the penny, although I don't think a steel ball bearing
would be damaged.

Don't doubt, however, that a bullet fired into the air, especially at an
angle, can kill someone. Hmm, possibly even the ball bearing could do it;
it'd sure smart like hell. I'm guessing 200 fps plus. And what, 120 grams?
(Anyone know the density of steel off the "top of your head"?hahhaha)


MythBusters debunked the bullet idea. They shot several bullets into
the air, and found the bullet will quickly lose velocity and start
tumbling through the air. Thus it will fall back to the ground at a
much slower rate.. too slow to kill anything.

MythBusters got that one wrong. We've had people killed here by falling
bullets. We have laws to keep people from shooting in the air named
after a little girl who got killed that way. It's hard to explain
people getting killed by bullets hitting them in the top of the head in
crowds firing guns in the air any other way.

--
Jitterbug phone works! (Third time's a charm!)

In article ,
Thanatos wrote:

In article ,
"Mike Minor" wrote:

"Thanatos" wrote in message
...
In article ,
Chris L Peterson wrote:

On Tue, 30 Oct 2007 09:17:07 -0700, Larry Bud
wrote:

A pretty good job? I mean, I like the show. Pretty graphics, cool
special effects, but science? No way.

I disagree. I rarely see serious scientific errors on CSI (Las Vegas).

Are you kidding me? They've done the "infinite zoom" thing repeatedly on
the Vegas show, just like the other two CSI shows, where they take some
grainy security camera footage and zoom in to read a clothing label or a
note in a person's hand or some other ridiculous thing.

And the Las Vegas Crime Lab seems to have a database for everything. I
about fell off my couch laughing one night when Stokes took a sofa upon
which a body was found and ran it through their "furniture database",
which not only instantly told him the exact make and model of the sofa,
but the exact store it was sold out of, when it was sold, and to whom.

But the real inaccuracies in the Vegas show (as well as the NY and Miami
shows) comes not in the science but in the law. The 4th, 5th and 6th
Amendments to the Constitution apparently do not exist in the world of
CSI.

They use the right techniques, and they
use the right equipment.

Not really. For example, they put all their evidence in see-through
plastic bags. That's not a good way to, for example, preserve
fingerprint evidence:

The use of clear envelopes is forbidden because plastic
can have an adverse affect on the future development of
latent prints on items of evidence. The introduction of
excessive heat and humidity and the friction of evidence
against the clear plastic can have an adverse affect
on latent print development. Light, which permeates the
clear plastic, can also result in the degradation of
latent prints. Additionally, the American Society of
Crime Laboratory Directors / Laboratory Accreditation
Board requires that latent print evidence be stored
in paper envelopes (as is the generally accepted method).

I feel your pain. As a someone in law enforcement, I'm sure
that the show eats at you from the inaccuracies that are
constantly perpetuated.

The worst ones are when goofballs like Horatio Caine raid a home or an
apartment. Everything from the way Caine *reduces* his visual acuity by
donning sunglasses right before kicking a door and moving from bright
sunlight into a dark apartment to the way these idiots peek into room
for a half a second and declare it "clear". They don't look under beds
or in closets or anywhere someone could be hiding. I've personally found
someone hiding in a kitchen cabinet over a sink on a raid-- what looked
like an impossibly small space for a person to occupy. They also like to
cross in front of each other's guns with frightening regularity. You
never point your gun at a fellow officer or move into a fellow officers
line of fire.

Conducting raids the way Horatio and his crew does is nothing more than
an express ticket to the grave.

The halloween ep was AWFUL for this. Delco yells 'we're clear H!' after
looking in the doorway to one room in the vampires huge apartment! I
was cringing and laughing at the same time.

--
Jitterbug phone works! (Third time's a charm!)

On Nov 1, 1:40 pm, Anim8rFSK wrote:
In article ,



Thanatos wrote:
In article ,
"Mike Minor" wrote:

"Thanatos" wrote in message
...
In article ,
Chris L Peterson wrote:

On Tue, 30 Oct 2007 09:17:07 -0700, Larry Bud
wrote:

A pretty good job? I mean, I like the show. Pretty graphics, cool
special effects, but science? No way.

I disagree. I rarely see serious scientific errors on CSI (Las Vegas).

Are you kidding me? They've done the "infinite zoom" thing repeatedly on
the Vegas show, just like the other two CSI shows, where they take some
grainy security camera footage and zoom in to read a clothing label or a
note in a person's hand or some other ridiculous thing.

And the Las Vegas Crime Lab seems to have a database for everything. I
about fell off my couch laughing one night when Stokes took a sofa upon
which a body was found and ran it through their "furniture database",
which not only instantly told him the exact make and model of the sofa,
but the exact store it was sold out of, when it was sold, and to whom.

But the real inaccuracies in the Vegas show (as well as the NY and Miami
shows) comes not in the science but in the law. The 4th, 5th and 6th
Amendments to the Constitution apparently do not exist in the world of
CSI.

They use the right techniques, and they
use the right equipment.

Not really. For example, they put all their evidence in see-through
plastic bags. That's not a good way to, for example, preserve
fingerprint evidence:

The use of clear envelopes is forbidden because plastic
can have an adverse affect on the future development of
latent prints on items of evidence. The introduction of
excessive heat and humidity and the friction of evidence
against the clear plastic can have an adverse affect
on latent print development. Light, which permeates the
clear plastic, can also result in the degradation of
latent prints. Additionally, the American Society of
Crime Laboratory Directors / Laboratory Accreditation
Board requires that latent print evidence be stored
in paper envelopes (as is the generally accepted method).

I feel your pain. As a someone in law enforcement, I'm sure
that the show eats at you from the inaccuracies that are
constantly perpetuated.

The worst ones are when goofballs like Horatio Caine raid a home or an
apartment. Everything from the way Caine *reduces* his visual acuity by
donning sunglasses right before kicking a door and moving from bright
sunlight into a dark apartment to the way these idiots peek into room
for a half a second and declare it "clear". They don't look under beds
or in closets or anywhere someone could be hiding. I've personally found
someone hiding in a kitchen cabinet over a sink on a raid-- what looked
like an impossibly small space for a person to occupy. They also like to
cross in front of each other's guns with frightening regularity. You
never point your gun at a fellow officer or move into a fellow officers
line of fire.

Conducting raids the way Horatio and his crew does is nothing more than
an express ticket to the grave.

The halloween ep was AWFUL for this. Delco yells 'we're clear H!' after
looking in the doorway to one room in the vampires huge apartment! I
was cringing and laughing at the same time.

--
Jitterbug phone works! (Third time's a charm!)

Is it like "Bones" where Booth the FBI agent lets Bones (the forensic
anthropologist) to take the lead in a similar situation?

"Anim8rFSK" wrote in message
...
In article .com,
SFTV_troy wrote:

Mason Barge wrote:
"Rich" wrote in message

I had a physics teacher that told us if a 1" ball bearing were
dropped
off the Empire State building it would go 7 feet into the ground. He
didn't understand the concept of terminal velocity.


I used to hear the same sort of rumors about a penny dropped
edge-first. In
truth, it might bend the penny, although I don't think a steel ball
bearing
would be damaged.

Don't doubt, however, that a bullet fired into the air, especially at
an
angle, can kill someone. Hmm, possibly even the ball bearing could do
it;
it'd sure smart like hell. I'm guessing 200 fps plus. And what, 120
grams?
(Anyone know the density of steel off the "top of your head"?hahhaha)


MythBusters debunked the bullet idea. They shot several bullets into
the air, and found the bullet will quickly lose velocity and start
tumbling through the air. Thus it will fall back to the ground at a
much slower rate.. too slow to kill anything.

MythBusters got that one wrong. We've had people killed here by falling
bullets. We have laws to keep people from shooting in the air named
after a little girl who got killed that way. It's hard to explain
people getting killed by bullets hitting them in the top of the head in
crowds firing guns in the air any other way.

My understanding is they showed that a bullet fired at 45 degrees or less
can still be fatal whereas one fired at an angle over 45 degrees will tumble
painfully, albeit non-fatally, back to earth. Is it possible that the girl
to whom you are referring still had some unfused skull bones or was hit by a
bullet fired from very far away?

In article .com,
RichA wrote:

On Nov 1, 1:40 pm, Anim8rFSK wrote:
In article ,



Thanatos wrote:
In article ,
"Mike Minor" wrote:

"Thanatos" wrote in message
...
In article ,
Chris L Peterson wrote:

On Tue, 30 Oct 2007 09:17:07 -0700, Larry Bud

wrote:

A pretty good job? I mean, I like the show. Pretty graphics, cool
special effects, but science? No way.

I disagree. I rarely see serious scientific errors on CSI (Las
Vegas).

Are you kidding me? They've done the "infinite zoom" thing repeatedly
on
the Vegas show, just like the other two CSI shows, where they take
some
grainy security camera footage and zoom in to read a clothing label
or a
note in a person's hand or some other ridiculous thing.

And the Las Vegas Crime Lab seems to have a database for everything.
I
about fell off my couch laughing one night when Stokes took a sofa
upon
which a body was found and ran it through their "furniture database",
which not only instantly told him the exact make and model of the
sofa,
but the exact store it was sold out of, when it was sold, and to
whom.

But the real inaccuracies in the Vegas show (as well as the NY and
Miami
shows) comes not in the science but in the law. The 4th, 5th and 6th
Amendments to the Constitution apparently do not exist in the world
of
CSI.

They use the right techniques, and they
use the right equipment.

Not really. For example, they put all their evidence in see-through
plastic bags. That's not a good way to, for example, preserve
fingerprint evidence:

The use of clear envelopes is forbidden because plastic
can have an adverse affect on the future development of
latent prints on items of evidence. The introduction of
excessive heat and humidity and the friction of evidence
against the clear plastic can have an adverse affect
on latent print development. Light, which permeates the
clear plastic, can also result in the degradation of
latent prints. Additionally, the American Society of
Crime Laboratory Directors / Laboratory Accreditation
Board requires that latent print evidence be stored
in paper envelopes (as is the generally accepted method).

I feel your pain. As a someone in law enforcement, I'm sure
that the show eats at you from the inaccuracies that are
constantly perpetuated.

The worst ones are when goofballs like Horatio Caine raid a home or an
apartment. Everything from the way Caine *reduces* his visual acuity by
donning sunglasses right before kicking a door and moving from bright
sunlight into a dark apartment to the way these idiots peek into room
for a half a second and declare it "clear". They don't look under beds
or in closets or anywhere someone could be hiding. I've personally found
someone hiding in a kitchen cabinet over a sink on a raid-- what looked
like an impossibly small space for a person to occupy. They also like to
cross in front of each other's guns with frightening regularity. You
never point your gun at a fellow officer or move into a fellow officers
line of fire.

Conducting raids the way Horatio and his crew does is nothing more than
an express ticket to the grave.

The halloween ep was AWFUL for this. Delco yells 'we're clear H!' after
looking in the doorway to one room in the vampires huge apartment! I
was cringing and laughing at the same time.

--
Jitterbug phone works! (Third time's a charm!)

Is it like "Bones" where Booth the FBI agent lets Bones (the forensic
anthropologist) to take the lead in a similar situation?

Yeah, well, Bones shouldn't even HAVE a gun. At least this week they
mentioned it!

--
Jitterbug phone works! (Third time's a charm!)

In article ,
"Victor Velazquez" wrote:

"Anim8rFSK" wrote in message
...
In article .com,
SFTV_troy wrote:

Mason Barge wrote:
"Rich" wrote in message

I had a physics teacher that told us if a 1" ball bearing were
dropped
off the Empire State building it would go 7 feet into the ground. He
didn't understand the concept of terminal velocity.


I used to hear the same sort of rumors about a penny dropped
edge-first. In
truth, it might bend the penny, although I don't think a steel ball
bearing
would be damaged.

Don't doubt, however, that a bullet fired into the air, especially at
an
angle, can kill someone. Hmm, possibly even the ball bearing could do
it;
it'd sure smart like hell. I'm guessing 200 fps plus. And what, 120
grams?
(Anyone know the density of steel off the "top of your head"?hahhaha)


MythBusters debunked the bullet idea. They shot several bullets into
the air, and found the bullet will quickly lose velocity and start
tumbling through the air. Thus it will fall back to the ground at a
much slower rate.. too slow to kill anything.

MythBusters got that one wrong. We've had people killed here by falling
bullets. We have laws to keep people from shooting in the air named
after a little girl who got killed that way. It's hard to explain
people getting killed by bullets hitting them in the top of the head in
crowds firing guns in the air any other way.

My understanding is they showed that a bullet fired at 45 degrees or less
can still be fatal whereas one fired at an angle over 45 degrees will tumble
painfully, albeit non-fatally, back to earth. Is it possible that the girl
to whom you are referring still had some unfused skull bones or was hit by a
bullet fired from very far away?

No idea. It's possible some idiot was shooting round shot. Did
mythbusters try that? Wonder what a shotgun does; I mean, tumbling
shouldn't be so much of a factor with round shot.

--
Jitterbug phone works! (Third time's a charm!)

On Thu, 01 Nov 2007 13:39:01 -0700, Anim8rFSK
wrote:

Is it like "Bones" where Booth the FBI agent lets Bones (the forensic
anthropologist) to take the lead in a similar situation?

Yeah, well, Bones shouldn't even HAVE a gun.

Assuming she has a license, why wouldn't she have a gun?

David Johnston wrote:
On Thu, 01 Nov 2007 13:39:01 -0700, Anim8rFSK
wrote:

Is it like "Bones" where Booth the FBI agent lets Bones (the forensic
anthropologist) to take the lead in a similar situation?
Yeah, well, Bones shouldn't even HAVE a gun.

Assuming she has a license, why wouldn't she have a gun?
Assuming she lives in metro DC, civilians can't GET a license. Even if
she lives outside, they can't carry in DC, IIRC.

Not that that really stops anyone, of course. But the suspension of
disbelief that the traditionally ultra-by-the-book feebs would let a
civilian ride along on operations, makes any minor reality gaffes a
trivial point.

I've SEEN real bio-anthropology labs. They ain't a glass room in the
middle of some big exibit space. The look more like the lab where the
morgue used to be, before they moved to better quarters. No wonder the
Smit wouldn't let their name be used in the series. Did they use a
pseudonym in the books, too? I never read those.

None of the above keeps me from loving the show, of course. (Having a
pretty-much-useless degree in the field, and all.)

aem sends...

Unique wrote:
Thanatos wrote in message:
,

In article ,
"windowwasher" wrote:
Ignoring wind, other atmospherics, and other variables, a 2000 grain
50 cal. bullet fired with a muzzle velocity of 2900 fps would drop
around 230 inches at 1000 yards from the sight point with a total
drop of 257 inches. Obviously the drop would be considerably larger
at 2100 yards. My hunting ballistics calculator only goes to 1000
yards. I'm sure there are programs on the web that go higher.
At that distance, even the rotation of the earth becomes a factor.

I wonder how, if you're tilting the rifle up to compensate for such a
huge drop over distance, how you can even see the target in the scope?


They don't use scopes--they use magic they learned at Hogwarts.

In article ,
Mark Nobles said:

Thanatos wrote:

Are you kidding me? They've done the "infinite zoom" thing
repeatedly on the Vegas show, just like the other two CSI shows,
where they take some grainy security camera footage and zoom in
to read a clothing label or a note in a person's hand or some
other ridiculous thing.

I have never seen anything on that show resembling this in any
way. They have done some very limited "sharpening" of pictures,
but it almost never gives them any useful information - maybe a
digit or two of a license plate, but never the kind of stuff they
do on Miami or Numbers.

Did you see the "CSI" episode that Faye Dunaway guest starred in[1]?

If I recall correctly they had a security camera image, from about
twenty feet away, of a parked car with something that the suspect
had put on the roof for a moment, and they enhanced the image enough
to be able to tell that it was a print-it-yourself airline ticket
(or boarding pass, I forget which) with a two-dimensional
data-encoding "UPC" on it, and then they enhanced it some more and
got a clear enough image of *that* to tell what date and flight it
was for.

*1: "Kiss-Kiss, Bye-Bye" Episode Number: 130 Season Num: 6 First
Aired: Thursday January 26, 2006

--
William December Starr