Film Facts 2: Gravity Capsule

Gravity was pretty good, wasn't it? Yeah, it's pretty much unanimous that it was a great film, with some stellar (eh, eh?!) acting from Sandra "Hyperventilating" Bullock and George Clooney and very pretty CGI and sound editing; I'll be gobsmacked if it doesn't pick up this year's Academy Award for visual effects, which it's apparently already in the finalists for. Since we all already know Gravity is good, I thought I'd skip the whole reviewing thing and focus on some of the logistics of the movie. Heads up to those of you that still think Hollywood has the balls to hire someone like Sandra Bullock and kill her off, because I'm going to spoil the ending for you. Around about...now.

Space never looked so dirty.

She lives. Shock, horror. But, frankly, that's hardly the point of the film and if this truly ground-breaking revelation is going to detract from your enjoyment the I shall gleefully direct you to this Cracked article (which is, obviously, gospel) that says you apparently enjoy things more when you already know the end. So mneh.

I'm right, you're wrong. I'm big, you're small. I'm...I forget...

At the end of the movie, Bullock's capsule lands in some unnamed lake and she stumbles onto the shore to the sound of epically dramatic tribal music because this movie is so tentative with it's imagery of rebirth that it pretty much just goes full on Lion King on our asses for the finale. Hell, it would have been subtler to just steal that shot of the starchild from the end of 2001 and be done with it.

"Now how did that get there...?" - Alfonso Cuarón 

This whole not criticising a film thing is harder than it looks. Anyway, why don't we have a look at the statistical possibilities of landing in such a place, shall we? If you're at all like me, you might remember xkcd's What If column covering the relatively similar topic of the likelihood of finding signs of intelligent life anywhere on the planet, but his statistics (other than the typical "70% of the planet is water" one) are of very little use here. If we start with our target destination then: IMDb says that the location for the landing scene was at Lake Powell in Arizona. A quick Google map of the lake shows that it's actually just over the state line into Utah, but we're just getting niggly here. This totally legitimate source suggests that a more specific shooting locating was in a shallow bay just south of Lake Powell, which is entirely likely seeing as the geography of the final product has been changed completely in post production so we'll take that as our starting block.

Movie (above) and Google Maps (below), both facing in approximately the same direction.

A cursory glance (you can always trust me for the most painstakingly accurate measurements) at the scale bar on the map tells me that the bay is about 200x300m-ish exactly, so Sandra hit a 60'000 square metre, or 0.06 square kilometre, pool of water with her capsule, about the same size as three standard international 105x68m football pitches. If we take that at face value and look at the same area in comparison with the 510'072'000 square kilometre area of the Earth, that makes up just under 0.0000000118% of the total surface of the Earth, or the other way round you could fit the bay onto the face of the Earth 8 and a half billion times. How fascinating. However, none of these numbers are actually getting us anywhere, so let's get down to brass tacks.

"Have you even started yet?"

I'm sure we've all heard before that around about 70% of the Earth's surface is water (the most exact percentage I could find was a Wiki Answers with 71.13%), so the simplest statistic for us to start with is that, obviously, there was a 71% chance of Sandra landing on water; soggy planet for the win.

"I'm so wet..." - Earth

But wait! Although it's never indicated in Gravity when the events of the film take place and we're meant to assume it is in present day, the more accurate date of space explosion smashy smashy is around the year 2022. Why, you ask? Well, the Chinese space station that Sandra Bullock's character finds herself in after ISS is torn to shreds is based on a real-life station called Tiangong-1. At the moment, Tiangong looks nothing like it does in the film, only being made up of one shuttle, but the plan is to slowly build up to a science laboratory by 2020-2022, the finished product of which we get the joy to see getting torn to shreds in glorious high definition; thus 2022 being a better choice of setting for the movie. As we all know, the sea levels are slowly rising, so there'll be a little more water in ten years than there is now. At 3.2mm per year, the sea levels will have risen a staggering 25.6mm, or the height of three and a half iPad Airs. So essentially you could stack four iPads by the ocean and Apple will have installed iOS into your eyeballs before the top one gets wet. That's a fancy way of saying that this consideration is negligible and I've wasted a paragraph of everybody's time.

But you need never worry about leaving your iPad at the beach ever again.

Sandra didn't land in the ocean though, did she. The coastal zone is the name given to that shallow bit of the ocean that keeps rubbing up against the land like a really creepy uncle and is defined as bits of the ocean under a depth of 200m, which in total cover around about 26'000'000 square kilometres of the Earth's surface. Rivers and lakes (those that were big enough to be measured) make up about another 1.5 million square kilometres; that means the likelihood of landing on the coast or in a lake or river like what happens in the film is 5.39%, which is about the same as having a genetic disorder of some kind. The lesson here: don't try to pilot a space capsule into a lake if you have coeliac disease.

Any space landing is pretty hard to stomach. Doctor joke!

Of course, space stations and satellites follow very specific orbits, meaning there are parts of the Earth more or less likely to be landed on depending on where your orbit happens to be. As this handy teaching aid informs us, imaging satellites usually orbit north to south over the poles while space stations like the ISS and Tiangong orbit laterally (follow the hyperlinks to see live orbit trackers); as such we can pretty much ignore anything that's not underneath the flightpath of Tiangong, which we'll have to assume won't have changed much in the next 10 years. Sadly I can't seem to find anything that gives me a good indication of how far from under it's orbit a shuttle can stray during re-entry so I'm going to be super ignorant and say they don't; shuttles go straight down.

So says science. Well, me, but also science.

As such, looking at the orbit of Tiangong we can pretty much ignore Russia, Canada, Greenland, Antarctica and the North Pole along with a good chunk of the South Atlantic, Pacific most of the Southern Ocean (something I didn't actually know existed until about now) and all of the Arctic Ocean. Excuse me while I maths for a second and work out the area of a planet with it's top and bottom shaved off. Some. There is some Earth left. And by subtracting these land masses and oceans from the total area of the Earth and redoing the ratio, the chances of Tiangong hitting water is 3 in 4, or a 75% chance. That's better odds than that thing with the doors and the goats.

If you did get a goat, don't let it pilot the shuttle.

All in all, to wrap up this series of rather disappointing facts, the likelihood of Sandra's capsule landing on water and not smashing her into the ground like a tin can full of delicious space Spam is in her favour, but the chances of her landing in waist deep water on a river within walking distance of a city are silly levels of unlikely. I guess I could have saved us all a lot of time by just writing that one sentence. You're welcome. I'm keeping the goat.

Film Facts 1: Amélie - Orgasms in Paris

Any good film buff has a good grasp of world cinema, even if it's only the most mainstream of those films; so long as you've seen your Pan's Labyrinth's and Oldboy's, you don't need to worry about not having seen Bombón: El Perro or I'm A Cyborg But That's OK. That said, a must for anyone willing to don the mantle of obsessive shut-in has to have seen Jeun-Pierre Jeunet's Amélie.

"Welcome to the club, make yourself at home. There's crippling anxiety on the table, next to the coffee."

What I love almost as much as watching films, though, is taking unrelated statistics and skewing them in order to come up with interesting facts about said films. And that's where Amélie comes in. There's a particular scene amongst the endless stream of utterly adorable tales that makes up the movie where Amélie is sitting on a rooftop, asking the question "How many people are having an orgasm right now?". The answer is, apparently, fifteen.

We don't ask how she knows...

Have no fear, dear reader, I am here to put your worries aside and assist in determining whether or not this claim is actually true through the power of various statistics and a very lenient grasp on basic mathematics. To do this we need the building blocks of smartness: numbers.

Carl Gauss: Knowledge Breeder

Right, lets get started. Firstly, lets get our demographic down. Now in the film, it isn't stipulated how many people we are considering in our test group, however the line "she amuses herself with silly questions about the world below.." is spoken as she looks over the Parisian suburbs, so I am going to assume she was referring to the city of Paris. The population of the city itself is 2.2 million, but that only counts the city and not the wider urban area which, to my untrained eye, is where it looks like Amélie is currently residing in this scene; so that racks the total population up to 12.1 million people in our test group, of which 53% are male and 47% female (we'll come back to that later). For an easily visualised approximation, that's about the same as the population of Zimbabwe. 

Plus one crazy authoritarian dictator unaware of inappropriate moustache styles.

So we've got 12 million people living there, but what about tourists? The website for Paris (like, literally the city's website) says they get 28.9 million tourists a year. We'll assume these tourists stay in Paris for a week on average, it is a pretty expensive place to visit after all, so maths says there could be anything between 79'000 and 554'000 tourists in any given day in Paris, not taking into account holidays. We'll just use the median of that and call it a cool 316'000 visitors on top of out 12 million, adding a drop in the ocean to the tune of 12.4(ish) million.

The "ish": a term first coined by Blaise Pascal when writing religious prophesies.

Next, we need to find out how often people supposedly orgasm. This is a deceptively difficult statistic to find, seeing as the Google search page for "average number of orgasms" is clogged up with Cosmo articles on "How to have the best female orgasm!!11!!!3!" and so on. Thank god the Kinsey Institute has my back with statistics on frequency of intercourse as well as masturbation statistics. These are done by age group, so if we go back to our Parisian population, the average age in Paris is apparently 40 years old (our few thousand tourists won't make much difference to that). Between the 30-39 and 40-49 year old demographics, we get between 69 and 86 cases of good old-fashioned noogie per person per year. If we subtract the 314'000 people in Paris who are under the age of 14 and thus not able to consent to sex (I won't judge, mind. What happens in French schools...), we undo all of my hard work with working out tourist numbers and end up with a population of 12.102 million people humping each other a total of 937.9 million times a year. 

That's a lot of shaggen. And the kids just have to sit back and watch.

That was rather poorly chosen wording.

Have no fear, wee kiddly bobs, for we've yet to add masturbation into the mix. If we go back to the Kinsey Institute, they say that 5% of men and 11% of women have never masturbated. So if we use our 53% male and 47% female ratio from earlier and put that into our total population (including kids this time, seeing as nearly half of the population have apparently masturbated by the age of 11), that means we have 6'243'400 masturbating males and 5'186'920 masturbating females. With an approximate masturbation rate of 12 times a month (144 a year) for men and 4.7 times a month (56.4 a year) for women, that gives us just short of 1.2 billion wanks per annum. Who would have thought we were such randy buggers?

Put that hand down, Timmy. I know where it's been now.

OK, we're getting somewhere. 1.19 billion one-man-bands plus 937.9 million horizontal two-steps gives us 2.13 billion orgasms in total. Those of you following along at home with a calculator might have a completely different number because I've been rounding more sporadically than a broken belt sander making banister knobs but this is all estimates so screw you and your fancy accuracy. 

Now that we've got a total number of jizzes per annum, we need to find out how much time that's going to take up. Depending on where you look you get a range of orgasm duration for both sexes from 8 seconds to almost an entire minute. Now I'm not a pessimist, but 60 seconds seems a little long, so we'll go further to the other end of the scale and use our first wiki article of the post for this one. Men clock in at a generous 12.5 seconds and women at an envious 20 even. If Paris is having 2.13 billion hail mary's a year, then the City of Love is spending 34 billion seconds, or 569 million minutes, or 9.5 million hours, or 400'000 days jizzing every year.

The fuck, France?

How my mind feels right now.

Just to clarify, the population of Paris and it's surrounding suburbs spends more time flooping the pig in one year than the length of the reigns of the Ancient Roman Republic and the Roman Empire combined.

I...What?

These numbers cannot be unseen.

Not to be confused with The Number 23, which also cannot be unseen.

But yes, what does this mean for our dear Amélie sitting alone on that Parisian rooftop? If we took turns with one person cumming after another, then it would take over 1000 years; with two people at once, that becomes 500. If we keep folding the numbers like that (because I work far better with a completely un-mathematical visual memory) then in order for all of that jizzing to take place within one year there would have to be at least 1082 people orgasming at any given moment.

With a total urbanised area of 2'724 square kilometers and a resulting average population density of 4552 people per square kilometer, my calculations mean that the next time you visit Paris, remember that at any given second you have a 23.8% chance of being within a kilometer of a spunking Frenchman.

"Remember to bring wellies." - Ingrid Bergman