March 23, 2008

Calculating the terminal velocity of a Balrog.
posted by homunculus 16 years ago
  • That's an awful lot of effort put into something I'm sure nobody ever worried about.
  • I would rather have people worry about this than designing bombs, n'est pas?
  • As Pascal observed, a man is rarely less harmfully employed than when sitting in his room calculating the terminal velocity of a Balrog. Of course, the Balrog in the corner of the room here is the unwarranted assumption that elapsed film time is exactly the duration of the fall, with no slo-mo, repeats, etc.
  • This obviously doesn't work - the thickest crust on Earth is only 50km thick! Why are nerds so fucking stupid?
  • I wonder if Jackson and company had an approximate distance plotted out. Somewhere on one of the 17 Two Towers commentaries somebody just might mention it.
  • Is that a laden Balrog or an unladen one?
  • It might be relevant to muse on the chronicity of the film. Can we, without further ado, assume that the 104 second space in the film corresponds with 104 in the events of the story? Perhaps narrative time is expanded compared with story time, perhaps condensed. Ever read "Slater's Pins have no Points" by Virginia Woolf? She crams a whole story into the time it takes for a hat pin to fall to the floor from the hand of a piano student.
  • On review: what Pleggy said.
  • Also, why bother with the Balrog if he fell for the same amount of time as Gandalf? We know Gandalf's terminal velocity.
  • Also, density is irrelevant: that bloke on the leaning tower in Pisa demonstrated this.
  • I have absolutely no idea what's goin' on...
  • density matters if you are not in a vacuum
  • Ah, there's my problem.
  • I abhor a vacuum, but that's just the nature boy in me showing itself.
  • I once hired a whore to vacuum. She wasn't really into it.
  • It took me eight hours to get that joke, MCT.
  • The Balrog-descent estimating people need to talk to the fire jugglers.
  • did she cost $5000 an hour?