by Cracked. com
When the human body reaches its terminal velocity, about 120 miles per second, nearly anything it hits—soft or hard, liquid or solid, concrete or open Dumpster full of expired-but-unused sanitary napkins—is more than capable of providing enough resistance to your forward momentum to convert you into street jelly (see Figure 5.8).
Yes, there are recorded cases of people surviving such falls, or even falls from much higher up (like from an airplane), but those cases are famous precisely because they’re the statistical equivalent of winning the lottery, if winning the lottery broke every bone in your body.
FIGURE 5.8 Jumping into dumpsters from more than three stories up is strongly discouraged by physicists, doctors, trash men, and people with weak stomachs.
Explosion Shock Waves Will Tear You Apart Like Wet Tissue Paper
When a bomb explodes behind characters in the movies, they have two options. They can be thrown off their feet, at which point they will be safely tucked under a nearby pile of rubble. But the really cool action stars will actually bodysurf the shock wave and ride it around like a really strong gust of wind. Riding explosion shock waves is actually Tom Cruise’s preferred mode of transportation in the Mission: Impossible films.
You remember those scenes, right? Notice how the shock wave was strong enough to tear apart that metal car or turn that concrete wall into rubble? It’s not complicated; explosions can turn titanium into tissue paper, and they will turn your body into a heaping bowl of human pudding. That’s how explosions work.
High explosives, like the kind you find in missiles, create waves that hit you with a force of around 1.5 million pounds . . . per square inch. In the explosion business, they call what results “total body disruption,” and it is every bit as awful as it sounds. And that’s not even mentioning the shrapnel flying toward Tom Cruise’s diminutive body, each chunk moving at the speed of a bullet. Or the ball of fire behind Bruce Willis, caused by jet fuel burning at 500 degrees Fahrenheit.
But maybe our hero was farther away from the blast than he looked, and maybe the explosion was just a gas tank instead of high explosives—in that case, you’re only dealing with ruptured eardrums, burst lungs, and bowel contusion/perforation. It’s a little hard to make laconic puns at terrorists when your guts are leaking feces into your abdomen. Hard, but not impossible (maybe wait until the villain starts his monologue and go with something like “Funny, here I thought I was the one who was full of shit,” but after that you should really get to a hospital).
Everything You Believe About Guns Is Wrong
The vast majority of you have never even held the kinds of guns frequently featured in action movies and video games. Probably less than a third of you have even used one in an open gun battle or violent car chase. Yet most movies and video games take place in a universe where elaborate submachine guns are used more often than coffeemakers. If society should ever devolve into a violent free-for-all that leaves you diving sideways while firing two pistols in slow motion, you’ll find that Hollywood and video games have done an extremely poor job of preparing you for the realities of the situation.
ABSURD BULLSHIT YOU BELIEVE ABOUT GUNFIRE
Safe to hide behind in gunfight
Will explode into fireball if shot
FIGURE 5.9 Look, if you can think of a clearer way to make a sign that says, “Consuming helium while getting shot will make you explode,” then put it in your goddamn book, we don’t give a shit.
Bulletproof Vests Are Not Magical Force Fields
Let’s say you’re Doc Brown in Back to the Future. Somehow your best-laid plans have gone awry, and now a bunch of Libyans in a Volkswagen van are out for your blood. They plan to shoot you repeatedly with their AK-47s, but you have an ace in the hole: a bulletproof vest. You might as well have Gandalf’s magic protection bubble glowing around your torso!
In the real world, the vest that protected Doc Brown would have been useful only for its ability to keep all of his bits in one convenient package for the mortician. No body armor can protect you from that kind of point-blank machine gunning. The type of bulletproof vest you can actually conceal under your clothes provides exceptional protection against most handguns. But against an assault rifle? It’s only slightly more effective than wishful thinking. The military does have its own stronger body armor, but it’s much bigger, heavier, and more rigid . . . and even then it won’t help you if the bad guy is closer than forty feet away.
FIGURE 5.10 Vague cosmetic similarities to pistol ammunition notwithstanding, thermonuclear weapons should not be regarded as “just really big bullets.”
A Fully Automatic Assault Rifle Runs Out of Bullets in Three Seconds
Hollywood treats machine guns (aka fully automatic rifles) as magical bullet factories. You’ll see the hero spray bullets for several minutes before running out at some point that is convenient to the drama. The M-16, the assault rifle the U.S. military uses (you’ve seen it on the news), fires really fast—a rate of about 700 rounds per minute. The problem is it holds only 30 shots. Do the math and you’ll find that you can shoot for a whole three seconds before the gun is empty. A U.S. infantryman carries only 210 rounds total—if he wants to go full Rambo on the enemy, he’ll be out of action in under a minute, even counting the time it takes to reload.
“But wait!” you say. “You just told us that the military uses machine guns all the time. And I’ve seen war footage from Vietnam and Iraq and everywhere else, and you can totally hear machine-gun fire chattering in the distance.” That’s true. Full-auto fire is only really used for suppression. That is, they’re using bigger, heavier machine guns fed by belts of bullets purely to make the bad guys duck their heads and hunker down while their own guys maneuver into position. For every enemy these guns kill in Iraq and Afghanistan, an average of 250,000 shots (three tons of bullets) are fired that hit absolutely nothing—they’re shooting at air. That’s right: Those big, badass Rambo guns are designed purely to annoy the enemy.
Silencers Will Not Turn Your Gunfire into a Gentle Whisper
Cautious spies and assassins know that if you’re going to take out a bad guy in a place where you can’t make noise, like at a movie theater or a library, you use a silencer. It turns the concussive bang of a gunshot into a neutered ptew. In movies, anyway. In the real world, exploding gunpowder is loud. Really loud. An unsilenced gunshot is around 140 to 160 decibels—that’s in the range where hearing it once can permanently damage your ears. A typical silencer will get that all the way down to . . . 120 or 130 decibels, or as loud as the sound of a jackhammer.
So a silencer really just makes a large gun sound like a smaller gun. If you’re James Bond and are sneaking into the enemy’s compound with a silenced pistol, you’re basically hoping the guards will decide that your gun is too small and wimpy to be a serious threat and leave you be. There is a reason why silencers exist, obviously—if you’re in an outdoor, noisy environment, they can make it impossible for the bad guys to tell where exactly your shot is coming from or how far away it is. But in the quiet palace of the dictator you’re trying to assassinate, your silenced gunshot will sound like, well, a gunshot.
It’s Really Freaking Hard to Hit Anybody
Every gunshot is a controlled explosion going off inside your hand, and learning to control the direction you explode it in is really freaking hard. The New York City Police Department did a huge study in the 1970s and found that when the bad guy was more than ten feet away, the shots missed 90 percent of the time. In real-life gunfights involving trained shooters, shots fired at that range only hit their target 10 percent of the time. To put that into perspective, go stand on one side of the free-throw line of a regulation basketball court, and have a friend (or if you don’t have friends, your mom) stand at the other end. You’re now twelve feet away from one another.
If you’re thinking that these guys should spend more time taking target practice, you should know that the same NYPD study found that the force’s top range shooters did no bett
er in actual gunfights than anybody else. Probably because controlling explosions with your hands like a freaking wizard gets harder when both you and the thing you’re trying to hit are running, ducking, and screaming like possessed toddlers.
Maybe you’re thinking, “That’s why I’m bringing a shotgun! You don’t even have to aim with one of those!” Well, that’s true, in a video game. In real life, no, a shotgun can’t take out everybody standing within a five-foot-wide corridor in front of you (buckshot only spreads in a pattern a few inches wide).
FIGURE 5.11 In hindsight, there may have been a less violent way to illustrate this point.
Bullets Don’t Explode Everything
In the movies, bullets and anything mildly flammable have a matter/antimatter relationship. The second that hot lead touches a car’s gas tank, it and everyone inside are going up in a beautiful ball of orange. Shoot an oxygen tank in a shark’s mouth and he’ll blow like he’s stuffed with dynamite. But this one doesn’t even pass the common sense test—the manufacturers of automobiles and pressurized containers really don’t like liability lawsuits. If their product could be turned into a fireball the size of a city block with nothing more than a puncture by a tiny metal object, every expressway pileup would look like the Hindenburg.
FIGURE 5.12 This diagram was funded by the Manahawkin, New Jersey, Council for Barrel Preservation.
FIGURE 6.1 There’s a chance that Nathaniel Hawthorne missed the point of the scarlet letters Puritan women wore on their breasts.
6.A
America’s Origin Story
Less Factual Than the Ones in Comic Books
When it comes to the birth of America, most of us are working from elementary school history lessons. And while it’s not surprising that your second-grade teacher might have biffed a couple of details, what’s shocking is how much less interesting the version we learned was compared to the mind-bending true story.
Repressed Puritans Needed All Those Laws to Curb the Constant Humping
THE MYTH: Every American school kid who has sat through a lesson on the history of Thanksgiving learned that the Pilgrims who founded America were a group of sexually repressed religious fanatics known as Puritans.
Those early settlers in America were actually an offshoot of a much larger group in the Church of England who were working to purify the world of anything relating to genitalia. To this day, we refer to someone’s sensibilities as “puritanical” if they’re the type to demand that somebody chisel a pair of slacks on the statue of David.
THE TRUTH: While sex between unmarried couples was theoretically a crime in Puritan society, that hardly slowed them down. It just meant that their society was rife with shotgun weddings. According to some studies, up to one in three Puritan women were pregnant when they got married.
Given that they lived in such a repressive and extremist society, these depraved criminals must have carried out their illicit affairs with discretion, right? Not even close. According to historians, the Puritans had sex everywhere. They had sex in churchyards. They had sex in ditches and on hedges. They had sex in bars and in bean patches and on porches. One of the most common places for Puritan servants to have sex was in the kitchen, often while the other servants watched.
Keep in mind, sex was at the heart of the faith. The Puritan church believed that because marriage was between a man, a woman, and Jesus, sex should also be between a man, a woman, and Jesus. This wasn’t even a metaphor: The Puritan church sought converts by describing the “voluptuous delights” that awaited them in heaven with their “heavenly husband.” Yeah, they’re talking about sex with the Lord.
BET YOU DIDN’T KNOW: At least one Puritan man was excommunicated from his church because he refused to have sex with his wife. Sign us up!
The Indians Weren’t Defeated by White Settlers
THE MYTH: Our history books don’t really go into a ton of detail about how the Indians became an endangered race. Some warring, some smallpox blankets, and . . . death by broken heart?
When American Indians show up in movies made by conscientious white people, they usually lament having their land taken from them. The implication is that Native Americans died off like a species of tree-burrowing owl that couldn’t hack it once their natural habitat was paved over.
If we had to put the whole cowboys versus Indians battle into a log line, we’d say the Indians put up a good fight but were no match for the white man’s superior technology. As surely as scissors cut paper and rock smashes scissors, bullet beats arrow.
THE TRUTH: There’s a pretty important detail our textbooks left out about the white European settlers’ conquest of the people who were already living in America: It happened immediately after the Native Americans had experienced what can only be described as a full-blown apocalypse.
When the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock, the most devastating plague in human history had just raced up the east coast of North America. So the Pilgrims started the tape recorder on New England’s written history immediately after 96 percent of the Native Americans in Massachusetts were wiped out.
In the years before the Pilgrims landed, a sailor named Giovanni da Verrazzano sailed up America’s east coast and described it as “densely populated” and so “smoky with Indian bonfires” that you could smell them burning hundreds of miles out at sea. So the Pilgrims didn’t land in an untamed wilderness so much as in the eerily empty cities depicted in every postapocalyptic movie you’ve ever seen.
It’s strange that so few of us were taught about the Native American apocalypse, since many historians believe it is the single most important event in American history. Before the plague, estimates put America’s population anywhere between 20 and 100 million (Europe’s at the time was 70 million). The plague would eventually sweep west, killing up to 90 percent of the native population in the entire country before white “settlers” ever came into contact with any of them. For comparison’s sake, the Black Death killed off between 30 and 60 percent of Europe.
Our history books naturally wanted us to believe that our ancestors won this land by being the superior culture, as opposed to inventing the crazy-lucrative Apocalypse Profiteering industry. If the Native Americans hadn’t been wiped out by plague, most of the people reading and writing this wouldn’t be in America today. At full strength, the natives had a tendency to make shit powerfully real for any palefaces trying to sneak into the country they had already settled. Just ask the Vikings who landed in America five hundred years before Columbus. Oh, right, the Columbus thing. You just seemed a little old to still believe that. No, it’s fine. We just assumed we could skip a few things. Columbus. Santa Claus. It’s cool, we’ll make this quick.
Columbus Wasn’t the First European to Discover America, Vikings Were
THE MYTH: America was discovered in 1492, when Europeans decided to conquer the outside world.
The Renaissance and the Enlightenment were under way, and Europeans of the time were just generally the first smart people ever. Columbus discovered America thanks to a daring journey across the Atlantic. His crew almost threw him overboard because they thought the world was flat and they would sail off the edge. When he arrived, Columbus named the people who already lived there Indians, for which they were incredibly thankful: Imagine, living there for thousands of years and never coming up with a name for themselves!
THE TRUTH: All of that is bullshit. Nobody at the time thought the world was flat. Columbus’s voyage wasn’t particularly difficult.
Columbus and his crew enjoyed smooth sailing, and nobody threatened to throw him overboard. Basically, if it’s a well-known anecdote about Columbus, you should assume that the opposite is true, and then pretend you’ve known it for a while so you don’t look stupid. Columbus wasn’t the first to cross the Atlantic. In fact, it’s possible that Native Americans crossed the Atlantic before Columbus—some anthropologists believe two men who shipwrecked in Holland in 60 B.C. were American Indians. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone ou
tside of a fifth-grade history class who thinks Columbus was the first to cross in the other direction. Which brings us to the good part: Vikings versus Indians.
Starting around 986, a steady stream of Vikings spent hundreds of years trying to settle what they called Vinland—which historians now believe was the east coast of America. Some think they made it as far south as modern-day North Carolina. In 1005, almost five hundred years before Columbus, a group of Vikings set up the first successful European-American colony. It lasted two years, and then the Native Americans kicked their asses out, shooting the head Viking in the heart with an arrow, because that was just how they rolled. So to recap, the biggest badasses in European history got into one scuffle with the natives and decided that settling America wasn’t that great an idea after all. If you think the Pilgrims would have fared any better against an east coast chock-full of Native Americans, you either don’t know what a Viking is or you’re placing entirely too much stock in the strategic importance of having belt buckles on your shoes. If the Indians had remained at full strength and never experienced a plague, America would probably be as white and European as failed colonies like India and Africa are today.
Native Culture Wasn’t Primitive
THE MYTH: American Indians lived in balance with Mother Earth, Father Moon, Brother Coyote, and Sister . . . Bear?