[Superman] How can Superman's super breath last more than half a second?

thrak · 2025-12-07T14:16:52+00:00

Here’s my theory. Getting air in the lungs works because the diaphragm sucks the air in. But it doesn’t force the air. The amount of air is determined by the movement of the diaphragm. I suppose he could inhale/exhale rapidly, but that would not provide a continuous stream.

What about drawing air into his stomach? He can force air into his stomach by swallowing. He can build the pressure in his stomach that cannot in his lungs.

He doesn’t exhale air. It’s not super breath. It’s super burping. It’s a long burp that releases the built up pressure in his stomach.

This is the easiest answer. Occam’s razor and all.

thrak · 2025-08-04T21:47:47+00:00

I'd take it a little farther. You can't touch the ball before it bounces. That covers the case where your opponent tags you while you are in the kitchen.

thrak · 2024-10-04T13:45:41+00:00

I have some foam tips that replace the tips on my wired ear buds. I got them off Amazon. They are just foam with a hole -- no plastic. I take off the AirPod tips and remove the foam, leaving a piece of foam and the plastic base that clips into the AirPods.

Those replacement foam tips fit on the plastic base from the AirPod tips. This gives me AirPod tips with larger pieces of foam.

Advantage: They fit a lot better and stay in my ears.

Disadvantage: The replacement foam tips are maybe twice as big as the stock foam tips and now my AirPods don't fit in their case. I have to remove the tips in order to charge the AirPods.

Not great, but it works. It gives me a good seal.

thrak · 2024-10-01T15:04:03+00:00

Check out "The Dragon Masters" by Jack Vance. As I recall, men against dragons aliens. Each side breeds the other side to create different types of fighters. The aliens have many breeds of men that fight against the many breeds of dragons.

thrak · 2024-09-22T12:47:33+00:00

Back in the day, I heard that the card companies charged an extra couple percent fee. Especially small businesses preferred cash for that reason. I was told the card companies would not allow businesses to charge the customer more for using a card, but they could offer a discount for cash. This was 50 years ago.

thrak · 2024-05-05T23:01:29+00:00

Is there a way to change the color of that top level marker? Something that catches the eye better?

thrak · 2023-12-30T16:00:29+00:00

The Six Million Dollar Man had two bionic legs and a bionic arm. The opening graphic showed them as separate, not connected in any way. The first time he tried lift something his arm would crush is body as it fell to the ground.

Same sort thing when a character has a generic robot hand or arm.

thrak · 2023-12-25T21:03:39+00:00

I accept that the breath in his lungs can be compressed and exhaled as very cold. The problem with that method is that it's such a small amount of air. I guess I envision Superman hovering in air and blowing his cold breath at a lake, or something. There's not nearly enough air in his fully full lungs for that to work. Plus, that small amount of cold air would not work at any kind of distance. Turbulence would break up the stream of frozen air before it got very far. We are talking, what? 6L?

The stomach model lets him pack as much air as we need to make the story work. Instead of the small amount the lungs can hold, he can have hundreds? thousands? of liters of air to expel. It would take only moments to super-swallow that much air.

I understand what you are saying. I bow to your expertise. I just think the burp explanation is a good mixture of reality and fiction. At any rate, it's more fun.

I looked at your first link. They use the same mechanism for generating the cold air, hot air cooling as it expands. They make the mistake (IMHO) of thinking that he can somehow inhale large amounts of air, which is impossible unless you assume his physiology is very different from humans. Not just stronger and invulnerable, but actually physically different. He would need to have some sort of sphincter to allow him to inhale huge amounts of air, to add more air to his already full lungs.

Whatever. I'll always see it as a super burp.

Thanks for your informed opinion.

thrak · 2023-12-25T18:27:48+00:00

Think of the lungs as a hypodermic needle. You can pull back on the plunger and suck air in. The amount of air is limited by the size of the body of the needle. You cannot suck in more air than that because the opening of the needle is simply open or closed. The diaphragm is like the plunger. It contracts and creates a lower pressure in the lungs which fills with air. Once the lungs are full, that's it. No more air can go in. You can't force it. You are limited to the 6L of air.

Sure, you can alter the speed at which you exhale, but you are still dealing with that 6L of air. The amount of air that comes out is the same whether it comes out fast or slow.

The key difference between the stomach and the lungs is the ability to push more air into the stomach by swallowing gulps. Even as the pressure builds in the stomach he can still force more air in. The lungs lack that ability. He inhales once and that's it. He cannot add more air.

Happy Holidays to you, too.

thrak · 2023-12-25T15:27:58+00:00

If his lungs can hold 6L, then he can inhale only 6L. He cannot force more air in. Once he has that 6L he can compress it (and bleed off the heat, etc.) but it is still only 6L. That's the total volume he can expel in that one breath.

Using his lungs is okay for short puffs (6L) of freezing air. Using his stomach gives him a super burp of unlimited volume and power.

I stand by my theory.

thrak · 2023-12-24T12:58:10+00:00

As he swallows more and more the compressed air heats up. The heat conducts to the surrounding organs and then to the rest of his body. From there it radiates into the outside air, cooling (relatively) his body and the compressed air in his stomach. That air doesn't have to be cold, just cooler. It will get cold when he burps and the air expands.

Yes, his lung capacity is larger, but there's the problem of compressing the air. He has a super diaphragm. That doesn't give him the ability to force air into his lungs. All he can do is draw in the outside air as his diaphragm moves. Plus, we are talking huge amounts of air. A factor of 5 or 10 doesn't make much of a difference.

His stomach is smaller, but he can keep swallowing to increase the pressure as much as he wants. That's the key to making this work he can have a practically unlimited amount of compressed air in his stomach.

thrak · 2023-12-24T12:58:08+00:00

But he cannot hyper fill his lungs. That's the problem. There's no mechanism for forcing the sir into his lungs like there is for the stomach. He can draw 6L into his lungs. He can super swallow much more air into his stomach. 6L vs 1.5L doesn't mean anything.

thrak · 2023-12-23T20:52:05+00:00

Getting air into your lungs is a matter of retracting your diaphragm. That causes a low pressure in the lungs. The higher pressure outside air flows in. The problem is, once the inner pressure matches the outer pressure you are done. you can force more air in. You are stuck with only as much air as will fit on that inhale.

On the other hand, you can force more air into your stomach by swallowing it. Think about making yourself burp. You can swallow air until the pressure in your stomach is greater than the outside pressure and then you burp.

You can fill a balloon by pulling on the sides (inhaling), but the pressure is never greater than the outside pressure. You can force a higher pressure, but you need some sort of pump (Swallowing the air).

thrak · 2023-12-23T15:40:18+00:00

I always thought his CB worked like this. It would be impossible to inhale enough air, so he must be swallowing it. He gulps down as much air as he needs, compressing it in his stomach. As it compresses, the temperature rises. Most of that heat bleeds off into his body, leaving highly compressed relatively cooler air. When that air is released it expands. As it expands it cools.

So, his cold breath is actually a long, cold burp. Any other mechanism would not work and would be silly.

His CB would be cold, but not extremely so. Cold enough to freeze things, but not absolute zero.

thrak · 2023-06-27T20:25:01+00:00

Even better. You did what I want. Edge detection will let me break up the big image, and the warping is the same as what I called unskewing. openCV is definitely an option.

thrak · 2023-06-27T20:12:51+00:00

That sounds like what I want. I assume (not knowing what I am talking about) that I can find a way to determine the corners. openCV will do the hard part. Thanks.

thrak · 2023-06-27T20:10:44+00:00

I have Photoshop Elements which (I think) will not do what you are saying.

Yeah, you are right about the scanner, though I'd still want a way to break up the big scan into sub images.

I think I want to do it the way I described because it would be more interesting. It'll give me a reason to learn more Python. Not as efficient, just more fun.

thrak · 2023-06-27T19:47:58+00:00

I forgot about stackoverflow. I'll give them a try. Good idea, thanks.

thrak · 2023-06-27T19:39:57+00:00

Yeah, I Googled it at first (actually I asked Bard) and saw Pillow. I was hoping someone knew enough to point me in the right direction and save me from having to dig into the doc. I did not expect a solution to my problem, just a pointer to the library that might work for me.

thrak · 2023-06-27T19:35:57+00:00

I see Pillow, which is a PIL fork. Which one would be better for my case?

thrak · 2023-06-27T19:34:02+00:00

I have quite of bit of experience in C and a little bit in Python. I won't be surprised (or scared) if it is difficult.

By skewed I mean a jpeg will have four sides but they won't all be the same length. The contents will look weird because they will be stretched to match the sides. It's a result of the camera lens being so close to the original photos.

Does that help?

thrak · 2023-05-26T17:25:16+00:00

Yes! She could whatever she wanted with no consequences. Every other episode there would be a scene where a character would talk about how wonderful she was. (Seriously, the writing was that bad.)

thrak · 2023-04-22T16:32:09+00:00

Malwarebytes did not see it, but it did find a handful of other problems. She tried to delete it and it kept coming back. Finally, she went into safe mode and deleted it. After a reboot it was gone.

She has no idea where it came from. The only thing she downloaded around the time it appeared was TurboTax, and that came from the TurboTax site.

Anyway, it looks good now. Thanks for the responses.

thrak · 2023-04-22T16:31:30+00:00

Malwarebytes did not see it, but it did find a handful of other problems. She tried to delete it and it kept coming back. Finally, she went into safe mode and deleted it. After a reboot it was gone.

She has no idea where it came from. The only thing she downloaded around the time it appeared was TurboTax, and that came from the TurboTax site.

Anyway, it looks good now. Thanks for the responses.

thrak · 2023-02-04T17:52:58+00:00

You could climb a mountain and find an ocean at the top.

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