You, Too, Could Be Batman In 10 To 12 Years 493
jmcbain tips a fascinating interview in Scientific American with a professor of kinesiology and neuroscience (and a 26-year practitioner of Chito-Ryu karate-do). The question was, how much training would it take for a normal person to become Batman? The professor says: "You could train somebody to be a tremendous athlete and to have a significant martial arts background, and also to use some of the gear that he has, which requires a lot of physical prowess... In terms of the physical skills to be able to defend himself against all these opponents all the time, I would benchmark that at 10 to 12 years." The problem is, even after that amount of training, no one could remain on top of their game for more than a few years. And "Batman can't really afford to lose. Losing means death — or at least not being able to be Batman anymore."
Obligatory Neal Stephenson: (Score:5, Interesting)
Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.
10,000 hours (Score:5, Interesting)
But I doubt that many people have the finances or drive to keep up such a regime until you achieve your goal. And thats what separates the world class people from the rest of us.
Of course some people do have a natural ability that also gives them a benefit. So I doubt a really short person could ever be competitive in a world class basketball - unless there was a league for really short people.
Re:How many years for the morals? (Score:5, Interesting)
A large portion of the Batman storyline revolves around the question of whether or not that's really true.
One of the more poignant observations made in the comics was by Commissioner Gordon when he pointed out that there were always regular criminals in Gotham before Batman arrived, but there weren't any supervillians until after Batman made room for them.
Re:How many years for the morals? (Score:5, Interesting)
Haven't you heard. Might makes right. So training for the skills is the same as training for the morals.
Re:10,000 hours (Score:4, Interesting)
That's about six hours a day on most days for five years. With world class teaching and appropriate practice facilities, that sounds pretty consistent with what I've found in everything from playing a musical instrument to martial arts. Obviously there are going to be some prerequisites: someone is going to have to be fairly smart to become a world class chess player, or fairly tall to become a world class basketball player. But you can get seriously good at most things if you have the resources and you're willing to devote the time to it.
The thing I always regret with my hobbies is that I never appreciated the difference a really good teacher and training facilities can make when I was young enough to take advantage of them. By the time I found a teacher who could answer my deeper questions in most cases, I had already spent several years studying with mediocre teachers and without access to the best facilities, or in one case well over a decade just messing around and learning by experimentation without any guidance. These things do work up to a point — after all, someone had to work each difficult thing out first — but for most of my hobbies, I could probably have achieved in 1–2 years what in reality took me 5+ with a lesser teacher and limited facilites, or a decade of experimentation on my own.
Re:Glad I don't subscribe to Scientific American (Score:5, Interesting)
I like Scientific American - I don't think you're being fair. The "fun" articles are obvious and they are careful to make no claims of certainty. Actually, I really have to put my thinking cap on when they get into Astrophysics these days.
Just as a for-instance, their medical articles are top-notch... my wife is a physician and will often read them. Their environmental articles are also often very interesting. It's not like the whole issue is full of Batman trivia!
Of course, I also like Popular Science and Popular Mechanics - but those I approach more from a comic book angle. At least Popular Mechanics has practical car and home project advice.
"The Cost of Being Batman" (Forbes) (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.forbes.com/digitalentertainment/2005/06/20/batman-movies-superheroes-cx_de_0620batman.html [forbes.com]
http://xrl.us/batman [xrl.us]
Being Batman
David M. Ewalt, 06.20.05, 7:28 PM ET
Dark clouds have gathered over Gotham. Crime is rampant, despair is
widespread and no one is safe. Who will rescue the metropolis from
itself, fight the forces of evil and save the good people of the city?
Why don't you do it?
Plenty of us would love to fight for truth and justice--if only we had
magic powers or mutant genes. We all love superheroes. Last weekend,
Batman Begins was the No. 1 film in the U.S., pulling in $71.1 million
over its first five days. The Batman movie franchise is also one of
the most lucrative of all time, with five movies (not counting Batman
Begins) grossing nearly $1 billion.
OK, so he also has a couple billion dollars. Batman's alter ego, Bruce
Wayne, is an old-money heir and the owner of Wayne Enterprises, a
massive international-technology conglomerate. In our Forbes Fictional
Fifteen, we estimated his net worth at $6.3 billion. If he were a real
guy, he'd be the 28th richest person in America, right behind News
Corp.'s (nyse: NWS - news - people ) Rupert Murdoch.
Wayne uses his riches and corporate connections to equip himself with
the latest and greatest in military hardware, and uses those tools to
help him fight villains like the Joker, the Riddler, and Ra's Al Ghul.
But you don't have to be a billionaire to become a caped crusader.
Using commercially available training, technology and domestic help,
the average guy could conceivably equip himself to become a real-world
superhero, provided he's got at least a couple million to spare.
What would it cost to become a real-world Dark Knight? Click here [forbes.com].
The Training
Cost: $30,000
You'd better be ready to defend yourself if you plan to take on all
the thugs and super-villains that call Gotham home.
In the new movie, young Bruce Wayne goes to Tibet on the mother of all
study-abroad trips and ends up learning the martial arts from a group
of vigilante ninjas called the League of Shadows. But similar training
is available to those not lucky enough to get plucked out of obscurity
by Liam Neeson.
A good place to start would be an internship at the birthplace of kung
fu, the Shaolin Temple in Henan, China. One month of training at the
prestigious Tagou school costs about $740, including a private room
and training with a personal coach. It'll take a while to get good
enough to stop the Joker's worst thugs, though, so count on spending
at least three years and about 30 grand for the trip.
The Suit
Cost: $1,585
They say the suit makes the man, and Batman's no exception. Without
his outfit, it'd just be Bruce Wayne running around out there, and
there's nothing particularly scary about a billionaire playboy in his
underpants.
Batman's suit is a modified piece of infantry armor built by the
applied sciences division of Wayne Enterprises. It's waterproof,
bulletproof, knife-proof and temperature-regulating. Paired with an
impact-resistant, graphite-composite cowl and spiked ninja-style
gauntlets, it allows Batman to protect himself against everything from
swords to machine guns. Wayne Enterprises also supplies Batman with
his cape, a specially designed nylon-derivative fabric that stiffens
when hit with an electric charge, allowing Batman to use it as a
glider. All this doesn't come cheap. In the new movie, Wayne's told
that the armor alone costs $300,000.
Real-world superhero wanna-bes will have to go with a much more
prosaic solution. We recommend a lightweight ProMAX OTV bulletproof
jacket, which will cover your ar
Re:I don't care how good you are... (Score:1, Interesting)
The trick behind multiple attackers is moving around enough so that they eventually line up and come at you one or two at a time. If they've completely surrounded you you're in a bit of a mess, but usually there's a weak point of the circle that you can brute force your way through to get to the outside, then work on the 5 D's (Dodge duck dip dive dodge) until they move from a large group all coming at you atonce to a line trying to chase you. Groups are notoriously easy to guide. Another tactic is to sort of move like a sheep dog, circling them until they start bunching up in the middle, then hopefully getting the hell out of there (This will give you a head start, bunches have a harder time getting up to speed).
Assuming they don't want to hit their own men, this is completely doable. If you have a decent weapon (a long stick does wonders), you'd be perfectly capable. Not saying you're not in trouble with 10+ guys attacking you, I'm not saying you'd come out unscathed, not saying you'd always win, or that you should try it. But a person can do this, so its not impossible, and it'd be stupid to give up.
Re:Glad I don't subscribe to Scientific American (Score:3, Interesting)
You think SciAm is bad, try actually reading Popular Science. It's all science-fiction military technology.
Part of the problem is actually that the mainstream news has gotten much better science reporting, so the gap between the NYT or Newsweek and SciAm has gotten to be quite narrow. It's still not as good as SciAm used to be, but most major newspapers have, if not a legitimate 'science person' on staff, easily-accessible consultants who can help break things down for them. Once you add in Wikipedia and the open-access research movement, the niche the magazine used to occupy is almost entirely gone.
Re:How many years for the morals? (Score:2, Interesting)
I suggest reading Batman before you judge the content. You are pigeonholing in an enormous way.
There's no more good writers (Score:5, Interesting)
It used to target a readership of average citizens who were keen on the nitty-gritty of scientific developments
It's bad writing.
SciAM got political and that turned a lot of people off, the same way NYT or WashPost did. They tried to dumb things down while still pretending to be smart and all it did it was anger their core readership and they bailed.
Science has exploded beyond the ability of writers to manage... It used to be that 50 years ago, you could probably have a smattering of what's new in physics and a few other fields, but right now, what's new in physics is a highly specialized thing and it takes way too much to understand what's even old versus what's new. The baseline education of some high school teaches a mathematics based on a level of calculus that's 100 years old at best, physics that's basically newtonian mechanics and chemistry is just doing the old "let's make break up water trick" when right now scientists are looking at individual atoms.
All of this points to a colossal failure in writing. We have a body of technical knowledge that is so disorganized that it takes way too long for humans to really communicate it to each other in order to share the knowledge. Roger Penrose made a heck of a go at it in his book about how everything works, but even he falls into the horrible trap of using bad names for different mathematical constructs. At least biologists got it right when put a taxonomy on species ... but in math we have Fourier Transforms, Newton's Method, and it's just a disorganized mess, and on top of that horrible language, we stack everything we know about the basic laws of the universe.
What the world needs is a bank of good writers that also know math and physics to go in there and get rid of biographically named crap, and organize things in a more direct and intuitive fashion. For the love of god, you can't let a scientist in the field do it, because they are just terrible at naming and organizing.
Writers, step up, and take command!
Re:Losing != death (Score:4, Interesting)
If I only had a brain... (Score:5, Interesting)
What about the mental component? While the movie Batman Begins didn't do too much with it, Batman's greatest asset is his mind.
He's a genius and one of the greatest minds in the DC universe. He uses it be one of the greatest detectives and occasional research, and use strategies/tactics to take down even the greatest forces (even Superman).
It isn't his physic and toys that let him stand with the greatest heroes and face the most dangerous villains, but his greatest asset: his mind.
Without his mind he's just some generic tough guy.
Re:Street fighting (Score:5, Interesting)
Just because you can't beat multiple opponents doesn't mean others can't.
My grandfather was a golden gloves boxer turned weight lifter. 5'10" 225-240 lbs when he competed. Could dead lift 500 lbs with one hand. Actually came from the same area as you. :) He was a natural athlete all his life and a veteran of many street fights. He could take on 5 guys, and did on more than one occasion. Would confront gangs of punks well into his 60s.
Took 7 strong men to drag him to the old folks home. Alzheimer's + elite athletes are a dangerous combination.
Re:I don't care how good you are... (Score:3, Interesting)
you've got it exactly right. I trained in martial arts for 10 years... 1st degree black belt (didn't have time or dedication to go another 10 years to get 2nd degree ;-)
If you find yourself in a fight like described you have to aim to put your opponents down... immobilize them. Break knees, break necks, knock them out and down... as fast as possible, then when their buddies are reeling from your viciousness you run like hell. (assuming they didn't all just dog-pile you)
If the fight is not going to happen (all talk no action) you talk your way out of it and/or run away... if there's no other option you do the above.
Re:I don't care how good you are... (Score:1, Interesting)
short of some super-exo-skeleton that boosts your strength and armours your body against instantaneous impact and sustained pressure and torsion
It won't help with strength, but search youtube for d3o. That looks like it fits the bill for body armor (maybe not bullets). The folks there take shovels to the joints without a wince.
For bullets, I would say to sew that d3o between some shear-thickening-fluid-impregnated kevlar. (http://www.sciencentral.com/articles/view.php3?type=article&article_id=218392807)
That should help with stabs too.
And come on, this is a premeditated attack. More than a couple attackers, when you aren't prepared, is one thing. But if you are Batman!*, you are equipped with smoke bombs and rope. You will storm down into a group of confused enemies with fists a blazing, and take out at least two before the others find out where you are.
So long as you don't get grabbed, you should be okay (while wearing the armor, and being a physically fit, fighting machine, that is). Once they can hold you down, you're screwed.
*Extraneous punctuation added for dramatic effect
Re:How many years for the morals? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, if you're going to remove yourself from the context of the storytelling, obviously there aren't going to be any supervillians like the Joker...
But within the context of the story, the point was this: Batman attempted to impose order by brutalizing the criminal element until it was too beaten and scared to stand against him. When that happened, only a few well-financed, high-powered, or outright-insane villians could continue to fight him, and with organized crime no longer in control of the underworld in Gotham, they had an arena in which to do it.
By taking street crime and organized crime out of the picture, Batman removed a barrier that prevented the supervillians from moving in to take Gotham, because the "common" criminals had just as much a reason to oppose the supervillians, in most case, as Batman does. No matter how deadly Joker is, he can't exist in a world where both the corrupt police AND organized crime have a reason to oppose him because they'll hunt him down and destroy him, but if he's only opposed by Batman, he's a one-man army facing a one-man army.
A common theme in Batman his how Wayne is tortured by the fact that he may have caused a lot more suffering in Gotham by donning his mantle than if he had simply internalized his own suffering and let it him alive.
The question becomes: Did Batman help Gotham by taking up his crusade, or did he just unleash the pain he was suffering on the entire population?
Re:Then we'd need to train a bunch of people... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:If I only had a brain... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Obligatory Neal Stephenson: (Score:1, Interesting)
Not just men.
Listen to act two about Zora (starts at 20:00 at the audio-link below):
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=178 [thisamericanlife.org]
Originally aired 02.23.2001
30-second Promo
Full Episode [thisamericanlife.org]
$0.95 Download
Buy CD
178: Superpowers
We answer the following questions about superpowers: Can superheroes be real people? (No.) Can real people become superheroes? (Maybe.) And which is better: flight or invisibility? (Depends who you ask.)
Prologue.
Host Ira Glass talks to comic artist Chris Ware, who thought about superheroes a lot of the time as a kid. In grade school, Chris drew superheroes, he invented his own character named The Hurricane (not to be confused with Reuben Carter), and he made a superhero costume. Sometimes he wore parts of the costume to school under his regular clothes, which went fine until he realized he would have to change clothes for gym class. Ware's book, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, is also inhabited by a "superhero" of sorts. (6 minutes)
Act One. Invisible Man vs. Hawkman.
John Hodgman conducts an informal survey in which he asks the age-old question: Which is better: The power of flight or the power of invisibility? He finds that how you answer tells a lot about what kind of person you are. And also, no matter which power people choose, they never use it to fight crime. (13 minutes)
Song: " That Man," Peggy Lee
Act Two. Wonder Woman.
Kelly McEvers with the story of Zora, a self-made superhero. From the time she was five, Zora had recurring dreams in which she was a 6'5" warrior queen who could fly and shoot lightning from her hands. She made a list of all the skills she would need to master if she wanted to actually become the superhero she dreamed of being. Sample items: martial arts, evasive driving and bomb diffusion. She actually checked off most things on the list ... and then had a run-in with the CIA. (16 minutes)
Song: " Goldfinger," performed by David Sedaris
Act Three. The Green Team of Boy Millionaires, Beppo The Amazing Supermonkey from Planet Krypton, and The Man from Sram.
Ira talks with Jonathan Morris, the amazingly funny and charming editor of the website Gone and Forgotten, an Internet archive of failed comic book characters. Jonathan explains what makes a new superhero succeed, and what makes him tank. (9 minutes)
Song: " Signal in Sky," The Apples in Stereo
Act Four. The Wonder Twins.
Ira talks with journalist Jason Bleibtreu about Luther and Johnny Htoo, twelve-year-old twins, and the leaders of a rebel army of Burmese separatists called God's Army. Everyone around them, both their own forces and their enemies, believed they possessed superpowers, that they could not be harmed by bullets, that they had the power to command ghost armies. Bleibtrau visited the twins while they were in the jungle and explains why they were so widely believed. (9 minutes)
Song: " Superman," Spouse
Re:I don't care how good you are... (Score:3, Interesting)
That's why we make firearms.
I wondered whether someone would come up with that. You're going to need one heck of a weapon to take down ten opponents at close range before they get close enough to grab you, though.
Then again, you're Batman. Maybe you really do have some funky combination of flashbangs, smoke bombs, and defensive equipment that renders you immune to their effects. :-)
Re:How many years for the morals? (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember reading this LARGE comic (Batman Black And White? Alex Ross' art iirc) where Batman realized that he spent too much time fighting criminals but not crime. He had caught this kid, and it made him pause. Later on, as Bruce Wayne, he wondered what could be done to the neighborhood that kid was in. He gave the go-signal to projects that revitalized that run-down neighborhood. When he saw the kid again--can't remember if he was Bruce or Batman -- the kid was doing alright.
The martial arts you see are all useless. (Score:3, Interesting)
The stuff you see on the screen, in the ring (including MMA) will get you killed on the street.
The real martial arts don't in fact take 10 years to train for, they only take a few months to teach the techniques, a few months to practice them until automatic and a few months to get into decent shape to apply them. You see, what you are taught 3 or 4 times a week for 10 years when you attend a typical dojo is almost certainly complete bollocks. It almost certainly isn't effective karate, it almost certainly isn't effective kung fu. In fact it almost certainly doesn't resemble the original material taught by the old masters in any way.
The addition of rules for sparring, competition have removed virtually all of the effective techniques. Few of which are taught any more in the dojo because they are forbidden in competition.
Effective (real) karate, kung fu, tai chi, boxing, wrestling etc are in fact functionally the same thing. Simple and brutal self defence techniques which are easy to apply when the addrenalin has removed all your co-ordination and your opponent's pain sensitivity. Virtually all of the "styles" you see these days are ... Ballet ... Not karate, not kung fu, not tai chi. If you are not practicing and training eye gouging, fishooking, choking, strangling, biting, stamping, headbutting, groin crushing as well as the more sophisticated stuff, you are kidding yourself (and your students if you have the gall to teach any) on.
Unless you train for effectiveness in the dojo, you are seriously going to get your backside handed to you the first time you attempt a spinning reverse head kick on a damp, slippy pavement when some moron and his 4 mates decide you looked at them wrong.
Xerxes and his ten thousand "immortals" (Score:4, Interesting)
By the way, this is the thinking behind the ten thousand "immortals" of Xerxes army. His hand picked crack troops were always kept at this number with replacements making up the dead/injured.
You can see one fictionalized representation of them in the movie "The 300". They were the warriors who went up against the greeks wearing the shiny silver masks. As befitting their awesome reputation, they were the first ones to draw greek blood (although they still got slaughtered).
Re:Then we'd need to train a bunch of people... (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't answer to the rumors, but I think that this may be a nod to Japanese Animation cultural influences in Western cinema and art.
I have seen several examples of characters in Anime where male sexual ambiguity is used explicitly in villains, usually in conjunction with some form of insanity. This is also heightened by cases where even the gender of the character isn't revealed until later in the series/movie, thanks to a highly androgynous character design and careful voice-acting.
Anyway, one could draw a line between homophobia and such a character design; I disagree with that. Personally, I see this as a kind of hint of "hypersexuality" - a complete lack of selectiveness for a mate - that suggests a very reckless personality, even at the most base and carnal level.