Etta Devine

Heading to San Diego Comic Con this week? Or maybe still deciding? Well, VRV and Frederator Studios are having a panel!

The distinction between passing out and knocking out is very simple:

1) Passing Out: Your body is so tired that it can’t go on.

2) Knocking Out: Someone else is traumatically forcing your brain to rapidly shut itself off by convincing it that its dying.

When you’re talking about hitting someone in the head as opposed to strangulation, this generally means a concussion. They have hit your head so hard your brain has bruised itself against the inside of your skull and you have now gone unconscious. When you punch someone in the head, you have zero control over what actually happens to them. You can hope, but you can’t control it. In comparison to a choke hold, where you have almost total control over their body and can feel for the moment they go limp (and a mistake is still going to potentially end their life), it isn’t worth it as a tactical choice.

Humans are persistence predators, they can go and go and go for a very long time. You have to work pretty hard to physically exhaust them to the point where they’ll collapse on the battlefield. Their brain/body will usually stop them long before that point arrives. When you’re talking about combat, they’re far more likely to die before they ever reach a point of total exhaustion. We’re talking days without rest, the kind you’re only ever likely to encounter in mass battles or with a character who is being hunted.

The truth is that if you see a character who has been consistently knocked out multiple times on screen, they’d either be suffering from serious damage to their brains or dead. Most of them would be dead. If you ever feel like testing the theory out, go check out the late life prospects for boxers and football players who’ve sustained several concussions over the course of their careers.

The whole “knock someone out to get rid of them” is a Hollywood trope built for narrative convenience. The actual process of physically subduing someone is long, drawn out, and takes a great deal more energy and effort than a one, two punch or a knife to the gut.

The “Knocking Out” Contrivance in media acts like character death but without the audience having to evaluate the protagonist’s morals or the narrative’s values. They maintain their “good guy” street cred, and the audience doesn’t have to ask the questions. We switch easily from one scene to the next without any of the hoopla. The audience gets their action sequence and no one needs to feel bad. It’s a bloodless death. Or it’s a scene transition, or someone’s been taken prisoner without the author having to figure out how they move tie them up, move them, and get them from Point A to Point B. (Nevermind that it’s actually much harder to move dead weight than it is someone who is conscious.)

It’s lazy.

No, yeah, it is.

It’s there for shock value when the protagonist is taken prisoner.

Still, if you want to use this narrative contrivance in your story you can. No one will stop you. The vast majority of general audiences won’t question it. Judging by the number of questions we’ve received about this topic alone, people do commonly think the knockout genuinely works as a tactic for subduing the enemy. However…

The “Knockout” is prevalent in media because it is a convenient narrative tool.

If you’ve got a burning need to use it then use it, just don’t sit there and try to say it’s “realistic” or safe after the fact. It isn’t. Accept the narrative knockout for the bit of smoke and mirrors it is, and move forward.

It’s part of a collection of tropes that I like to call “Feel Good Violence”. They have no relationship to reality or responsibility, but they’ll make the audience feel good and the character seem powerful. It is “Feel Good”.

So, that’s it. I have nothing more to say that we haven’t covered in previous posts about head injuries. Unless @scriptmedic has anything they’d like to add, we’re done with the topic for now.

-Michi

I’ve trained this open-source neural network framework on a variety of datasets, including recipes, Pokemon, knock-knock jokes, pick up lines, and D&D spells.

Now I give you: training a neural network on the complete list of Dr. Who episodes. (Big shout-out of thanks to blog readers Anya and Dan, who provided the dataset!)

The input dataset was simply the list of episodes, with no extra information given to the network - it has no idea even if this is English, or words, or a list rather than a paragraph or code.

Pretty much immediately, however, it figures out that “The” is important, as are the letter combinations “Do” and “Da”. The following is output from a very early generation, with the “temperature” (think “daringness”) variable turned to a very safe setting:

The Dont The Dant The Dant The The Dant The The Dont

If increase the temperature, forcing it to be more daring, it will try other letter combinations, but won’t give up on using “the”. Sometimes it’ll pile on a whole cascade of “the”s, in a fit of either panic or pique.

The Dinn The Sons The Ardeao The Areir The Wed on the The The Ans

Then, it finally learns to spell “Dalek” and never looks back.

Safe setting: (Daleks. Stick with the Daleks.)

The Sires of the Daleks The Argass of the Daleks The Arges of the Daleks The Wire of the Daleks The Argoss of the Daleks The Argass of the Daleks The Argas of the Daleks The Daleks of the Daleks

Adventurous setting: (Nonsense words and Daleks) The Wirs of the Arooss of the Daleks The Pas of the Amse The Aaression Ware The Amios of the Lale The Fist of the Daad The Girg Bans

In later generations, it has learned the tiny input set by heart, and on the safe setting is able to reproduce the actual episodes word-for-word, in order. On the adventurous temperature setting, I’m able to force the neural network to make spelling mistakes, and its attempts to move back toward some spot in the original list make for some interesting new episodes.

I give you: Dr. Who episodes produced by a rather annoyed neural network.

The neural network can be trained to write recipes, invent Pokemon, and invent superhero names. But can it learn to tell a joke?

@researchbuzz generously provided me with a list of 200 knock-knock jokes - brief and highly formulaic, they seemed to be the form of joke best-suited for a neural network to reproduce. I figured it would quickly learn the formula, but would never, never manage to tell an actual joke.

It proved me wrong. 

Very early on, the network figured out that question marks were important somehow, as were the words “Knock” and “who” in some mysterious way:

Koo k ano? ? Khnck Knock oae?t rA  noc? Knock Woock Whecr lwhot h o nwoe hio

In very short order, it learned to begin a knock-knock joke, and almost never got that part wrong again. But the rest of the formula took quite a while to figure out, and the algorithm frequently devolved into playing a game of telephone with itself:

Knock Knock Who’s There? Iane Aatar who? Aaane who? Aan who? Anac who? Iobe who? Irata who?

Next it figured out the formula, but no actual, you know, words:

Knock Knock Who’s There? Bool Hane who? Scheres are then the there

Then it learned the joke about the cow with no lips which became its Favorite Thing Ever, even if it didn’t know how to properly tell it. The punchline to Every Single Joke was ooo ooooo ooo…

Knock Knock Who’s There? Alec Anic who? Wow co poo the tho tho door to the soout oo ooo oooo ooo oo oo oo oo ooo oo oo oo ooo ooo oooo ooo ooo oo oo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo oo oo ooo ooo ooo ooo oo oo oo ooo ooo ooo ooo…

It made it past this stage, but still had problems that were remarkably similar to two people telling knock-knock jokes over a very bad phone connection, and maybe forgetting who was telling the actual joke:

Knock Knock Who’s There? Alther Water who? Water who who? Who who? Arton and out on the moor?

At last it figured out the basic formula and proceeded to make jokes that, while technically correct, didn’t make all that much sense. Many of them were partially plagiarized from jokes in the training dataset.

Knock Knock Who’s There? Hiwl Howlowwhowhow

Knock Knock Who’s There? Ireland Ireland who? Ireland you money, butt.

And then.

It produced. An actual joke. I checked, and this one most definitely wasn’t in the dataset. There was one about Alec, but the pun was “Alec-tricity”. There was one about knock-knock jokes themselves, but it was “Irish I knew more knock-knock jokes”. And it didn’t produce this just once, but over and over again. I give you possibly the freakiest thing the neural network has done to date:

I’m training a neural network to generate recipes based on a database of about 30,000 examples, and although the network has managed to produce identifiable recipes, and even sometimes sort sweet from savory, it hasn’t actually managed to produce any good ones. Only a very few of them are technically doable. Three typical examples:

Citran Barbecued Mube game, ethnic       —-CAKE—- 1 pkg cornstarch 34 oz ginger 1  white sage 2 large red potatoes, peeled 1  magazine bread; chunks 1 cup shredded corn peas 4 cup liquid ice cream Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Remove the casserole from the refrigerator and heat soup for 20 min. Serve with nuts, chopped caczooled and serve with the rice and oatmeal. From: Fial Hosselr                        Date: 24 Jul 96

Grilled Snailsed Butter crockpot, vegetables, crockpot, rubbing holiday, meats 2 lb shrimp; cut in ½ cubes 6  cloves, minced 2 teaspoon apple juice ¼ cup mushrooms 1 lb tomatoes, nuts.   plastic 1  Strawberries 2 each pinto beans; sliced 1  plum tomatoes, (no carri-fater) 1 pkg unknown yogurt fillets, thawed Pour noodles and cauliflower through a wider measure just on high speed until stiff. Flavor radicchio mixture with the wine and continue simmering until mixture is desired doneness. Reserve side of bowl mixture. Chill until circle is reamy inricating. Serve on ranged removable pieces.

Smushed.I’s Bried, Heritame Sprigs cakes, pies, pastries, extract 2  eggs 4 tablespoon water 1 cup dried butters and firmly beaten 20  eggs 4 oz fresh chopped nuts (approximately 10 minutes) 2 tablespoon grated zucchini 20 oz almonds, rough 1 cup seasoned baking powder

Sift milk in crockpot. Turn dough.

Add egg powdered sugar and whipped toppings. Serve immediately.