Thursday, August 20, 2009

Firing Warning Shots Into the Crowd Thursday!

Are you reading the ongoing Secret Six? You should.

You should also check out the fun I found in World's Finest #72!


Ah, that Batman. Ever the master strategist, he was. Taking a little-known tactic right out of The Art of War, he suggests that rather than save the guys with weapons for last, perhaps we should take them out before we get shot!

Then again, his sidekick was the Golden Age Robin. Robin probably needed to be told those sort of things. Kids get easily distracted, and they're often none too bright.
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Shenanigans!


So, Clark tosses a ball and guides its path with his X-Ray vision? Someone explain that to me. You can't, can you? I didn't think so.
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Can't you just hear the crowd below?

Hey, what the hell? Is that an arrow? Who's firing arrows down on us? Is that Green Arrow up there on a giant kite? Hey, douche! You want to quit firing arrows down on us? If you want to guide the cops, howzabout you try pointing your damn finger???
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Here's a little fun way to pass the time. Check out the instructions for the "Batman Word Puzzle" I found in that ish:


I fully acknowledge I'm not the smartest person you'll ever meet, but I defy any child to make heads or tails of what they're supposed to do. By the time I finished reading the instructions, I was ready for a nap.

Then again, I'm always ready for a nap. I loves me a good nap.

See you tomorrow!

6 comments:

Zocktastic said...

Well, maybe he's... just using X-ray vision to see where the balls are going? No, that doesn't make any sense. How would that help after he threw them? And if he was just lining up the shot, then why did they say he was "guiding" them with X-rays?

Maybe it's just because back then, people thought things like X-rays and radar and atomic energy could do ANYTHING!!

"Hey Phil, X-rays can push stuff, right?"
"Uhhhh... sure, why not. And if they don't, who cares! It's not like people are gonna be readin' these things 50 years from now on some sorta wireless electronic information network or somethin'."
"Heh, yeah. That'll never happen!"

D.B. Echo said...

I seem to recall you have a Physics genius friend who could probably answer this right off the bat, but...let ne try...

It MIGHT be possible to guide the balls using X-rays IF the balls have just the right crystalline structure (such as the latticework structure of some metals), but doing so would liberate large quantities of electrons in the process. I think. (Or I may have this process the wrong way around, and bombarding the crystalline structures with electrons will liberate X-rays. I seem to recall that it works bith ways.)

Easier to just use his X-ray vision to give the bad guys spinal cancer or something so they can't fire their guns.

Speaking of such things, given the Golden Age Robin's propensity for shooting people in the head and making it look like a suicide, Batman is probably just recommending that he prioritize the order of killings.

Scott said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Scott said...

OK. So I'm the "physics friend." Although take my explanation with a grain of salt; my Stanford physics days are decades behind me and I now just advise clients on intellectual property issues all day long.

Although electromagnetic radiation, e.g. x-rays, have no mass, they do have a momentum. Lots of interesting (thought) experiments with solar sails propelling spacecraft across the cosmos. But light pressure is extremely small, and these solar sail things are enormousely large to capture as much light as possible.

So can x-rays deflect a ball or other object? Yes, given enough x-rays which push the object away from the x-ray source. But can Superman's x-rays guide the ball in the path shown in the panel? Uh . . . I'll have to call shenanigans on that one. Unless the x-rays somehow create convection currents that somehow guide the ball from Clark's hand to the crook's heads. That's a stretch, though. As if men of steel aren't already a stretch.

Elrossiter said...

bravo bravo bravo - ha ha ha ha ha todays post was ACES!!! hey dousche, wanna quit firing arrows down on us - what were the writers thinkin....

elrossiter

David said...

Don't forget back in the day, what would eventually be known as "heat vision" was at that point called "the heat of my x-ray vision." Thus, maybe he means he's using heat vision to create thermals to keep the balls going at crook-head height, rather than just plopping to the floor as they should.

I confess when I read the story, I just assumed he meant he was using x-ray vision to see where to throw.

Where you're really going to need a scientist is in explaining how a grown man can sit on a box kite without crashing it.