Ask Lemmy

I'm an electrician who installs (mostly) commercial electrical systems, including fire alarm systems.

In most cases, pulling a fire alarm pull station doesn't set off the fire suppression sprinklers. The pull station just sets off the alarm and calls the Fire Department. Sprinklers aren't automatically activated. The water in the sprinkler pipes is under constant pressure. Sprinkler heads are just nozzles with a little heat-activated stopper in them. When that stopper heats enough, it breaks and opens the nozzle, allowing water to flow (they can also be broken by fucking with them or hitting them with something). But there's no mechanism that sets off other sprinkler heads when one goes off. Each head needs to be heat activated individually to go off. You see in movies and TV all the time someone pulling a pull station and that setting off sprinklers throughout the entire building, or someone lighting a fire in a small closet and that setting off sprinklers throughout the building. That simply isn't how they work.

(note: there are some fire suppression systems which do have remote activation, but those are not standard. They're usually used somewhere like a data center or a lab where there's extremely expensive stuff that you want to be sure doesn't get damaged. And those systems usually use a fire suppression foam or powder, rather than water.)

Also, the water in sprinkler pipes is NASTY. It's been sitting in those pipes for years, sometimes decades. It gets black and sludgy pretty quickly. It stains/destroys anything it touches.

Hobby: Skydiving

1. Free fall is at most 65 seconds on a normal jump. My personal record is jumping from 28,000 feet and I was in free fall for around 85 seconds. That's it, there is no such thing as a 5 minute free fall, unless you are looking to break an altitude record.

2. If you run up to a skydiver and pull their Pilot Chute (PC) out and throw it into the wind, nothing will happen. The gear is designed to work at free fall speeds. A 10mph wind will not pull the main out. If you pull on the PC bridle hard enough to actually pull the main out of its compartment... You will just have a main parachute in its deployment bag closed by rubber bands, or other method and it will just be laying on the ground. You will also get a well deserved punch in the mouth by more than one jumper. If you pull the reserve handle you will probably get murdered and there will be no witnesses, especially if the hanger was full of jumpers. They will just hide your body and you will have deserved your fate.

3. BASE jumping and Skydiving are as related as Hockey and Figure Skating. Sure there is some overlap, but one cannot do the other without training. Also BASE is an acronym. Building, Antenna, Span, Earth. Bridges fall under Span BTW. No, I am not a BASE jumper, although I have jumped the Bridge in WV. So yeah, I guess I have my S.

4. Yes, wing suites are cool. Wish I had more jumps on them.

5. You cannot talk in free fall. The old movie trope of talking back and forth is simply not possible. How difficult is it to talk in a car with the windows open going down the road at 70mph? Now, remove the windshield and drive the car 120mph...

6. The "parachute not opening" is not even in the top 10 concerns when jumping. The gear works and we jump with two chutes. There is a whole lot of bullshit that can happen before we get to deployment altitude. Not the least of which is just getting to the DZ in the morning. I always considered my drive to the DZ my most dangerous part of the day. Second most dangerous is being in the airplane. I'm actually relieved to exit the aircraft as at that point I have a better chance of making it to the ground safely than the pilot.

Aside from Mr. Robot, almost every show that features software or computers completely butchers the details. My favorite offender? Mythic Quest. The main cast supposedly runs a massive MMORPG, yet their day-to-day activities have almost nothing to do with how game development or even basic software work actually functions.

It is like if ER was about hospital staff moving random boxes labeled "coils" back and forth while claiming to perform life-saving surgery. That is how far off it feels.

What really gets me is that Mr. Robot proved it is possible to do it right. If you treat the subject matter with respect, you can absolutely make something compelling and realistic. But since it is all just "nerd stuff" to most writers, and none of them are C++ goblins, we get tech scenes written by people who probably think JSON is a fitness drink.

I work at a bank. Every bank heist scene makes me fucking cringe lmao. Why would only one person know the code to something??? Why are safety deposit boxes treated as some super special thing? Daredevil just pissed me off with this so much lol

Hobby 1: Ballroom dancing

It is surprisingly difficult to get into a good dance position, especially for the standard (waltz, tango, foxtrot, quickstep, Viennese waltz) dances. Two actors walk up to each other and it's apparent even before they touch that they have no idea WTF they are doing: they aren't even standing up correctly.

Hobby 2: Chess

Smart guy walks over and absolutely beats the pants off of anyone else playing like 30 seconds after they get taught the rules or from glancing over the shoulder of someone else playing the game. It's all "aha! Mate in 4!".

No way dude. It is way, way not that easy. There's "good at chess" and there's "GOOD at chess". Unless you are part of a very large club or are taking lessons from someone at or above the master level, you probably don't know anybody in the second category. Dr. House is not going to blindfold beat anyone like that.

Hobby: Telescopes upside-down or back-to-front, pointed through windows, with aperture caps on, without eyepieces, under heavy light pollution and glare, magically show Hubble-level images of something only visible from the opposite hemisphere.

Job: The Government knows everything about you and any employee can pull up any info on anyone in seconds. Ffs we can't even get two departments to cooperate on a common database format.

I used to work in organ transplants, and like literally everything related to organ transplants in film or tv is entirely wrong. Every medical drama, even the ones that pride themselves on realism, always try to make transplants and donation more dramatic, which is absurd when you consider how dramatic the reality actually is.

it's neither a hobby or a job But the trope that a very complicated, very dangerous situation can be solved by just one person and a gun.

It's unfortunately so ingrained into the Hollywood story lines that people, especially in the US, think that that's reality.

The idea of the rugged individual has destroyed the idea of societal support to the point that some people are actually terrified to ask for help in anyway.

They think programmers are super smart and great at maths.