Muppets and Aeroplanes

In one of the Muppet Christmas Specials (the one where they have to visit Santa to deliver mail because they got so distracted mucking about in the mail room they forgot to actually post their mail), they have to ride on the wing of an aeroplane to get to the North Pole.

Now, discounting the whole amounts of fired that the airline lady should be, would that be physically possible?

I'm going to assume here that the Muppets do breathe. I know, they're puppets, but magic isn't a thing in the Muppet universe, so therefore, Muppets breathe. For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to assume that they require the same sorts of pressure as humans to breathe, since they live on Earth and are considered human-like in other aspects, so why not this?

Due to this, we can assume that they need similar amount of oxygen to breathe and survive. Between 30 and 40 thousand feet is far above the DEATH ZONE, or the altitude at which most humans can survive, simply due to the sheer lack of oxygen that's up there. They wouldn't have chance to acclimatise either, so the hours it would take to get to the North Pole would be filled with altitude sickness which involves, among other things, death.

Also, look at how they're holding on:

Put simply, they're not. Kermit doesn't even have his hands on the plane! There is literally no way they're holding on tight enough to prevent the wind from pushing them off the plane. They've got a very long drop ahead of them, and I don't think they're going to survive that, especially not if they land in the water.

But you see that canonically, they do survive. So, how does that work?

Remember those assumptions that we had to make for it to work realistically? Look at the Muppet's mouths. They don't have any gap at all, implying that they don't need to breathe. This implies that no matter how realistic the Muppets may seem, there is a small amount of magic in there, as they can still talk, backed up by the fact that Santa exists.

So, rather than considering Muppets as human-like, we have to consider them almost like mystical beings. Their powers aren't truly established, other than not being blatantly obvious ones like teleportation, so it could be that, as mystical beings, they have the ability to grip onto any surface, no matter how slippery. So they technically could hold on, and drop at a low enough point that the snow can actually break their fall, especially due to being made of fabric as opposed to flimsy human bodies.

So... I guess it is physically possible, just not for humans. I guess it's a good thing they aren't really human then? And if they're not human then what does that imply about the Muppet world... But that's another theory!

Merry Christmas!

Kat.

Tangled - How Did the Tear Work? Random Theory

Note: Serious spoilers for Tangled's ending. I'm not even joking here. Just... all the spoilers.

In Tangled, the only magic seems to be magical healing hair. But at the end Rapunzel revives Flynn by a tear...

So, how does that even work?

One idea often expressed is that the tear was the drop of sunlight from the start of the movie, but I don't like that theory. The reason is because at the start, the drop of sunlight was yellow, whereas the tear that revives Eugene is clear.

Not that sunlight comes down in drops anyway. It's either particles or waves.

But if it isn't the drop of sunlight, what could it be?

The best way to consider this is by looking at magic. The magic in Tangled seems to be almost a form of energy that is passed from one living being to another. Exactly how this happens I'm not quite sure yet, but any way you go about it, when Rapunzel's hair gets cut off, there's a load of magical energy in her body looking for an outlet, since it can't travel down her hair follicles any more. The closest place that the energy could be used is in the eyes, and as she cried, she used the energy to revive Flynn. After all, it's never stated that she couldn't revive with her hair, just that she only used it for age reversal and healing.

I wonder what would have happened if she hadn't used the tear to revive Flynn though? Reasonably, you could say that it could have overloaded somewhere in her body unless she could let it out some other way.

Considering that... I'm out. Merry Christmas or whatever you celebrate! I'll try to think of a more Christmas related topic for next week.

Kat.

Random Theory - Is Magic Really in the Blood? (Harry Potter)

One of the main themes in Harry Potter is the idea that people describe magical linage as being in the blood. People who have two wizarding parents are considered 'Pureblood', one wizarding, one muggleborn or muggle considered 'Halfblood and... well, lets not go into the rather rude insult for muggleborns, shall we?

So, we can assume that magic is part of the genetic code, partly because that's how you make a human: by getting a load of human DNA together and using it (hopefully with the right amount, otherwise things start to go wrong).

The easiest idea is to have magic just be a single set of genes. You have magic or you don't have magic. Sorted.

But would it be dominant or recessive?

Probably recessive actually. The reason being that there are squibs and muggleborns. Squibs are born to magical parents, but don't use magic themselves (as you probably know, and no, Kwikspell doesn't help). If magic was dominant, it'd still be possible to have squibs, but they'd be a lot rarer, and almost non-existent in pureblood households, since most purebloods would have double 'magic genes' and so would be completely unable to produce squibs with each other.

But squibs are rare, you may say. And you may say that means that squibs aren't proof of it being a recessive gene. So we'll look at muggleborns instead.

Muggleborns are born to non-magical parents. This means that the 'magic gene' can't be dominant, since if either parents had one of the genes to pass down to the child, they would be magic, and as such, their child wouldn't be considered muggleborn. As the gene for the muggleborn had to come from somewhere, the only way it works is for it to be a recessive gene.

Now for the other idea about magic being genetic: there's more than one gene which controls magic.

Why are there superior wizards, like Dumbledore? If magic is just a case of having the right genes, then why aren't all wizards exactly the same in skill at magic.

You might argue that it's a case of practice, and part of that certainly is true. After all, it's implied that they have to practice spells a lot to get them right, and that's part of the reason they have Hogwarts and the ilk to practice and improve.

However, that doesn't correlate with the idea that Hermione, in the first movie, had her feather up and flying around all over the place, whilst others were still struggling to get it off the desk. On her first time doing magic, no less. Furthermore, it's indicated in Prisoner of Azkaban that young teenagers don't have the magic resources for Patronuses, but we can all see Harry gallivanting around with his stag (which is not a goat).

Looking at skin colour, there's multiple genes that control it, but lets focus on just one, since I'm no biologist, and I don't want this to require an A-level to understand. I'm getting this information from Wikipedia, so it might not be the most correct, but it's what I can understand. The MC1R gene causes pheomelanin and eumenlanin to be produced, and someone with different amounts of them would have a different skin tone.

Getting back to Harry Potter, if there was a second magical gene, similar to the MC1R gene, then different amounts of chemical would be produced by each person, meaning that they'd have varying amounts of magical resources. What would change with practice would be the amount of magical resource required for a spell. What would be genetic would be the amount of magical resources your body produced in the first place, with people like Harry, Hermione and Lily having larger amounts of the magic proteins due to their genes, and people like Neville having much less, requiring more practice to reduce the magical resources required for spells.

Furthermore, you could have high amounts of this magic protein, and still not be magical if you didn't have the original gene for being able to control the protein, only for your kids to be magically strong and get to go to Hogwarts.

Meanwhile, I'll just wait for my letter to come by owl post (after all, there must have been some clerical errors forming from the Battle of Hogwarts... they just haven't realised that I was meant to be a wizard yet...)

Kat.

Can You Win the Hunger Games... Before it Even Starts?

Yes, and before you say anything, I guess not being chosen as tribute is kind of winning (a method made easier by being in a Career district), but this isn't about that.

It also isn't about the idea of assassinating your opposition while in the training tower (but I may cover that later, if it strikes my fancy).

Instead, I'm going to focus on the 60 seconds you have to wait on your platform before the Hunger Games start.

This is how you do it.

These platforms are surrounded by mines, as anyone would tell you. Meanwhile, everyone else's platform is surrounded by mines. And as Katniss mentions, they're very easily set off, as a wooden ball, rocks and even apples are heavy enough to set them off.

But could you bring anything into the arena to set them all off? After all, you want to win the Hunger Games, not just make it easier for yourself. But first, we need to figure out a few things.

How much weight is necessary to set off a mine?

Well we don't know the weight of the ball, nor how heavy the rocks that Katniss expected to throw were, but we can see if you can bring in anything the weight of the apples. We can assume that the apples are just going to be common apples, since it's never mentioned that they're anything different. The average weight of an apple is between 70g and 100g.

This means that marbles are out, weighing in at an average 4.54 grams, so you'd need between 14 and 20 just to kill one tribute, and that's assuming you managed to get them all on the same mine, which is kind of hard when you can't even see them. Ball bearings aren't much better with a weight of 4.71g. I'm just going to assume beads aren't heavy enough to be the same weight as an apple.

We could also consider gemstones. Quartz is the most common gemstone and so the most likely that any tribute would be able to have it. It also requires 25 cubic centimetres to get the smallest weight required... so, not exactly easy to carry 5.75m² of it around, let alone find that much in any district in Panem.

Of course, this might not be the lightest weight, just the lightest we know about, so this may not prevent you from winning this way. So the next question is... could you throw it?

We'll assume best circumstances, and that you're an average 18 year old who can throw averagely far. An average girl can throw 22.86 meters and an average boy can throw 58.52 meters.

This means most people wouldn't be able to throw far enough, especially considering the huge cornucopia in the way.

Okay, so now we've managed to find some material heavy enough (which could be impossible), and throw it far enough (which most people can't do), but could you still succeed?

Probably not.

After all, the Gamemakers are always watching, and if they realise what you're doing, they've got the tools to stop it right there. With explosions.

Seems like assassination is the more possible idea after all...

Kat.

Hi There!

So, here's another blog, just like the several million floating around the internet...

But this one's different!

Sure, every blog says that, but we've actually got a plan (or at least a good excuse for one).

We're going to look at different parts of pop culture, from the Hunger Games to South Park (with a bit of anime in there, because anime is awesome), and we're going to look at how the worlds work.

So hang around for a bit and see how crazy we can get about the fictional worlds we obsess over.

In case you're wondering, the reason I'm saying we is because I'm not going to be the only one posting on the site. The writers are:

Kat (Me!)
Panda
Becca
GemGem (note, she didn't actually pick this name, so I might need to run away soon...)

See you around!
Kat.