* ArtisticLicenseStatistics: Several statistics about diseases are used throughout the movie; most of them are wrong. More {{egregious}}, however, are the two or three instances where an InUniverse statistic about the virus is obtained or explained with math that is completely wrong. The crown prize goes to the scene early in the movie in which it's stated that an average person touches their face 2000 times a day or 2-3 times per waking minute, which is an exaggeration.
** Alan claims that if each person is infecting 2 others, on the first day 2 people will be infected, then 4, then 16, then 256, then 65,336 and so on. Of course, in reality, if you have 256 infected people, and they each infect 2 people, the next day you'll have 512 new cases, not 65,000. The correct number sequence is 2, 4, 8, 16, 32... [[hottip:*:technically, assuming the infection started with 1 person, you'd want 1 less than this, so 1, 3, 7, 15, 31..., but the progression would still be based on this slower growing series]] In other words, he wants a [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_progression geometric progression]], not a quadratic. If he was doing the sums wrong to scare people, then fair enough, but he explicitly quotes results based on the proper series later in the scene (he says it would take a month to infect a billion people, and sure enough, 2^30 is just over a billion. Using the incorrect series, it would take a week -- indeed, just one day after 65,336 were infected you'd have 4,268,792,896 cases).

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* ArtisticLicenseStatistics: 
** Alan claims that if each person is infecting 2 others, on the first day 2 people will be infected, then 4, then 16, then 256, then 65,336 and so on. Of course, in reality, if you have 256 infected people, and they each infect 2 people, the next day you'll have 512 new cases, not 65,000. The correct number sequence is 2, 4, 8, 16, 32... [[hottip:*:technically, assuming the infection started with 1 person, you'd want 1 less than this, so 1, 3, 7, 15, 31..., but the progression would still be based on this slower growing series]] In other words, he wants a [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_progression geometric progression]], not a quadratic. He explicitly quotes results based on the proper series later in the scene (he says it would take a month to infect a billion people, and sure enough, 2^30 is just over a billion. Using the incorrect series, it would take a week -- indeed, just one day after 65,336 were infected you'd have 4,268,792,896 cases). This may be intentional, as Alan is an untrustworthy gossiper who's [[spoiler:falsifying a cure on behalf of alternative medicine companies to rake in profit.]]

18th Apr '13 12:54:12 AM Sandbylur

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Nothing related in YMMV

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14th Apr '13 3:02:55 PM Austin

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Moving from YMMV.

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* ArtisticLicenseBiology: Mostly averted. However, there were a few obvious fictionalizations:
** [[spoiler:The trouble that they had growing the virus in cell culture, the reason cited that it "killed all the cells". Though some viruses are extremely difficult to grow in cell culture in the Real World, culture killing usually indicates a ''successful'' attempt to culture the virus.]]
** There were repeated references to genomic DNA; paramyxoviruses are RNA viruses.
** The vaccine is depicted as imparting instant protection from the virus during both the off-protocol testing and public distribution, whereas most take some time to become completely effective as the immune system "learns" to defend from the disease.
** The grandaddy of them was when the viral envelope protein structure was solved within days of the virus' discovery. X-ray crystallography is often a process of many months to years, and co-crystalization of proteins which bind to each other (such as depicted) is even more difficult and time consuming.
* ArtisticLicenseStatistics: Several statistics about diseases are used throughout the movie; most of them are wrong. More {{egregious}}, however, are the two or three instances where an InUniverse statistic about the virus is obtained or explained with math that is completely wrong. The crown prize goes to the scene early in the movie in which it's stated that an average person touches their face 2000 times a day or 2-3 times per waking minute, which is an exaggeration.
** Alan claims that if each person is infecting 2 others, on the first day 2 people will be infected, then 4, then 16, then 256, then 65,336 and so on. Of course, in reality, if you have 256 infected people, and they each infect 2 people, the next day you'll have 512 new cases, not 65,000. The correct number sequence is 2, 4, 8, 16, 32... [[hottip:*:technically, assuming the infection started with 1 person, you'd want 1 less than this, so 1, 3, 7, 15, 31..., but the progression would still be based on this slower growing series]] In other words, he wants a [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_progression geometric progression]], not a quadratic. If he was doing the sums wrong to scare people, then fair enough, but he explicitly quotes results based on the proper series later in the scene (he says it would take a month to infect a billion people, and sure enough, 2^30 is just over a billion. Using the incorrect series, it would take a week -- indeed, just one day after 65,336 were infected you'd have 4,268,792,896 cases).

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13th Apr '13 4:06:45 AM dakinebrah

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10th Apr '13 3:40:28 PM EmperorZim

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10th Apr '13 3:39:39 PM EmperorZim