Posted by John Preston on 21st, 2009
I know it seems like I post a lot about C.S.I. Miami. That may be because they push the reality barriers more than other dramas. More likely, it’s because I’ve been watching a lot of C.S.I. Miami lately. With a 16-month-old around the house, you tend to get a little behind on your favorite shows. The summer reruns give you a chance to catch up.
Nonetheless, I’m Calling Bull to Horatio Cane and his crew once again. In the episode Sink or Swim, an Attorney (played convincingly by P.Diddy) is throwing a party on his yacht. His fiance’ is killed during an "Only-In-Miami" style pirate raid. The later captured pirates (no eye patches, sorry) say there’s no way they killed the girl. They say they fired their shots straight into the air. When the C.S.I.’s studied the body more closely, they discovered a long thin piece of metal lodged in the wound.
It was identified as a bullet stabilizer used for shooting underwater. From that they determined that the woman was killed by a diver beneath the surface of the water. BULL!!!
Apparently, this stabilizer is designed to lead the way for a bullet passing through water allowing that bullet to avoid the turbulance and deflections that it would normally encounter. I guess, in theory, I can see how such a device would allow a bullett to travel straighter. When a bullet it going through the water, there is a tremendous pressure wave that travels in front of it. This is caused by the flat front of the bullet pushing the water ahead at extreme speeds. These pressure waves usually push the bullet one way or another. If there was something with a sharp point leading the way, the bullet might travel straighter. That’s why dart guns are usually much more effective underwater.
The Bullish issue isn’t whether such a device exists, it’s whether or not you could use such a device to kill someone on the boat with a shot from underwater. That’s where I Call Bull. This is a matter of optics. Let’s assume the stabilizer exists and it does exactly what it is supposed to do. You could easily shoot someone else who was also underwater, but when you tried to shoot someone above the surface you’d miss my a mile. The refraction of light at the surface of the water could make the victim appear to be as much as 10 feet from where she actually was. Next time you are swimming, go underwater and try to look at someone at the pools edge. You’ll see what I mean. This woman was a good twenty feet above the water. There would be no way for a shooter (without some pretty complex compensation computers) to calculate the actual position of the victim and hit her perfectly with one shot.
Posted by John Preston on 11th, 2009
I remain a big fan of the all of the C.S.I. franchises, but sometimes I think they really should be labeled Sci-Fi.
In the episode titled "Collateral Damage", the crew led by Horatio Cane is trying to track down the photographer who took a particular photo of some suspects. They were at a dead-end until one of the lab guys suggested they could identify the make and model of the camera that took the photograph by analyzing the photos pixel pattern. He said that every make and model of camera created a very distinct pixel pattern; he compared it to DNA in humans.
They quickly identified the camera. BULL!!! "Luckily" they had already encountered a photographer who happened to shoot with the very make and model of camera. What a Break!
Now I don’t know whether or not these "pixel patterns" exist; I suspect they do. Every digital camera has a semi-conductor chip that has millions of tiny photo sensors placed on it. You can almost call them small solar panels. When light hits them they generate an electrical burst which is read by the computer in the camera as a digital 1. If no light (or the wrong kind of light) hits the photo cell, the computer registers a digital 0. From these 1′s and 0′s, a computer image is created.
It stands to reason that the way these millions of sensors are alligned is probably different for different types of chips and that this is reflected in the pictures (under high magnification). That being said, I doubt that every different make of camera uses a different chip. Several different models by the same manufacturer probably use the same chip.
That’s just speculation. The part that I’m certain deserves a Bull call is the fact that they just happened to have a database which they could use to match up the pixel pattern with the right camera. Not only were they able to instantly match the pattern, the camera that came up on their screen had the exact same lens on it that the guilty photographer was using.
I feel 100% certain in saying there is NO database in existence that contains the pixel pattern for every digital camera on the market.
Posted by John Preston on 10th, 2009
We Call Bull!!! This is a case where the writers of CSI Miami took some legitimate theoretical science and ran with it.
Here’s the setup… Eric Delko (one of the CSI’s) is about to be deported because some documents showed up that indicated he wasn’t a US citizen. Earlier in the show, Eric supposedly Russian father had lost a tooth that have been recovered by the CSI team. They ground up the tooth and determined the level of particular oxygen isotope in the enamel. Using a map that showed the level of this isotope in the atmosphere at different locations around the world, they were able to prove that the father actually was born in Arizona not Russia. Hence, no deportation.
In theory, the level of a particular isotope in the atmosphere would be represented in the enamel of a tooth. The problem is that in order to use that information you’d need a map that not only showed the exact levels of that isotope for every single spot on earth, it would also have to be a map that represented those levels at the time the particular person was a child. That’s when the enamel on his/her teeth was forming.
In this episode, the man in question was at least 65. I find it hard to believe that they would have been recording isotopes for the entire world right smack in the middle of WWII.
As always, feel free to agree with me, argue with me, or flat out prove me wrong.
