Grrl Power #309 – Conservation of momentum into your head
It is a huge pet peeve of mine when momentum is ignored with teleporters and gateways and the like in movies. Also someone being caught six inches from the ground after falling 500 feet, especially if the person catching them is traveling laterally at terminal velocity plus. Like the first Star Trek reboot when Kirk and Sulu basically fell from low orbit and Chekov transported them the instant before they splatted, and all that happened was they fell over in the transporter. I think a grating on the floor broke. Edit: As discussed in the comments below, that may not be the best example since transporters would have to compensate for the difference between the velocity of a ship in orbit and the surface of a planet at the very least. All I’m asking for is one line in the movie which explains that, especially since it was pivotal to the scene, and I don’t recall it ever being discussed in any movie or episode of the series. It’s one of those refrigerator logic things that fans think about but I suspect the show creators never did. Granted it would invite all sorts of questions about how it can remove external momentum without stopping blood dead in its tracks or hearts or whatever, but then at least that one scene wouldn’t rank 4 eyerolls out of 5. Low orbit! Still, you guys know the sort of thing I’m talking about.
The way Harem is delivering that kick is a good way to break an ankle or worse, but don’t forget she gets physically tougher when she un-teleports some of herselves. (Which, out of context is a super weird sentence.) So when she pulls a horizontal 2 story drop into the side of someone’s stone head, she quickly contracts down to two of herself for the impact, which makes the both of them about 4 times as tough until she re-exists the dupes. She does that almost immediately because she describes not having all 5 of her out at once like a regular mono-person with walking around with an eyepatch and one ear stopped up.
Fighting Harem would basically be the worst. She’s master of the blindside, and it’s hard as hell to hit her. Obviously a skilled fighter could beat her, (she’s never beaten Math) and if you get one good hit in, it staggers the rest of her.
I asked on twitter what it’s called when gravity overcomes upward velocity and I got a lot of answers, Ballistic Apogee and Trajectory Apex both sound cool but I think those are names for the highest point of the parabola, not necessarily names for gravity countering momentum. Harem went with “velocitudeinal equilibrium.” She’s not a genius, but she’s smarter than average and surprisingly well read. Still, there’s part of her that thinks people (boys) find brainy chicks offputting so she doesn’t wear her education on her sleeve much. She’s still young though so she’ll probably outgrow that eventually, especially hanging around with all the other capable women on the team.
The Renegade X books (one and two) are among my favorite superhero novel series, up there with Wearing the Cape and D-List Supervillain, and the author, Chelsea Campbell, is running a kickstarter in advance of the third book coming out. It doesn’t cost much (as far as I’m aware) to publish an e-book through Amazon, but kickstarters for books like this are cool cause they allow for hardback versions but more importantly, they’re so they can afford to pay artists for cover art. Otherwise you wind up with covers done in Poser with Microsoft Word wordart for the title. There are some god damned dire covers if you go looking through the dregs of e-books. Like unbelievably bad. I’m sure there’s a subreddit just for making finding and making fun of the worst ones.
Speaking of reddit, there is a subreddit for Grrl Power. There’s not too much going on in there yet, but if you’re a big reddit person, you can subscribe there and get updates to the comic that way.
Here’s the link to the new comments highlighter for chrome, and the GitHub link which you can use to install on FireFox via Greasemonkey.
SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
Meatspace ComicSeriously these are awesome. Check 'em out!
Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
Nice tattoo there, Harem
it’s pedantic, but I’m pretty sure that ‘flipping’ your momentum by 180 degrees is the exact opposite of ‘conserving’ your momentum.
It looks like it’s conserved relative to Harem.
Harem’s velocity, and therefore momentum, relative to Harem is always trivially zero, since a reference point cannot move relative to itself. krenn has a point. Energy, on the other hand, is conserved.
Er, at least kinetic energy is conserved. Potential energy is not, as someone else pointed out below.
And, following that train of thought to its logical conclusion, Harem is a source of unlimited clean energy. Even better than clowns.
No more so than Maxima. Or many other heroes, including several on the team.
Only because she pulls the energy needed to teleport out of her ass (or a Cherenkov-Kirby reaction) Otherwise it wouldn’t be anywhere near economic
I’m not with the physics but at least the energy was merely transformed not destroyed right? Probably she doesn’t worry terribly about correct terminology when talking to Zany Comic Book Store Owners and casual Observers?
Momentum is a vector quantity, so the direction would have to be conserved as well as the magnitude. But I’ll accept a suitably hand waved explanation ‘cuz It’s so cool looking.
OK she flubbed the explanation. But she didn’t break the Law as she did exert energy to alter the vector consciously?
That depends on how teleportation is done. If it’s done, say, via wormhole (a.k.a portal), then it’s absolutely okay, since in GR the conservation laws are local (nobody even knows how a global conservation law would look like). “Speedy thing goes in, speedy thing goes out”.
Yup, makes sense to me.
*replicates trick using wormholes, with suitably inverted entrances and exits, instead of teleportation*
See, no problem!
You’ll find a suitably bizarre application of this kind of physics in the Pixar short “Presto,” which was shown in front of Wall-E.
…or in the mechanic on which the entire game Portal revolves around.
Yes, no problem. Well, the only problem is that it affects the wormhole itself. The momentum of the system “you and wormhole” doesn’t change when you pass through it, but individual moments of you and of the wormhole will change. That will probably destroy the wormhole.
Mmm, obviously my knowledge of this is limited to the simplistic terms, and analogies, used for us non-mathematicians/ physicists. But, using that, envisaging the folding of space, to change the orientation of entrance and exit points is very simple. And the wormhole itself is not moving, it is simply the conduit connecting those two points in the space/ time.
Personally I was just envisaging it as a Portal (the game) style entrance and exit (albeit with a tunnel-like route, thanks to Star Trek). So I could go into it in a straight line, and come out where I wanted.
So I am not getting why you say:
Obviously I realise that analogies will break down if analysed too closely. So there may simply be something here that I do not appreciate (as opposed to arguing with what you are saying – I know that my practical knowledge in this area is too limited to speak with authority).
Are you implying that I should modify my visualisation to include a curved tunnel, that I would need to negotiate?
Because, if so, that would lie at odds with the other analogy that I have seen used. Where you can pick up the corner of a tablecloth (representing space) and fold it over to touch the tablecloth elsewhere. The point where the cloth touches itself representing the wormhole.
In that analogy it is extremely easy to envisage the orientation being inverted, with no difficulty!
I am not that good at physics either, but the point is that any modification to space-time metric is made by matter and/or energy, and traversable wormholes are known to require exotic matter. So when you pass through it, you will interact, even if just via gravitational force, with the stuff that made that wormhole and keeps it open
Yup. With nasty effects, including dying. The wormholes as theorised by our physicists would be totally inimical to human life. But we gloss over minor little details like that :-D
That said though we interact with everything. Even the smallest speck of dust, in the furthest galaxy, is exerting some gravitational pull on us. No matter how minuscule. But a wormhole is a distortion within time and space.
Our interactions with it (still ignoring deadly radiation) should be akin to traversing any other bit of time and space. We just follow our noses and come out the other side. Which could be anywhere and anywhere. But, once we are on the far side, that is where we are. Where we used to be no longer has any baring on the matter.
I am honestly very comfortable with visualising Harem travelling in a straight line (from her point of view, albeit that it is done instantaneously) and her super-power just bends time and space, wormhole-style.
The fact that this would massively change the energy within the system really does not matter, in the super-genre. As many supers can spontaneously create energy (or pants) out of nothing.
York, careful with those. You could get worms.
Sorry Yorp. Phone.
the problem I have with wormholes, like say Star Gates, is that both of the planets are rotating, but they’re probably not rotating at the same rate, angle, direction, etc. Why we never saw the team walk out of the gate UPSIDE DOWN is beyond me.
Also, even if things were aligned right when the connection was made…….they wouldn’t stay aligned. At all. This also doesn’t account for the fact that planets not only rotate, but they freaking move. it’s like teleporting out of a moving vehicle that is moving at 60mph into one at 250mph……that’s going in the opposite direction……and is in fact a plane that is flying upside down at the moment, and it’s four hundred thousand light years away, and may not actually exist anymore.
That one is easy, it comes under the heading of Clarke’s third law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Not to mention that these age old Stargate(tm) things might give you a blue screen of actual death if there is a computer glitch. So beware of stargate software updates. It could be a virus!
The most weird thing here probably is what her velocity is measured relative too. If the direction changes under teleportation, her momentum (or at constant mass, her velocity) is clearly not preserved.
What however is preserved is the velocity of everything else relative to herself.
Yeah, I think that you’re on the right track Kenn. While her speed is conserved, the momentum is not conserved. In order for harem’s momentum to be conserved the wormhole has to react to how she is moving through it.
A short aside, I cannot tell if David B is either using wormhole/field teleportation or light based teleportation where harem becomes a beam of light. The latter involves issues like quantum information manipulation problem or in some case even time reversal depending on the reflectivity of her surroundings.
Now, most people’s comments are assuming it’s the former—a wormhole or teleportation field. Passing through a wormhole that changes your momentum is similar to a ball bouncing of a wall. In order, for momentum to be conversed would require the teleportation field/wormhole to displace or move based on the momentum of harem entering it.
So when harem is moving down, she has to place her entrance and exit wormholes slightly above where she enters and where she wants to go. Because as she passes through, the wormhole is going to “wobble” down in reaction to her passing through it.
P.S. I rather wish I had a sheet of online paper so I could draw this.
P.P.S. I am going to go into more detail to in the comments below :D
Weird. So stuff Harem teleports with is relative to Harem, not the rest of the universe. If she could teleport more weight there would be a lot of engineers who would like to talk to her.
Her energy being “Higher” self in the dimension/universe/whatever its in helps her to feel out where she is going for a safe spot to “land”. Maybe it devours all extra information/energy not crucial to basic life functions in that shell then it can feel out the objects on the target end to copy aspects of their momentum to Harem? Then just provides energy needed for that new momentum or stores extra energy unneeded to the process.
Her higher self being the mistress of multiverse level copy paste and basic “photoshop”. (corrects red eye and that nasty blur caused by unexpected momentum in the shot!)
She could become the aerial bombardment specialist of the team. Just pick up a large rock, vorp to about 2000 feet above the target and let go of the rock. If she picked a more streamlined object at a higher release point the effect could be even greater.
She’d make a dandy cannon too. Do several pop-and-drops to get maximum potential energy (you’ll know you’re getting there when the projectile starts to get too hot to hold) and then the drop kick as shown above (folding the knees and feet out of the way – as body posture is evidently not conserved either; not a problem), and let go. The projectile will start at about 200 mph (max falling speed of Harem), accelerate sharply (max falling speed of a presumably spherical object is considerably higher, and not really an issue — it’s not really a falling object now), then continue in a ballistic trajectory.
Slight correction… I seem to have confused mph with kph. 120 mph is maximum human falling speed (200 kph). Not as impressive as I first imagined, but you still going to use the projectile trick… you really don’t want to hit something with you body when moving 120 mph!
120 mph is max human falling speed in normal atmosphere while spread out flat perpendicular to the direction of fall so you get maximum wind resistance and edge effects. If you fall like Harem does (feet first, arms in) you can get up to 180 mph or so. That air is pretty wacky stuff.
And perhaps we can fudge the issue of ‘conservation of momentum’ here by saying that her weight-carrying limitation is the reason she can get away with this: there’s a transfer of momentum vector somewhere, and so she can only do so much before physics breaks or she does.
That’s the best solution I’ve seen for this problem. But should’t Harem have an velocity limit analogue to the weight limit (although a very high one)?
For teleport itself the biggest issue with velocity is timing. For striking momentum, there is a limit based on how many bodies she has out. Too fast and she’s in the hospital for broken legs or a broken spine. The less bodies the higher that threshold is.
Right. Harem can get up to Anvils base strenght and durability if she unteleports all her other “selves”. But she does not like doing it.
I wasn’t talking about the effect on her body or how her timing copes with the velocity. My concern is if there is something limiting the mass she can teleport it should also apply for velocity. Teleportation at 1000 mph, fine. 1001 mph, not anymore.
The old ‘fall down a hole through the Earth’ problem will put you at a speed of just under 18,000 mph when you pass through the center of mass at the core. (ignoring air resistance and Coriolis forces)
And those pesky ‘getting crushed to a squishy pulp, by the air pressure’ and ‘burnt by the sheer heat’ issues.
Not really necessary to impose a limit here, as long as she remains inside the atmosphere. Air friction takes care of that.
And outside the atmosphere there will probably be different problems.
Now you’re thinking with portals
Speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out.
Reminds me of a book. The (very humanoid) aliens there could teleport but the conservation of energy made it difficult to teleport up or down. Though some of them could also store kinetic energy for a time and release it (into the ground or the enemy, your choice).
Nightcrawler also had similar problems with his ‘porting. Easiest ‘port is along Earth’s north-south magnetic alignment, more difficult is ‘porting parallel to lines of latitude, but the most difficult was ‘porting upwards away from the ground surface. The way Harem ‘ported here is that she didn’t ‘port to much of a higher altitude & that would presumably also be easier for Nightcrawler to ‘port to change only orientation without changing his actual altitude.
that’s a cool trick
and TATTOO DISCOVERY ACHIEVEMENT on harem’s back hehe
All you had to do is look at Dave’s pic of Harem’s Playboy shoot on Deviant Art to discover that.
:P
Wrongo MD, in that paticular picture Abby is facing front doing the splits.
The tattoo on her that you see is some stars running belt fashion along her panty line.
You do see Punky’s back tattoo though.
And part of Blondie’s tramp stamp, with some stars like Abby’s.
That’s a silly shop name in the background. I wonder if they do both businesses implied?
I would expect car repairs only.
Maybe they specialise in Rat Rod Music. Providing a rat rod creation service, with a special emphasis on making it a stadium-quality set up, on wheels!
Be careful what buttons you push when trying to use the lighter. You might end up shattering every window pane in a two-block radius!
There’s probably a lot of professional musicians that would love that feature on their instruments.
“Puts the auto tuner back in the supressed invention vault.”
So that takes care of the obvious observable momentum.
But weren’t there some more educated folks last update who were also discussing her need to adjust for the rotation of the Earth, its orbit around the Sun, the Solar Systems rotation around the center of the Galaxy, etc… ?
While its nice to answer part of it this still basically leaves us with the answer that some part of herself/power that doesn’t communicate directly with the rest of her conscious self (at least not in a way she’s noticed and understood yet) is dealing with the momentum problem without her conscious self having to make every decision. So that other part could just as easily alter her momentum for a safe landing on the ground when she isn’t using it for “tricks”. (I like the trick though) I think what we see of Harem, as generous as it seems, is still just the tip of the iceberg as far as her true being.
I would actually get HIGHER Sydney so that if Harem had an issue you would have time to swoop in and save the day?
Before I read the speech bubbles I thought that was a Cyclops Kitteh. I liked Cyclops Kitteh for the brief moment she existed. *bows head*
The reason Sydney is as low as she is is that a normal person would likely only break a limb at most from that height. She doesn’t want to be responsible for killing Harem.
Depends on how she hits and then there is the trick she is working on showing her new buddy which flips her the other way around. All it would take is for someone to dump ice down her back at a crucial moment…
But I’ll be nice and say she “stored” a bunch of selves down to just 2 so that this drop was child’s play even with her head pointed down. If someone studied the tactics where she tends to “store” extra’s and sniped the other to distract the one fighting maybe it would be a “twofer”.
I don’t think Sydney is quite that comfortable with her powers or confident in herself to do something.
And considering her lack of experience, the option that is least likely to end in serious harm would be to drop Harem from a relatively safe reight.
The reason that transporter trick worked in Star Trek is because it doesn’t move matter. It converts matter to energy, moves the energy, then converts it back back from energy to matter.
So…. what happens to the kinetic energy?
Presumably, if you can convert a whole human being into energy and back, a little bit of kinetic energy would be a tiny rounding error. So it could be added or subtracted by the transporter as necessary.
So, that means it’s just as possible the transporter ,in a “normal” beam-down, would “beam” you to the surface with a relative velocity too high to survive as it would canceling the velocity of that dive, yes? “Just a glitch my ass!”
So, when converting energy to matter, energy doesn’t matter?
As we understand it currently, yes.
Where teleportation is concerned, who knows ?
Adds to the light show, is transformed into excess heat, gets absorbed by the transporter system… There’s a bunch of possibilities here. Enough that people not really taking the momentum with them when beaming never occured as strange to me.
So… they get weight?
No, you store the energy, and convert it for ship use, like running the transporter. Remember, Star Trek is in a distant future wherein they have a much better understanding of how the universe works, and the more advanced technology to take advantage of that knowledge.
Can’t help it:
https://www.egscomics.com/?date=2010-10-04
https://www.egscomics.com/index.php?id=1153
What the fu…? I replied to Greyman’s comment below! Not this one!
Comments make Lukkai say what.
Darned “Energy Age”, were Matter and Energy become interchangeable.
Although for Treky technobabble the Transporter has a all kinds of junk to sort out motion conflicts (since the beaming pad is also in motion relative to the thing being beamed). The subject needs to have its velocity adjusted before materialization anyways.
@Daemonwolf, they do move matter, at the quatom level, not unlike Harem actually. Only Transporters get a free “Pattern Buffer” to help sort out issues like matching your velocity to the point you’re beaming to.
Why didn’t Kirk and Sulu get placed in as standing position? Well the hand wave is Chekov isn’t a wizard at riding the controls and it was just safer to materialize them in the same relative configuration of particles. Instead of getting fancey and maybe misplacing some critcal vitial organ bits.
Okay, this is likely covered elsewhere in this thread, but it’s already getting to the point of tl;dr anyway, so:
The reason Kirk and Sulu didn’t give the transporter pad a very personal lesson in why it’s called “terminal velocity” (I know, I know, it’s because the object has reached its final velocity in that atmosphere and gravity, but I thought it was a funny line) is because Chekov moved the transporter beam (the sparkly “beam out” effect) with them at their falling speed. Think of it as stepping out of a car moving 70 mph down the highway into another car travelling right beside it at the same speed in the same direction.
As a matter of fact, this function literally has to be available in the standard transporter functions, or else they couldn’t beam anybody down without turning them into an instant WMD. Speed-correcting for the difference in velocity between the ship and the planet is probably an automatic function. Chekov was able reapply that function to their falling speed as well. The inexperienced transporter tech he pushed aside just hadn’t learned how to do that yet.
+1
Err think you now might have a problem explaining why Harem dosn’t shoot of into the sky(or even worse into the ground) when she teleports a few miles round the circumference of the earth. (remember the earth is rotating)
At the extreme end of teleporting from one side of the earth on the equator to the other the difference is over 2000mph.
According to the rules demonstrated in this page, she would go shooting off horizontally most of the time.
And the most extreme case would be if she was standing at the equator and the teleported to anywhere on the equator but facing the oposite direction.
The way I understand the explanation, is that it’s not the distance teleported that gives her momentum. She conserves real world momentum, teleports to a different location with that same momentum, not that she gains momentum in the teleportation itself. Think like the game Portal. If you go into one portal very fast, you come out the other portal very fast as well. However, if you walk through one portal, you walk out the other with the same speed regardless of how far away the two portals are.
According to this page if she re-orients herself while teleporting she would go flying off. Say she’s facing east at the equator, and since she’s on the surface of the earth she’s traveling 465 m/s. Now say she teleports so that she’s facing west but in the same spot. Suddenly she’s traveling 930m/s relative to the ground.
Unfortunately this momentum would also prevent her from doing the nice flying kick in the comic as when she rotates her orientation the momentum from the fall is much less then the momentum from staying constant to the surface of the earth.
And this is why the physics are rarely explained, no matter what is said there is always a problem that can’t be sorted out.
She’s only traveling that speed relative to a single fixed point in space. Relative to the earth she’s traveling exactly 0.0 m/s. If she goes from facing east to facing west, her speed wouldn’t change at all relative to the earth, or a fixed point in space. She’s still standing on earth, with the same constant rotation.
She’s traveling that speed relative to a non-rotating earth. The earth’s surface is rotating at about 465 m/s at the equator and 0 m/s at the poles. Everywhere else is moving somewhere between those two values. Its why rockets are launched as close the equator as possible, that extra 475 m/s saves a ton of fuel.
She may still be standing on Earth with the same constant rotation but she changes the direction of her constant rotation by teleporting into a different orientation.
But this is the reason why shows rarely use simple science to explain away fiction. People who know the scientific subject are pulled out of the story as badly as misspelled words or bad grammar does to english majors. Its better to say “magic did it” and move on then to try to explain something without understanding what is being explained.
I don’t expect DaveB to have a grasp on science beyond a high school education, he’s obviously spent his time in other pursuits. Hell, my grasp of high school french is so bad that I’d probably forgive him from knowing any science. But writing science fiction is hard. It’s usually 99% science and 1% fiction. Anything more then that and science falls apart really quickly and instead if replaced by magic (or a sufficiently advanced science indistinguishable from magic).
Why are you so sure that her teleportation abilities, which can’t really be explained by our current science anyway, aren’t taking her direct surroundings only into account? That is her movement relative to that.
At least when it comes to deciding her speed. Her moving direction is obviously decided relative to her body only.
Ugh! Conservation of Momentum doesn’t work like that. Momentum is a vector; with a magnitude and direction. Both of these components are conserved. What Harem is doing is conserving Kinetic Energy while breaking the Conservation of Momentum to all to pieces. Though, even then, she’s traversing up and down the gravitational field without exchanging Kinetic and Potential Energy.
Somewhere your physics teacher is crying.
She’s thinking with portals, sans actual portals.
And the whole teleportation thingy sorta dropkicks physics in the first place.
Exactly. In Chronicles of the Lensmen, starting and ending use of their inertia-nullifying machine would conserve momentum. They quickly learned to do this very far from any planet or star to avoid having the ship lurch to the side straight into a large object. Oftentimes, they would have no clue which way they would be moving, so the fleet needed to keep spaced out from all objects, including each other ship.
Agreed.
“It is a huge pet peeve of mine when momentum is ignored with teleporters and gateways and the like in movies.”
It is a huge pet peeve of mine when someone says they hate something and their actions prove they don’t know what they are talking about. Dave, I like your comic, but that statement is wrong – Harem’s power breaks conservation of momentum, conservation of energy in general, and conservation of spin (if she can teleport into a reversed position, spin would also be reversed). Please read Niven’s explorations of the consequences of teleportation. They are in one of his short story collections, but I can’t remember which one.
You basically just gave Harem more raw power than anyone else on the team. There are still some practical considerations stopping her, but those aside she could easily generate fractional-c kinetic weapons.
If you’re playing Portal and you have the orange and blue portals on the same wall, when you throw a companion cube into one of them, it comes out of the other. Its direction has changed relative to you, but not to the cube. That’s basically what Harem’s doing, albeit without an obvious portal.
And she could make fractional-c kinetic weapons, but only extremely fractional as she and anything she’s holding when she’s falling is limited to terminal velocity in the atmosphere.
Greyman and Unmaker are right. Vector momentum is conserved, not just the length of the vector. Also, the concept of changing the direction while preserving the length violates the principle of relativity (even Galilean relativity). It’s only definable with respect to some privileged state of rest, which you’ve apparently unconsciously taken to be the local motion of the earth’s surface.
Portal also gets it wrong, though it’s arguably more defensible than your setup since the portals are anchored to solid walls, which both establishes a natural local standard of rest and provides a large reservoir of momentum.
Thank you for the reply, especially since I got a bit snippy – apologies.
I get what you are saying, but momentum is a relative concept and is only conserved relative to other systems, e.g. relative to the universe. One point of some of Einstein’s thought experiments that led to relativity is, if a person is not interacting with another system, e.g. the outside universe, then there is no difference for them between going 0.9999999 c in whatever direction and standing still – they literally cannot tell the difference because, for them, there is no difference. You can’t say “object A has momentum V” without specifying the framework, i.e. what it is in relation to. By definition, momentum relative to self is zero.
Imagine telling someone you had an auto collision. When they ask “with what” you say “nothing”; when the ask “how fast” you say “standing still”. Then that’s not a collision – the same way you have to have two objects moving relative to each other to make a collision, you have to have two objects to have relative momentum (and its conservation).
In Portal, Chell moves in relation to the universe until she enters a portal, then she moves relative to the portal until she exits it. Since portals aren’t constrained to be oriented identically or a the same height, this breaks relative momentum with the universe, but conserves it relative to the portal.
Harem isn’t doing any of the above – she isn’t conserving momementum with respect to the universe, she isn’t conserving momentum with respect to other Harems, and she isn’t conserving momentum with respect to herself (because that’s a meaningless phrase – momentum with respect to self is by definition zero). So she is acting like she is using a portal gun, but without having any of the visible signs. If I saw a power like that for real I would suspect that the teleporter could actually come out of a teleport with any relative velocity they damn well wanted (up to whatever the absolute energetic limits were for their power), but they were subconciously constraining themselves because, for example, they played Portal and that’s what they were expecting. So, if later on, Harem realizes she can change momentum and orientation any way she wants during a teleport without having an intermediate step, then her power would be consistent (fearfully powerful, but consistent). It would also be consistent if she were actually using some portal-like object, real or virtual, to maintain some relative momentum. But even a basic mechanics course (physics of motion) teaches that all momentum is in relation to something.
At one point I heard Stephen Hawking indicate that time travel, via a wormhole is theoretically possible. Barring the issues of being crispy fried by the radiation, and minor quibbles like that.
So interesting things happen, in that you can come out of one end of the wormhole before you go into it. Given that you do not previously exist in the time/space that you are arriving in (let us say a point prior to when you were born), I fail to see how the universe could complain that your momentum was not being conserved?
The framework includes the fact that time and space have curved back on themselves, to get Harem where she wants to be. Her momentum is unchanged,* within the framework of the metaverse (the flat universe, plus the loop in time/space, which is the wormhole effect, that Harem transits when teleporting).
* The universe just went a bit wobbly. Don’t fret too much. Super powers do stuff like that!
Sorry if I am a bit slow replying. I have a less than one day old dragon hatchling, to look after. She is super cute, being in all-pastel shades, so it may be a while before I can leave her. So does take precedence. Not to mention that I need to find her a cuddly familiar to hug!
Steven Gould wrote Jumper to explore some of the consequences of teleportation, which led to one of the sequels having a character realize that the teleporters have been subconsciously controlling momentum, and figures out how to do it consciously, such that she can use the teleport but not change position, just momentum. Like adding 5m/s thataway for a much stronger punch, as one example. Jumper, Reflex, Impulse, Exo. Great books.
You are making 1 mistake in your argument.
You are leaving out the qualifying statement, As far as we know.
That being said please remember that this is an alternative universe and the laws of physics can and probably are different.
You could argue that Harem is restrained to the Framework of the nearest mass (the ground) by some aspect of her power (probably a very useful safety function). Momentum is conserved locally, like mentioned above.
So if her power was ‘create portals/wormholes that are static relative to the ground, oriented as harem wishes’ her power would be consistent.
Sure, she can break global conservation of momentum, but not the relative to her entry/exit framework. Which apparently is restricted to be not moving relative to the ground.
There, easy.
+1
and +1 for your name
Okay, trying a second time since my first answer somehow landed a bit further up.
On the note of crying professors:
https://www.egscomics.com/?date=2010-10-04
https://www.egscomics.com/index.php?id=1153
Just so you know, the word you are looking for is “equipoise”.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/equipoise
They talk fast.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TalkingIsAFreeAction
Oh, you bastard. There goes my day. #SwallowedByTropes
If you’re bothered with conservation of kinetic energy, why not potential energy as well? Say that teleporting “up” is hard, and teleporting down generates excess heat, then.
That sort of nitpicking is just silly, IMHO.
she isn’t doing a “timeless dash”, she is cutting herself off from reality, and then placing herself elsewhere.
as so, gravity and friction are irrelevant, and ineffective.
So?
She changes the momentum arbitrarily, conserves kinetic energy, yet somehow completely ignores potential energy. This is just inconsistent. Either none of those things matter, or all should
As far as our understanding of physics goes.
Every use of the teleporters from the enterprise to planetside or back would have to reorient the person’s momentum to the enterprise, however, unless the planet didn’t rotate (which may have happened in an episode or two, I guess). Even if the enterprise was in geostationary orbit relative to the position being beamed, there’d still be a difference in the momentum due to the greater radius of the arc.
Probably the inertial dampeners take care of it. (Old fan question: “How do they work?” Answer given: “Very well, thank you.”)
Actually, that was the Heisenberg Compensator.
I stand corrected :-)
Hmm, that’s true, going from orbit to the surface of a planet you would have to take that stuff into account. I just need one line in the movie that even mentions it.
Trouble is that you would need a Sydney type character there to ask the question. Somebody who does not know the basics. From what I remember of the movie though, everyone involved was trained, enough that none of them should be asking questions about teleportation 101.
As such, they would either have to voice unrealistic dialogue. Or script in a character just to ask the question.
But, despite all that, I would have preferred something too. I also recall it felt jarring to me. So your point is well made. Perhaps Scotty, muttering to himself? But it is a pretty complicated concept to get across in the context of “Now, all I have to do is…”.
I am betting that they tried scripting it half a dozen ways. Each version finding it was too complicated for audiences to follow easily. Or took too long, which would cripple the high-speed drama of the scene. Or, as per my initial point, just sound wrong coming from the character, in those circumstances.
The other way to handle it being to foreshadow it by talking about it in a more leisurely moment earlier. But that then gives away how they will be rescued from the fall, so ruins the suspense. And doing it after the fact has the problem that you have already lost your suspension of disbelief!
So the only way the latter would work is if it is done immediately after the rescue, whilst the audiences are still struggling with accepting the scene. But, again, that is the time when you want to be playing on the post-adrenalin rush emotions and the joy of still being alive.
That’s one of the things I love about the Portal games. They take inertia and momentum into account. That’s why Chell has to wear those things on her feet – so she doesnt break her legs every time she lands :)
It’s ok guys. Harem doesn’t teleport herself: She teleports all the universe, except herself. That’s why she ACTUALLY conservates momentum like that.
Chuck Norris’s mutant daughter?
or she could be unsummoning/resummoning her body+stuff rather than actually teleporting
with her belief that she is teleporting (recreating the stuff she was carrying wearing) her “momentum” needs to be conserved because she’s smart and sort of aware of it
Walk me through the difference between unsummoning/resummoning and storage/recall from storage would you? I think you lost me…
he can’t follow something that isn’t there, or at least wasn’t aware of it.
I imagine the difference would be thus: If it’s Teleportation, that implies “Taking one thing, and moving it over there”- be that ‘thing’ Matter, Energy, Momentum, donuts, whatever. If it’s a Summoning process, then it’s less movement, and more ‘cut to clipboard, paste in different document’ sort of stuff.
If it’s Teleportation, things like Momentum and vector mechanics and potential energy all have to be conserved right there during the transition. However, if it’s Summoning, then what’s actually happening is Harem’s Power is ‘absorbing’ the body from existence- ‘eating’ the energy and matter and what-have-you so that there’s nothing there in the universe. Then, like how a 3D printer takes data and raw material and combines them into a new object, her Power ‘reads’ the schematics of her unsummoned self and uses its pool of energy/matter to create a brand-new body with all the same, well, everythings.
Because it’s a new creation, not pulled through the real-world but rather extruded from a ‘spaceless void of potential’ that is Harem’s Power, it can be placed in a different orientation without all the messy dragging about.
Or, in other words, Conservation of Momentum is happening, but not immediately, and through a medium unknowable to us.
That actually makes quite a bit of sense. However, it would probably be the case that resummoning a body with existing momentum only happens because Harem things it should. Normally creating a completely new piece of matter would place it at a dead stop relative to the universe: turning it into a relativistic projectile in a random direction. However, Harem unconsciously grants the new body the momentum that it had when she disappeared it; or at least the momentum that she thinks it would have, based on its last experiences.
Since Harem is already playing silly beggars with physics by creating and destroying matter on a casual basis, a little extra doesn’t hurt.
The summoning side of things, as you believe it to work, sounds exactly like what I have been saying up and down the board. I did the cut’n’paste reference and everything so I’ll go with that. I remember at some point Dave called it “teleport” in quotes so he considers it fundamentally different as well. But since it matches almost exactly how Star Trek teleporters work a new term would be hard to win folks over with.
heh
just to be silly buggers:
in star trek, it’s called ‘inertial dampeners’, all ships have them. And yes, the transporter does it automatically, it’s how you beam someone from ship a (moving at dV1) to ship 2 (at dV2) without the person going splat.
it’s not 100% efficient, which is why people have to hold on when the ship makes a fast turn.
and no, they don’t explain it every episode/ film, because if they did explain all the things about it, and stuff like that, the movies would take 12 hours.
it’s also one of the biggest differences between star trek and star wars:
star trek: we have an explanation, it gets mentioned in the shows every now and then, here’s the technical guide the science is kind of interesting, sit down and let me show you…
star wars: we don’t know, go ask the star trek people.
Star Wars: Normally getting from point A to point B sucks Bantha Balls so when traveling we temporarily exchange this boring arse universe for one where physics are our personal biatch (Hyperspace) cause that’s how we roll. ;D
The Star Trek universe:
We have created antimatter engines that send our ships across the galaxy. We can communicate in real time across multiple light years. We can replicate almost anything on the atomic level. We have cured almost all known diseases.
We have never figured out that seats on vehicles that move rapidly and change direction suddenly really should have seat belts.
Its a pride thing. They want visitors to believe their high-tech protects them perfectly. ;D
The inertial dampeners also compensate for relative motion every time the ship enters or exits from Warp Space; it’s to make sure that every single subatomic particle of the ship & crew actually make the transition intact, not spread out from here to Basingstroke Roundabout.
The relationship between momentum and teleportation is all about relativity. Gates are easy, since the gates themselves are the reference points, so “speedy goes in, speedy thing goes out,” but teleportation is completely different. The end point is probably going to be relative to an object of some sort, so you can use that object’s velocity as the reference, but for the initial point I’d have to rule that the Harem being teleported is the point of reference, which means she should have no relative momentum at all. So she can teleport onto or into something with no problems other than some possible balance issues depending on how she was moving when she teleported, but she can’t exploit initial momentum unless she can optionally choose an external point of reference for the initial point. Which is fine, but that option had better require some concentration if you don’t want her to accidentally set her momentum to be relative to, say, an oncoming truck that she wants to avoid.
Didn’t Chekov have a line about matching the velocity when he got a transporter lock?
Because I always thought the point of the pad was it gave easier lock onto a person so any errors could be compensated for. Also the transporter would not need to counter the momentum. At least not directly. Inertial compensators in the pads would be updated on relative movement and alter gravity to ‘cushion’ things.
My beef is how do people go from sitting when beamed up to standing on the platform?
He doesn’t actually. He “compensates for gravitational pull”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGNfrNJZin4
As someone mentioned higher up the chain, the Star Trek transporters don’t work by moving molecules of matter. They change that matter into pure energy, move that, then change it back to the original matter in a new location. Given all of that, I think that materializing that matter in a new position would be childs’ play. Although rule of funny would require, should they appear still in a sitting position, that the chair not be transported. :D
The Quick Zapping Harem Jumped Into The Stone Fox.
I think you mean “fell deliberately on the Stone Fox”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangram
I can see one problem in Harem’s life. For long-range teleports, she probably has to get her calculator out, to ensure that she does not flip herself through the ceiling! With her re-orienting trick, she can ensure that she goes safely sideways of course. So can aim for her well-sprung bed, at home, easily enough. And maybe her precognition viewing allows her to orient herself, in an emergency.
But, if she has a lot of momentum from the different latitude/ longitude/ altitude, as the case may be (let alone any from being on a fast moving vehicle), then she may well find herself going head-first through her bedroom wall instead!
or she could initially teleport up high then re-teleport to redirect the motion upwards let it come to equilibrium then teleport to where she’s actually going
Yep, a good solution. But one that will require some intense maths to get right. Of course it is an equation that she will be very familiar with, and she is smart. But if she is forced to rush her calculations, or makes an error estimating distances, she could easily make a bad mistake.
Even a “+” instead of a “-“, at the wrong point, could have devastating consequences!
Calculations, smalculations. She’d just do it by feel. Just teleport 100 feet straight up, reorient, wait for it, STOPPED!, teleport to new location momentum free. With practice, takes less time to do than to explain.
Mmm. Not a bad technique for open air use. Can’t do that if going anywhere indoors though. So she really needs to know if she is going to be arriving with more momentum than she can bleed off, by natural means, in the space available.
If going straight up, would gravity counteract it in 3′ 13′ or 30′. Get it wrong and she suffers head inserted through ceiling syndrome.
See this is wrong. Teleporters aren’t moving like portal-makers. Teleporters are shifting mass, not anything else, thus meaning the mass is shifted from one location to another, you can’t shift momentum in pure mass. Portal-makers open a hole in the fabric of space-time that relocates to another point, like a doorway or a window, their momentum would be kept as they’d be forced to continue in the direction they are moving.
It depends on the method of teleportation. I’m pretty good with my physics, and I’ll be honest: I’m not totally sure where the kinetic energy in a falling object is. I _think_ it’s in the falling object, but it might be in the object with the gravitational force to cause the fall. However, if that were true, then people climbing up ladders and jumping could pump the Earth full of energy at the cost of personal work. And since momentum includes a vector, momentum is DEFINITELY in the object moving along the vector. Mass contains energy except at absolute zero, so if you teleport mass, you teleport energy–and while I’m not a good enough physicist to prove it, I’m absolutely certain that momentum is teleported without either magic or physics-ignoring superpowers (Like if Harem teleports by crossing through another dimension). Please post a proof if you can. I’d be interested in it regardless of which of us is right.
I’d say that the energy isn’t in any single object, rather it is a property of the overall system. This problem actually occurs in many-body quantum physics, where normally reasoning about single-particle energies works only with strong approximations (but we still use quasi-single-particle models, e.g. when talking of band structures of solids).
For a start, the kinetic energy depends on your frame of reference.
As for teleporters shifting mass: You can choose a frame of reference in which the object has zero momentum at the moment of teleporting. You then change the position and the momentum remains zero. In other frames of reference however, the non-zero momentum has been conserved that way. Mind you, the violation of energy-conservation brings up all kinds of questions…
Well think of it like this: If a person teleporting keeps the momentum, then wouldn’t the same go for all aspects effecting mass? For example, if Daphne was to use that teleportation pile driver explained in the page, she’d be instantly shifting her mass from a low altitude to a high altitude in a second, the effects of which would be similar, if not identical to someone suffering from the bends from a diving expedition in which they rose too quickly. Yet it seems not to effect her. The fall comes from a mix of things, the mass defining the effect of the graviational pull on the object, which would then determine the velocity, but shifting ones mass from one place to another would alter the gravity pulling on said object, negating the velocity. If someone throws a punch that misses, they can’t keep the momentum going when they shift their mass to fix up the punch, they have to start the momentum all over again, unless they keep moving in one direction. Also that teleportation would essentially result in a person being in two places at once, even for a split second, before their full mass shifted. Most teleportation used in any works of fiction are done via breaking up the objects molecular structure, moving it through various other molecules, and reassembling it in another location.
See even though I’m not much with the science end of things it seems something is missing here. She doesn’t just shift mass she transforms it into information and energy then stores it “someplace else”. There is someplace outside the dimensions we ordinary mortals play with most often where this stuff goes and is stored. Then she brings it back and puts it back together. In between storing it and bringing it back she gets stronger cause something that is being used to somehow maintain and or coordinate all her shells is now free to be redivided. She is always doing it this way. Sometimes she brings the unit out of storage immediately and sometimes she waits a spell but it is always going into that storage “place”.
Where or what is that storage “place”? How do physics work there? How much of Harem dwells and perhaps performs calculations or efforts of raw will (however it works there) there to make what her lesser consciousness here thinks of as a “cool trick” actually work? There is a whole other “place” (for lack of a better word) AND a whole other aspect of Harem, perhaps the MUCH larger aspect, involved in this that people just don’t seem to want to acknowledge.
Is it entirely a place of the mind stored in the vibration of the fundamental stuff of the universe requiring at least one physical shell to anchor and maintain it in some way? *shrugs*
Whatever or where ever it is and however large or bizarre a piece of Harem exists there this “place” or aspect of her overmind (whatever) is what helps her play with physics the same way that “Hyperspace” helps Star Trek or Nightcrawler’s alternate dimension does for him.
The storage is not just a handy aspect of her power it IS her power. Where does that crap go and how is it getting there?! So far my guess is that there is a part of Harem that in terms of calculations and understanding probably dwarfs Dabbler’s intellect but this organ (probably not made of flesh or existing entirely inside one or all of her “bodies”) is so specialized and devoted to “teleporting” that Harem has to think and provide will with her entangled meat brains for the larger part of it.
If the overmind/energy being aspect of Harem can exist for a short while without a physical body to anchor/maintain/whatever it here maybe if she has a body in storage at the time her last physical one is “killed” she can bring the stored one back like a saved game file?
See that doesn’t help the argument. Should she be like Nightcrawler, who traverses through an alternate dimension, resulting in his mass being effected by the last thing he does in that dimension, then she’d be the same. If it requires walking from one “opening” to another in the fabric splitting the two dimensions, she’d have to reappear in ours as if she’d just walked a great distance.
You sort of skimmed that for a summary I take it?
I was throwing that up to say that this aspect of her powers helps her ignore some realities the way those aspects of those story universes help them wave what we know away because we can’t know those places or how they work. It wasn’t meant to be a summary of how her powers might work. Even though I do, above that text, try to make some rough guesses for how it might (very vaguely) function that reply was mostly designed to get folks to stop thinking of this as a simple shifting of mass. Its probably a lot closer to manipulating a small file in a computer before copy and pasting it back in a different part of the larger filing system. (actually this is starting to remind me of the webcomic “Misfile” where the language in the file is a “short hand” coding language where the file just says trout and the system generates a basic trout which it further alters based on other short hand in the file like “3lbs” or “has parasite {see subfolder parasite for link to specific parasite file}” I doubt its that simple but it would make for a funny Harem of Grrl Power to Misfile crossover!)
This “place” of Harem’s very likely is only good for storing data and holding the specialized bulk of her “overmind”. It is either connected to everything (storing data and mind in those superstring thingies one hears so much about? ) or its a place with no reality of distance etc… so all places are sort of one place which is why when it sends data and or energy back it can go anywhere she is capable of helping it “find” in all the information “white noise” that our universe must appear to that part of her from that “place”.
I don’t really know what it is I just wanted to get people thinking that direction rather than some simple concept where Harem’s body exists as a normal body throughout the procedure. I think it stops being a physical body as we know it somewhere in there and at that point it can be manipulated and altered for things like say: Momentum.
i believe her “teleport” work as a “frame capture”.
The captured frame can then be stored and pasted anywhere she wants, within her line of sight or memory.
the frame captures all things directly attached to the objects inside, but ignores outside forces like gravity. When the frame is rotated, so is everything in it accordingly.
Harem doesn’t have to account for the rotation of earth and such, because all the pasting is done in reference to her other bodies, which may also explain why she can’t jump to the moon.
A captured frame is stored in her other bodies (or otherwise attached to them) and the connection has to be made before she can warp (or vorp). whether that’s a hard limit, or subconscious “safe switch”, i can’t say.
if she can cause a dimensional overlap using her frames, she could somehow use the strength of her other self with her “primary (for this example)” self.
hmm that sounds like “one for all”, although instead of hundreds of the strongest men in history she has only 5 of herself. Also, i do not know how that work with the time freeze.
as for “dimensional overlap” that i mentioned, i mean something like dabblers blade being phased into it(‘s other) self (yes i know they are technically 2), can interact with everything except each other.
But hey, that’s just a theory… a Super power theory.
I won’t swear to in on a stack of Bibles but I think that when she reduces herself to one body, all the rest being in storage, she can still teleport which means for a slice of a moment she doesn’t exist physically anywhere in the easily sensed and measured part of the universe so she probably doesn’t have to use her bodies as a reference or as a storage medium. (though she can choose to do so to find a new location quickly that one of her is already at)
I don’t think having all those bodies in the physical, besides the one vorping, would allow her to ignore the rotation of the planet, solar system, etc… just cause she can use them to find her place in it? Having a reference of position and the effect of energies/forces inherent to that position doesn’t make the energies imparted to her mass go away. Those forces are already a part of her mass’s very nature and have to be accounted for. (if I understand my scientific better’s comments on these pages)
This is why I am suggesting that Harem, like Anvil, has a component that can absorb energy, store it, and transform it to suit her own needs. I think she stores this energy outside of her meat bodies. (The last body being physical still possessing vorp ability, if true and I think it is, comes pretty close to proving this in my mind)
I like that when she “stores” all bodies but one she gains a strength similar to Anvil’s base abilities? Maybe there is a relationship between their abilities. Maybe there is a more subtle relationship between the abilities of all the humans with inborn powers? Like the way Whateley Academy’s Body Image Template ties together a lot of powers or the way the same universe has ordinary all round psychics as well as ones who use it in unusual ways like PK supermen.
If I understand correctly how “frame capture” works this probably isn’t it. She wouldn’t need the inverted phase in what I underst and of “frame capture”.
and what is your understanding of “frame capture”?
i used those words cause that’s what it seemed like to me.
if you want to name it something else, then just name it.
About star trek teleporters canceling momentum:
They can beam from and too planet surfaces and onto other ships during COMBAT. They only need to match velocity at Warp Speed.
Canceling out the terminal velocity of two humans falling on Vulcen is not that hard (the higher Gravity might have made that a bit harder).
Heck, they have Biofilters that decontaminate everyone being beamed aboard.
The only limitation of the Transporter/Replicator tech is really that it cannot create life from scratch. It needs the stored pattern of an exsiting lifeform to recreate.
And even that is somethimes ignored (Riker times 2).
In essence that is exactly the right term. Although here Harem is travelling straight up to do it, so there is no appreciable arc, there is no difference, in principle to firing a cannon ball through the air (or straight up for that matter).
Put another way, it is like she has been fired upwards out of a circus cannon, set to make her only get as high as Sydney is hovering. She has reached the Ballistic Apogee / Trajectory Apex, and then (without the aid of super powers) would just fall to the ground again.
In her case though, as she negated her momentum at that point, she can safely teleport, as you depicted. But terminology wise I do not think we are likely to find any other term, as that one does match.
The arc is always present in the ‘height v time’ graph.
Technically, it’s only a parabola when the net force is constant. The Earth’s gravitational field is radial, although it’s so large at the surface that over small distances it appears constant. Air resistance, however, is proportional to the square of the airspeed, therefore the net force is always changing, unless terminal velocity has been achieved.
One page that definitely underscores that this is a comic for hard core nerds. :) So you’ve dealt with the conservation of momentum problem. How about the “having the time to talk a lot through a very short drop” problem? :)
Taking is a free action.
+1
And one of the stated rules of the comic. Comedic timing comes first. Getting a stopwatch out and seeing if it could be said, in the time available, doesn’t even come second. It is flat ignored! :-D
What does the tattoo on Harem’s back say? Even with my laptop upside down, I can’t read it, but I’m sure that A. Dave definitely knows & B. fans with bigger screens might be able to read it. It looks Latin, which makes me think military, but USAF motto is in English. Dave, if you could answer in the blurb at the bottom of the comic instead of in the comics, that would be super cool, because there will be 5 pages of comments by the next time I check the page.
Also, big thumbs up! _I_ understand the physics of what Harem is doing; the vector of her momentum is relative to her, so when she changes her orientation to gravity by teleportation, gravity starts slowing down her momentum just like if she’d ‘fallen’ straight up, and when the kinetic energy has been transferred completely into potential energy, she teleports again. Since potential energy isn’t _actual_ energy, conservation of energy is maintained, much as if someone thrown into the air, say, grabs a trapeze just before they would start falling from potential energy. Apparently some people here don’t understand that potential energy is exactly that: _potential_ energy created by work, not actual energy, and in this case the work of teleporting reduces the potential energy to zero the same way climbing down a ladder to the ground reduces potential energy to zero through work. Yay physics.
I love superhero comics, and I was with Sydney on the “I never thought of that” when Max gave her the lecture on things like throwing cars (I need range and I’m a brick!), looking behind your enemy, and legal repercussions, but I hate superhero comics that ignore physics. I love the fact that you do your best to keep the basic laws of physics (more complicated ones get destroyed by super powers) intact, though I have one comment about that: Max’s particle beam should make her SUPER hungry. Conservation of energy: if you emit a huge amount of energy, you need to replace it. It would make a funny mini-comic some day. Maybe when they get to Archon, Max is eating in every panel? She didn’t get to finish dinner after the demonstration AND threw a particle (fusion?) bomb at Hex, plus I’m sure fighting Vehemence was exhausting. She must have super-heroic energy reserves, which is odd, since the NORMAL human body stores energy in fat, and it’s already been said that superhero(es/ines) have almost no body fat. I’d love a Dabbler science corner on where the hell the supers keep their enormous energy reserves.
i think
extrahās
one quick googleing later (this may be wrong)
second-person singular present active subjunctive of extrahō
extraho
Etymology[edit]
From ex (“out of”) + trahō (“I drag”).
Pronunciation[edit]
(Classical) IPA(key): /ˈeks.tra.hoː/
Verb[edit]
present active extrahō, present infinitive extrahere, perfect active extraxī, supine extractum
(transitive) I drag, pull or draw forth or out; extract, remove.
(transitive) I extricate, release; draw out, extract, eradicate.
(transitive, of time) I draw out, protract, prolong, put off.
So her tat says that, “She poops?” Well, that might be handy if the aliens that kidnap her can translate that language.
Are you sure? I thought it read “deshantis” , as in her IRL last name.
flipped my screen visable letters are defintly “extrahas” or “extrahis”
… Well that explains why that one Latin translation site kept insisting that “Dragon” translated into “Extraho”. It apparently felt the need to add a space in the word without telling me.
Also, it could also be considered a description of her powers- as she ‘extracts’ or ‘removes’ herself from reality and/or pulls herself through wormholes.
Thanks! “You extract” makes a lot of sense (not as much as “I extract” though) given her power and the fact that I’m pretty sure that’s a bullseye below the lettering. If she served with Peggy & Max in the Air Force, she would have been the best medevac ever. That would also explain the small amount of medical training that she appears to have (such as her ability to dose people with tranquilizer guns without hitting a nerve, and her extensive use of tranquilizers normally requiring some medical training)
Reality check!
.. do people actually say “Gentle as a lamb fart”?
People who want to be original and funny can say anything? (sounds Scottish though?)
Doesn’t mean it’ll work.
*shrugs* People think anything having to do with baby sheep is soft…idiots.
I bet those little hooves dig right in!
you took a lamb fart to the knee? XD
more like a ram-lamb’s head to the *cuckoo!*
Remember, Harem is a farmer’s daughter. People that grow up around such a culture have own way of describing things.
Personally, I wouldn’t think it would be all that “gentle.” Have you ever seen a flock of sheep? From a distance they look all fluffy & bucolic, but up close they’re dirty & stinky…and that’s just on the outside.
Kevin O’Donnell, Jr.’s “The Adventures of McGill Feighan” has the best paradigm for teleportation I’ve ever seen. Teleports called “Flingers” can teleport ANYPLACE they’ve ever been and memorized, even over interstellar distances. They have two limits: they can teleport up to 918 kilograms of mass, including themselves, or other objects, or themselves AND other objects, and they have to be adept enough to bleed or supply kinetic momentum from the “energy dimension” to match velocity with the destination. It’s a purely instinctual process, though they do have to practice it a LOT.
Steven Gould’s Jumper novels (note: Griffen’s Story is set in the universe of the movie and the teleportation works a little differently) do a pretty thorough job of exploring the self-portal type of teleportation, while telling a really good story.
I grew up a farm boy. Not all lamb farts are gentle. Just sayin’.
So could Harem get like five degrees in different subjects at the same time?
How could she guarantee to the school that during a test another copy of her is not giving her the answers from a textbook somewhere else?
Have all 5 of her in the same room on test day?
+1
Of course Harem keeps number six a closely guarded secret. She has no tattoos and a full set of stick on ones, plus matching wigs. So that she can impersonate any of her other bodies. Just in case she needs to operate somewhere that she might get spotted.
Honor system?
Good SF authors either do take momentum into account (e.g. Vernor Vinge’s _the Witling_) or they equip their teleport devices with compensators (e.g. Larry Niven’s teleport booths).
But then again Niven had a person in Ringworld (Wu) who wanted to extend his birthday by teleporting sequentially around the planet to make it last longer. He had the person going EAST to do this, which would actually shorten it. He did fix it in later printings after someone (OK, pretty much everyone) pointed it out to him.
Ooh, I get to propose a team power combo name. Mmm, “Harem Cushion” sounds short and distinctive enough to shout out in an emergency.
Step 1 Harem fast-dials Anvil, in a mode set up to immediately bring up live feed from Anvil’s camera (be it the one in the glasses, her mobile, or both).
Step 2 Shout out “Harem Cushion”, to ensure Anvil sets her kinetic absorption to maximum (or warn “No”, if it is full or there is otherwise some problem).*
Step 3 Harem teleports adjacent to Anvil, ensuring that she is oriented appropriately such that she will impact her and nothing else.
Anvil will then completely absorb all the momentum of the incoming Harem. Instantly giving her a powerful top up to her kinetic battery, allowing a strong attack later. Whilst ensuring that Harem is at no risk from her landing.
For info, Math, thinking multiple steps ahead, used a similar technique in the sparring against Sydney. As an amateur she was at severe risk of injuring herself in falling. So Math ensured that she landed in Anvil’s lap, as the safest cushion in the world.
* Although Anvil can use this with anyone, the combo may need refining to work with specific team-mate, hence this being the Harem variant. Flyers she might need to catch, for instance. If only to avoid them tumbling off her and spraining a limb, from that modest fall. Which would be rather embarrassing after having a terminal-velocity fall negated!
In that example she would need to look up. For Harem though Anvil needs to be prepared for her to come in at any angle, without warning.
To be fair, we’re not sure just what Anvil’s absorption limit is so I doubt having her turn down a ‘top-up” might would most likely be for some other factor, like say, in a mine field…
Easter Egg: the word s are missing from the Auto Tune shop in panel six, at least most of the word “Auto” should be visible.
Based on that name, the ‘Auto Tune’ store could be either a car care place or a recording studio.
Jumper … Mediocre movie, damn good book … It was actually filmed locally, so I recognize a lot of the first part of the shooting locations.
Reflex is the sequel book. It explores “doubling”.
Griffin’s Story is the third book, but more of an alternate feature.
Impulse is the story you want, it’s the story of the child of two Jumpers … Explores velocity as a factor.
Steven Gould is the author.
Yeah, I was thinking about the Steven Gould books. Both Impulse and Exo explore the implications of velocity change from teleportation. Really enjoyed those books.
As someone who majored in physics, I approve of this, it’s nice to see someone actually being accountable to the laws of physics. Sort of, I mean, she is still teleporting.
A question just occurred to me, does Harem ever take into account the Coriolis effect when porting? If she teleports due north or due south any great distance, it should start to have some effect, especially at higher latitudes. She might also have to account for a slight re-orientation due to earth’s curvature.
I figure the Star Trek transporter should easily be able to put a filter on the momentum of what it’s reconstituting. If the object it’s transporting has a large momentum in one direction, anything that can handle putting so many atoms back into such a precise position should also be able to recognize and account for that sort of thing.
Lastly, because I must:
Harem’s thinking with (tele)portals! I want to see her cosplay as Chel now.
Perhaps Daphne has a set of circuits in her brain that automatically adjusts momentum when she vorps? I’m thinking of our “sense of balance”. Is there a “vorpal organ” in there? I don’t think we have an “orientation organ” per se, yet we feel our balance anyway. Something like that?
If she has a vorpal organ, she should have snicker-snacked Jabberwokky with it.
We do have an orientation organ. It’s a structure in the inner ear filled with fluid, and we sense balance and orientation from the way the fluid moves. You get dizziness when the fluid’s sloshing around such that it’s not working right, and motion sickness when the input from that isn’t matching other inputs, primarily visual references.
My niece recently got two concussions in a fairly short span of time, and has gotten her inner ears shaken up to the point that the fluids have mixed and they’re not working right. She can get by okay on visual reference, but if she closes her eyes, she gets nauseous and falls down.
So now, I have an image of these “vorpal organs” being located somewhere in the hollow of both scapula. Thus giving her right & proper vorpal blades.
Two of ’em, for the ol’ one-two, one-two, and through-and-through.
Ha! You made me chortle. I knew someone would pounce on the Jabberwocky reference, but Dave is the one who started it. Vorp, vorping, vorped, vorpal, et cetera. All legit now, when talking about Daphne’s ability. :)
My point about the sense of balance (equilibrioception) was that it’s not just one organ. It’s a combination of organs providing input to synthesize a “sense” that we can feel. As far as I know. Anyway, maybe Daphne has an extra something in there that allows her to feel her way through this tricky inertia vector business. That’s my guess.
Sorry about your niece. I hope she feels better soon.
Doesn’t star trek transporters just disintegrate you and create a copy at the target location?
The copy then wouldn’t be moving, or would be moving with whatever ship it’s in wouldn’t it?
Or was that some other sci-fi teleporter I’m thinking of?
That’s how I thought it worked. Isn’t that how we got two Riker’s in Next Gen?
Wait, haven’t we actually seen Harem beat Math?
So what happens to Harem’s momentum if she de-teleports herself? Can she store ludicrous amounts of velocity indefinitely this way?
Only for THAT body she can’t start it this trick with one body and have another finish it.
Initiativ and momentum are far to often forgoten in movies and comic. Just imagen what woud happen inreal world if superman flying in superspeeed lift sombady
I’ve hardly read Superman since before the Crisis and subsequent reboot, but at the time his cape and costume were said to be even more indestructible than he was, so when carrying someone at supersonic speed, he tended to wrap them in his cape.