Serial Escalation/Real Life

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • How many blades can they fit onto a razor before it just becomes too ridiculous (well... MORE ridiculous)?
  • The Fashion Industry: What ridiculous creation will be touted as "the next big thing"? How obscenely emaciated must the models be before they can even audition? How flamboyantly gay can the designers be before they create a black hole of Camp?
    • The second one, thankfully, only applies to the American continents, as European fashion shows now have minimum weight requirements.
      • So many costumes never intended for mass manufacture were deliberate hyperbole, to make one statement or another. For example, to underscore a theme the maker has gotten into lately, for another example, to lampoon the same that's been overused.
  • How much More Dakka can a Nerf gun have? If they get much more powerful you'll need a license to carry one...
    • No licenses yet, but the Raider's drum holds 35 rounds.
  • Computer technology does this every few years. Remember when a terabyte hard drive was absolutely unthinkable?
    • Remember when 32 gigabyte SD Cards were?
    • Or when a gigabyte was the realm of supercomputers? Now a camera has more memory than a Cray formerly used in colleges.
    • Not so many years ago, when one gigabyte hard drives were on the horizon, PC Magazine did a spoof glossary of computer terms that included the following definition: "Terabyte: A unit of storage so massive it would take the average user two months to fill." At the time, it was a hilarious over-the-top commentary on how people's expectations of what would be "more than enough" capacity tended to get continuously modified as time passes. Now, it's simple truth if you download HD movies or the like.
      • Speaking of storage, back when CDROMs were first introduced, most of them were in fact barely filled up (many actually containing the equivalent of just a dozen 5 1/4" floppy disks, just a drop compared to the media's 700 Megabyte capacity). One article from an issue of Amiga World magazine back in those days commented about the problems of what to fill them up with during a review of a CDROM drive for the Amiga 500. Now compare that to today's Blu-Ray technology, with one rewritable variant announced to have a capacity of 200 Gigabytes.
      • This is in fact called the Rebound Effect. To summarize, when something is increased, we we find ways to use more of it. For example, take a terabyte hard drive, now take it to the 1990s where 3 1/2 inch floppy disks where used. Each floppy disk has 1.4 megabytes each, to everyone in the 1990s, a terabyte hard drive had pretty much unlimited storage. Now take it to the present, 2011 at this time. Blu-ray quality movies, games that are stored on DVDs which where once used only for movies where the large memory was necessary. Not to mention all of the crap we forget to delete and a terabyte hard drive fills up fast.
    • On computing power, we've went from $1000 per GFLOP (a measurement of computing power) in 2000, to $1.80 in 2011. In fact, it's possible to build a supercomputer class machine for less than $3000 if you pick the right parts.
  • The classic joke "The Aristocrats". How much more vulgarity can we jam in before the inevitable punchline?
  • Modern Samurai Machii Isao. After cutting a mushroom's canopy, a pea pod (both lengthwise) and an Airsoft bullet as it was shot at him, what will people want to see him cut next?
  • Automotive Industry: How fast can a production car go? 217mph? 240? 250? 253? 256? How about 267? (set by the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport Edition. It has a 8 litre, W16, quad-turbocharged engine tuned up to 1200 horsepower. Stop and think about this for a second: it goes from zero to sixty in one hundred and twenty feet.)
    • Meanwhile, aerospace engineers look at it and giggle. Moving in only two dimensions, in a straight line, and with no cargo aboard. On the other hand, the aerospace industry has been challenging the Impossible for speed (speed of sound, impossible? Naw, there's several planes that do twice that, while carrying the weight of five Veyrons in cargo alone), distance (landed on the Moon in the sixties, didn't go back...want to travel from one side of the continent to the other? Sure, just buy a ticket.), agility (the heart of every airshow. Can the Veyron do its quarter mile while upside down?) and size (Can a million pounds of metal, flesh, and cargo fly across the Atlantic? Yes, just ask the Antonov A225 and Airbus A380).
    • That's nothing compared to experimental cars. The ThrustSSC managed to reach 763 mph in 1997. Now, there's another car being made, the Bloodhound SSC being developed to be able to reach a speed of 1,000 mph. If you're wondering, SSC actually does stand for Super Sonic Car.
  • The commission into the Victorian bushfires of February 2009 recommended the addition of a new bushfire danger level called "beyond extreme". (It has since been named "Catastrophic - Code Red")
  • A Tex Mex restaraunt chain called Tijuana Flats has provided the answer to the question of how spicy hot sauces can get. Its hottest sauce is maybe 725000 Scoville units and approximately 5 times hotter that the former World's Hottest Hot Sauce, and their absolute hottest product, Chet's Gone Mad (a chili powder) is about 1.5 million Scoville units, more than enough to actually feel burning on your skin if you placed some on there. Naturally, anyone without a mouth of adamantine should really not try this.
    • Nicko McBrain's restaurant "Rock N' Roll Ribs" has a hot sauce called the Run to the Hills Sauce measuring 1 million scoville units. When someone complained it wasn't hot enough they made the Die with your Boots on Sauce. The guy who complained about the Run to the Hills Sauce couldn't take one bite of the new one.
      • Apparently now the menu has a Maiden reference that further notices the escalation: Mild, Medium, Hot, Die with your Boots On, and Heaven Can't Wait.
  • The search for the world's hottest pepper. As of early February 2011, the hottest pepper -- the Infinity Pepper -- clocked in at 1,067,286 scoville. Two weeks later, February 25th 2011, it was displaced by the Naga Viper pepper, which registered 1,382,118 SHU,
  • The cold war nuclear arms race. How powerful can the nukes get? The Czar Bomba was around 5,000 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima!
    • Or how MANY? For instance, let's take the Ohio class SSBN. Working small and going large, warheads. Each one ten times as powerful as the combined nuclear power dropped on Japan in WWII. Each Trident D-5 carried eight of those (although international negotiations got that reduced to five...that's 'arms reduction' in politician-speak). An Ohio class could carry up to twenty-four Tridents. We had over fifteen Ohio class boats on the register. Warheads, missiles, boats, bombs, how many cities could we fry? (and that's just ONE class of subs-there were preceding classes with the smaller Polaris missile, and many, MANY land based ICBM silos and plane-launched weapons)
      • It was said that during the heyday of the Cold War both sides had enough nukes to destroy each others every town and city at least 24 times over, and basicly whole human civilization at least a few times over for good measure.
  • How much smaller can our iPods get? Answer? NOT ENOUGH.
  • How much more realistic will our videogames get? Eventually those A Is will develop minds of their own and take over the Earth's video game industry!
  • How many decorations will Christmas fanatics put up without getting out of hand?
  • How many cats can a crazy cat lady own before they suffocate the house?
  • How long can a tennis match be? 11 hours and 5 minutes over 3 days, answer courtesy of John Isner of America and Nicolas Mahut of France in the FIRST ROUND of the 2010 Wimbledon tournament. On the first day, it was a routine four-setter, suspended due to darkness. On the second day, they took the court at 2 p.m. and left at 9 when it was too dark at 59-59 in the fifth set long-game. The final score for the fifth set was 70-68. Records set: longest match, longest game, most games in a match/set, most aces fired (112 to 103)
    • Adding improbability to absurdity: Isner and Mahut drew each other in the first round the following year. This is only the 8th time a back-to-back first round draw has happened in the 125 year history of Wimbledon.
  • We're used to the ridiculous stuff they serve at county fairs. No one bats an eye at things like deep-fried Snickers, or chocolate-covered bacon. But how would you feel about deep-fried butter?
  • The Whopper. How many more patties can we fit between two buns?
    • Twelve.
    • Try the Mega Tamago from McDonald's Japan. 3 Patties, Lettuce, Cheeze, 2 strips of Bacon, and a Fried Egg.
      • They also offered for a limited time the Big America series of burgers, all of which are variants of the Quarter Pounder, stuffed with More Dakka.
      • And they also have the Mega Mac, which is the Big Mac with 4 patties instead of the usual 2.
  • How ridiculously gigantic can a gun be made with 20th century technology?... Possibly one which equates in destructive power the early atomic bomb, or which could fire an early nuclear bomb as a shell and it would still be too small for it?
  • "Minimally-invasive" surgeries. These days, many surgeries can be performed in such a way as to cause less shock to the body, by making smaller incisions and using smaller instruments. There's still recovery time, but it's much less than previous methods.
  • Fetishes, how many things can we put up here? How much will this stretch? How much insane amounts of squick can we squeeze out of this one scene?...
  • The rôti sans pareil ("roast without equal")? This dish was a monstrosity dreamt up by the French (who else?) in the 19th Century. It consisted of a bustard stuffed with a turkey stuffed with a goose stuffed with a pheasant stuffed with a chicken stuffed with a duck stuffed with a guinea fowl stuffed with a teal stuffed with a woodcock stuffed with a partridge stuffed with a plover stuffed with a lapwing stuffed with a quail stuffed with a thrush stuffed with a lark stuffed with an ortolan bunting stuffed with a garden warbler. And an olive.
    • Supposedly, a true gourmet would just eat the olive. Only the olive.
  • How long can Roger Gracie's winning streak at the World Jiu-Jitsu Championships (aka the "Mundials") go? Before the 2011 Mundials, it's already at least fifteen (including an opponent being unable to compete in a divisional final).
    • The original question, "how many times in a row can Roger Gracie submit his opponents," ended up being answered with an unprecedented sixteen, including all nine of his 2009 opponents (by the same white belt-level chokes from the same position no less!) and all but one of his 2010 opponents... who only survived long enough to lose by points, 13 to 2. All of them were fellow BJJ black belts, by the way.
    • How long can Roger Gracie go without tapping out (being submitted) in competition? It's already been A DECADE and at least SEVENTY confirmed bouts. (He reportedly last tapped in competition back in 2000 when he was a blue belt, the rank above white belt, and his few losses were almost all on points.)
  • People figuring out how to play "Flight of the Bumblebee" faster and faster on various instruments, such as piano and accordion (and more accordion).
  • The 2010-2011 government formation in Belgium. Normally, when a parliamentary democracy votes, no party has a clear majority, and circumstances demand coalition government, it takes no more than 30 days for a coalition to get itself together. If there's a particularly close result or if a particularly unsavory party has won a lot of seats, it might take take three to five months. This government formation has taken about a year. And the news out of Brussels thus far has not been pleasant (former PM and current European Union President Herman Van Rompuy has made some rather pessimistic noises about the prospects), making it possible that Belgium will reach 13 June 2011 without a permanent government--a whole year. A term of the Federal Parliament is four years. Yeah.
    • To give some perspective, this is (naturally) history's longest-ever government formation. Second place is Iraq in 2009-10, which took 249 days (about eight and a half months)...but Iraq is a young democracy, with really nasty sectarian and ethnic politics, and foreign powers meddling in pretty much everything. Oh, and the war. Don't forget the war.
      • Well, as of today, Belgium is still strugglin' to do it !
      • The way things are looking now, it seems formation will be finished just short of the 500 days mark.
      • Wrong. It took a whole 541 days.
  • Throughout his career, Evel Kneivel broke 433 bones. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, that's the most broken bones survived by a person in one lifetime. Granted, motorcycling stunts are dangerous, but still...433 bones. That's like breaking every bone in your body twice, and then some!
  • World War II. By the time it was finished, a huge number of cities were utterly devastated, a major ethnic group was nearly eliminated (at least in Europe), atrocities of astonishing cruelty were commonplace, and entire classes of weapons (nukes, missiles) had gone from science fiction to killing hundreds of thousands. Within a few years of its conclusion, communism had gone from a fringe movement to a world force, and the great Europe-dominated empires were transforming into the "Third World".
  • Just how big can can crazy people get their building ideas? Pretty big.
  • Since before World War 1 firearm accuracy has been measured in Minute of Angle (MoA), or how many sixty-iths of an inch shots will deviate at 100 yards. Originally getting anywhere near sub-2 MoA required a rifle that suffered from Crippling Overspecialisation: A highly specialized rifle and ammo (which not only had to be made for a specific individual rifle, but also stored under particular conditions) combo not suited for battlefield use, even among snipers. As technology has progressed it became relatively easy to hit 1 MoA with a good rifle and handloads. Now accuracy has progressed so far that cheap autoloaders (inherently less accurate than a bolt action) with good quality factory ammo can pull it off.
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