Does E = mc² or mc³? The Science in Bond Films Thread

RichardTheBruce

A Psychological Analysis of James Bond, Kevin Dutton.

I get his points, but I don't see Bond as a pyschopath. Not so absolutely without conscience or remorse.

CommanderRoss

It goes to show that one of our best comedians is righ: 'most psychologists are sitting on the wrong end of the table'. Bond is especially interesting because he isn't a psychopath, he does have a concience. The choices he makes there are his legacy. Of course it doesn't show that well in the films, but it does a little.

RichardTheBruce

Steve Albrecht DBA
The Act of Violence
What James Bond Teaches Us
About Life
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-act-violence/201602/what-james-bond-teaches-us-about-life
Five toughness tools to keep you going in tough times
Posted Feb 05, 2016

After watching every James Bond film from “Dr. No” in 1962 to “Spectre” this year, my one conclusion about the character is that his main talent is he perseveres. Yes, he can shoot and fly helicopters and bed women and choose the perfect wine. He certainly knows his way around fast cars and high-tech weaponry. He can fight multiple attackers, often much bigger than him, and almost always while wearing an expensive suit or tuxedo. He can work complex computer systems, defuse bombs, and survive being punched, shot, or tortured. He’s great at moving from the battle to the bedroom and he speaks many languages, including the language of amore.

But all those things being equal (and fun to watch), his primary skill is that he keeps going; he endures, despite being wounded, outnumbered, outgunned, surrounded, and (Bond purists will gasp as I write this) even showing us on-screen, occasionally, that he can be afraid. Of course we all know he is a mythic literary and movie character with a high tolerance for pain and the ability to drop a droll aside or a bad pun as he kills a bad guy. I’m hip to the fact that he doesn’t exist beyond the mind of his creator, author Ian Fleming, and executive producer Albert Broccoli and his family’s continued legacy of the film franchise. But I have met guys as tough and resourceful as Bond and we have heard stories of our brave military men who have overcome horrific situations and survived. They are not ten feet tall and bullet-proof. They certainly have skills and tactical training. But like Bond, they keep on keeping on, out-enduring the other guy and their bad apparent situation. More of this should rub off on more of us, these days.

We already know we can develop endurance of the body through physical exercise. Conditioning the mind for endurance is also a learned skill, through practice. Putting yourself in situations where you need to have patience, problem-solving abilities, and even a little luck can build those mental conditioning skills as well.

Improve your physical endurance – So many sports actually require more stamina than skill in order to win. Whether it’s the fourth quarter of the football game, the last period in basketball, soccer, or hockey, the last set in tennis, or the last hole in golf, your ability to fight the fatigue factor and finish strong is often the difference between victory and defeat in a close contest. In boxing, it’s who is standing at the end who wins. Your mind tells you you’re tired a lot sooner than your body does. Your brain will say, “Let’s quit, let’s walk, let’s stop, let our opponent go past us, let’s head for the bench, the sidelines, or the couch.” Your body can and will ignore all that negative energy and simply do what it wants to do, which is complete the event, with as much energy as you had at the beginning. Physical strength is built through time, repetition, pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, and developing new upper limits. Building your physical side trains your mind as well, to ignore the negative self-talk and quell your doubts.

Add to your mental endurance – Suppose there is a group situation where ten people are asked to work together on a fairly complex math problem, e.g., “If a train leaves Cleveland at 8:00 p.m. and travels at 74 miles an hour, when does it crash into the train leaving Baltimore traveling at 72 miles per hour?” Unless there is a math whiz or a word-problem fan in the room, many people make a few wild stabs at the answer (“Three hours? Two weeks? A month from never?”) and then promptly give up. Having mental endurance requires you to keep working past the original three guesses. Edison tried over 700 elements to find the right materials for the inside of his first light bulb. Keep moving your pen across your paper, do more research, look at the problem from reverse angles, get expert help, but don’t stop thinking when the answers are not apparent.

Get more comfortable with pain – Having a higher pain tolerance than most people helps you endure. Training for a marathon is not really about fitness (unless you plan to win the bloody race, then you better be fitter than a Kenyan); it’s about having stamina under discomfort. Most reasonably healthy people could prepare themselves to run 26 miles in a row at a 10-minute per mile pace. (I did it in 1998 – worst five hours of my life.) That level of fitness is not overly-difficult to attain, in general. Specifically, however, the pain that sets in at mile 11 or mile 18 or mile 22 can be significantly unpleasant. When your feet, legs, back, and head start to hurt from all that pounding, and your stomach is upset from too much Gatorade or not enough Gatorade, it’s easy to simply quit the race. Tough people get past their pains and keep going. This is a learned skill. Putting yourself in situations where physical and mental pains are sharp and vivid can remind you of your own fears, but also give you a great opportunity to go past those self-perceived limits and finish the task, no matter how unpleasant.

Get some POT - Plain Old Toughness – There is a story, supposedly true, about a Russian doctor on a polar ice cap research team that discovered he had appendicitis. Thousands of miles from help, he knew he was in a serious medical situation. The rupture of that organ would cause peritonitis and certain death. So in his agony, he set up a mirror, asked his colleagues to pass him his surgical tools upon his request, and removed his own appendix. Surely whatever you’re facing at home or work can be solved through a healthy dose of POT. Get tough, get tougher, lean forward!

Constantly seek options and solutions – One of my favorite movies - and I’m not exactly sure why it is – is "Sexy Beast" (2000), starring Ray Winstone, Ian McShane, and Sir Ben Kingsley. It’s about how Kingsley goes to Spain to drag Winstone, his reluctant former crime partner, back to England for one more bank heist. Mc Shane plays Teddy, the crime boss running the operation, and he has the best line in the film, “Where there’s a will – and there’s always a fu#$*%^# will – there’s a way.” And he’s right. As long as what you’re trying to do doesn’t violate our natural laws (defying gravity, breathing underwater without oxygen, etc,), you can and should figure out a way to get it done. In his book about the Vietnam War, We Were Soldiers Once . . . And Young, Lt. Col. Hal Moore said, when facing what seems like insurmountable odds, “There is always, always, always a solution.” Never stop looking for the answer you need for the situation you’re facing. It’s there; find it.

Steve Albrecht, D.B.A., holds degrees in English and Psychology, and a doctorate in Business Administration. He is a former police officer and domestic violence investigator with the San Diego Police.

Dr. Steve Albrecht is internationally-known for his writing, speaking, and training on workplace violence and school violence prevention. He manages a San Diego-based firm specializing in high-risk HR, security, and work culture issues. He holds a doctorate in Business Administration, an MA in Security Management, a BS in Psychology, and a BA in English. He is board certified in HR, security management, employee coaching, and threat assessment. He has written 17 books, including Ticking Bombs: Defusing Violence in the Workplace, one of the first books on workplace violence subject. He worked for the San Diego Police Department for 15 years. You can hear his “Crime Time” radio show at CrimeTimeRadio.com. Contact him at www.DrSteveAlbrecht.com and on follow him on Twitter @DrSteveAlbrecht

BMW_with_missiles

That was downright inspiring!

CommanderRoss

And true. Loved it.

BMW_with_missiles

I had always wondered if the rear ejection seat in a fighter jet could deploy and still have the pilot remain in control and unburned like we see in TND. Apparently, it’s not only entirely possible, but it happened during a civilian ride along giving the passenger an unexpected ride of his life.
https://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/civilian-on-fly-along-accidentally-ejected-from-fighter-1833821292

CommanderRoss

Yep, it's possible. It has happened more often, but this is the first time I read about a civillian beeing ejected. 'an ejectorseat?...'

RichardTheBruce

How Ejection Seats Work
https://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/flight/modern/ejection-seat.htm
by Kevin Bonsor


Ejecting from an aircraft is rare, but
pilots sometimes have to resort to
pulling the ejection handle to save
their lives.
Photo courtesy U.S. Air Force

U.S. Air Force Captain Scott O'Grady was helping to enforce the no-fly zone over northern Bosnia on June 2, 1995, when a Bosnian-Serb surface-to-air missile (SAM) struck his F-16. With the plane disintegrating around him, O'Grady reached down between his knees and grabbed the pull handle of his ejection seat. After a loud bang caused by the canopy separating, O'Grady was blasted into the air along with his seat. Soon after, his parachute deployed and, like 90 percent of pilots who are forced to eject from their aircraft, O'Grady survived the ejection from his F-16. Following six days of evading capture and eating insects for survival, O'Grady was rescued.

Ejecting from an aircraft moving at speeds greater than the speed of sound (mach 1: 750 miles per hour / 1,207 kph) can be very dangerous. The force of ejecting at those speeds can reach in excess of 20 Gs -- one G is the force of Earth's gravity. At 20 Gs, a pilot experiences a force equal to 20 times his or her body weight, which can cause severe injury and even death.

Most military aircraft, NASA research aircraft and some small commercial airplanes are equipped with ejection seats to allow pilots to escape from damaged or malfunctioning airplanes. In this edition of HowStuffWorks, you will learn about the parts that make an ejection seat work, how the seat lifts a pilot out of a plane and about the physics involved in ejecting.

Page 2

Take a Seat

An ejection seat being removed from
an F-15C Eagle
Photo courtesy U.S. Department of Defense

It's important for many types of aircraft to have an ejection seat in case the plane is damaged in battle or during testing and the pilot has to bail out to save his or her life. Ejection seats are one of the most complex pieces of equipment on any aircraft, and some consist of thousands of parts. The purpose of the ejection seat is simple: To lift the pilot straight out of the aircraft to a safe distance, then deploy a parachute to allow the pilot to land safely on the ground.

To understand how an ejection seat works, you must first be familiar with the basic components in any ejection system. Everything has to perform properly in a split second and in a specific sequence to save a pilot's life. If just one piece of critical equipment malfunctions, it could be fatal.

Ejection seats are placed into the cockpit and usually attach to rails via a set of rollers on the edges of the seat. During an ejection, these rails guide the seat out of the aircraft at a predetermined angle of ascent. Like any seat, the ejection seat's basic anatomy consists of the bucket, back and headrest. Everything else is built around these main components. Here are key devices of an ejection seat:

Catapult
Rocket
Restraints
Parachute

In the event of an ejection, the catapult fires the seat up the rails, the rocket fires to propel the seat higher and the parachute opens to allow for a safe landing. In some models, the rocket and catapult are combined into one device. These seats also double as restraint systems for the crewmembers both during an ejection and during normal operation.

Ejection seats are just one part of a larger system called the assisted egress system. "Egress" means "a way out" or "exit." Another part of the overall egress system is the plane's canopy, which has to be jettisoned prior to the ejection seat being launched from the aircraft. Not all planes have canopies. Those that don't will have escape hatches built into the roof of the plane. These hatches blow just before the ejection seat is activated, giving crewmembers an escape portal.


A pilot prepares to pull down the face
curtain that will launch the ejection seat
up the track of the ejection-seat trainer.
Photo courtesy U.S. Department of Defense

Seats are activated through different methods. Some have pull handles on the sides or in the middle of the seat. Others are activated when a crew member pulls a face curtain down to cover and protect his or her face. In the next section, you will find out what happens once the seat is activated.

Ejection-seat Terms | Source: The Ejection Site
Bucket - This is the lower part of the ejection seat that contains the survival equipment.
Canopy - This is the clear cover that encapsulates the cockpit of some planes; it is often seen on military fighter jets.
Catapult - Most ejections are initiated with this ballistic cartridge.
Drogue parachute - This small parachute is deployed prior to the main parachute; it designed to slow the ejection seat after exiting the aircraft. A drogue parachute in an ACES II ejection seat has a 5-foot (1.5-m) diameter. Others may be less than 2 feet (0.6 m) in diameter.
Egress system - This refers to the entire ejection system, including seat ejection, canopy jettisoning and emergency life-support equipment.
Environmental sensor - This is an electronic device that tracks the airspeed and altitude of the seat.
Face curtain - Attached to the top of some seats, pilots pull this curtain down to cover his or her face from debris. This curtain also holds the pilot's head still during ejection.
Recovery sequencer - This is the electronic device that controls the sequence of events during ejection.
Rocket catapult - This is a combination of a ballistic catapult and an underseat rocket unit.
Underseat rocket - Some seats have a rocket attached underneath to provide additional lift after the catapult lifts the crewmember out of the cockpit.
Vernier rocket - Attached to a gyroscope, this rocket is mounted to the bottom of the seat and controls the seat's pitch.
Zero-zero ejection - This is an ejection on the ground when the aircraft is at zero altitude and zero airspeed.

Page 3

Bailing Out

This ACES II ejection seat has a middle
pull handle used to activate the
ejection sequence.
Photo courtesy Goodrich Corporation

When a crewmember lifts the pull handle or yanks the face curtain down on the ejection seat, it sets off a chain of events that propels the canopy away from the plane and thrusts the crewmember safely out. Ejecting from a plane takes no more than four seconds from the time the ejection handle is pulled. The exact amount of time depends on the seat model and the crewmember's body weight.

Pulling the ejection handle on a seat sets off an explosive cartridge in the catapult gun, launching the ejection seat into the air. As the seat rides up the guide rails, a leg-restraint system is activated. These leg restraints are designed to protect the crewmember's legs from getting caught or harmed by debris during the ejection. An underseat rocket motor provides the force that lifts the crewmember to a safe height, and this force is not outside normal human physiological limitations, according to documents from Goodrich Corporation, a manufacturer of ejection seats used by the U.S. military and NASA.

Prior to the ejection system launching, the canopy has to be jettisoned to allow the crewmember to escape the cockpit. There are at least three ways that the canopy or ceiling of the airplane can be blown to allow the crewmember to escape:

Lifting the canopy - Bolts that are filled with an explosive charge are detonated, detaching the canopy from the aircraft. Small rocket thrusters attached on the forward lip of the canopy push the transparency out of the way of the ejection path, according to Martin Herker, a former physics teacher who has written about ejection seats and maintains a Web site describing ejection seats. (Click here to go to Herker's site.)
Shattering the canopy - To avoid the possibility of a crewmember colliding with a canopy during ejection, some egress systems are designed to shatter the canopy with an explosive. This is done by installing a detonating cord or an explosive charge around or across the canopy. When it explodes, the fragments of the canopy are moved out of the crewmember's path by the slipstream.
Explosive hatches - Planes without canopies will have an explosive hatch. Explosive bolts are used to blow the hatch during an ejection.

The seat, parachute and survival pack are also ejected from the plane along with the crewmember. Many seats, like Goodrich's ACES II (Advanced Concept Ejection Seat, Model II), have a rocket motor fixed underneath the seat. After the seat and crewmember have cleared the cockpit, this rocket will lift the crewmember another 100 to 200 feet (30.5 to 61 m), depending on the crewmember's weight. This added propulsion allows the crewmember to clear the tail of the plane. As of January 1998, there had been 463 ejections worldwide using the ACES II system, according to the U.S. Air Force. More than 90 percent of those ejections were successful. There were 42 fatalities.


The parachutes opening on a Martin-
Baker ejection seat during a test. The
small parachute at the top is called the
drogue parachute.
Photo courtesy NASA

Once out of the plane, a drogue gun in the seat fires a metal slug that pulls a small parachute, called a drogue parachute, out of the top of the chair. This slows the person's rate of descent and stabilizes the seat's altitude and trajectory. After a specified amount of time, an altitude sensor causes the drogue parachute to pull the main parachute from the pilot's chute pack. At this point, a seat-man-separator motor fires and the seat falls away from the crewmember. The person then falls back to Earth as with any parachute landing.

Modes of Ejection

In the ACES II ejection seat produced by Goodrich Corporation, there are three possible ejection modes. The one used is determined by the aircraft's altitude and airspeed at the time of ejection. These two parameters are measured by the environmental sensor and recovery sequencer in the back of the ejection seat.

The environmental sensor senses the airspeed and altitude of the seat and sends data to the recovery sequencer. When the ejection sequence begins, the seat travels up the guide rails and exposes pitot tubes. Pitot tubes, named for physicist Henri Pitot, are designed to measure air-pressure differences to determine the velocity of the air. Data about the air flow is sent to the sequencer, which then selects from the three modes of ejections:

Mode 1: low altitude, low speed - Mode 1 is for ejections at speeds of less than 250 knots (288 mph / 463 kph) and altitudes of less than 15,000 feet (4,572 meters). The drogue parachute doesn't deploy in mode 1.
Mode 2: low altitude, high speed - Mode 2 is for ejections at speeds of more than 250 knots and altitudes of less than 15,000 feet.
Mode 3: high altitude, any speed - Mode 3 is selected for any ejection at an altitude greater than 15,000 feet.

Timing an Ejection | Source: Goodrich Corporation

0 seconds - Pilot pulls cord; canopy is jettisoned or shattered; catapult initiates, sending seat up rails.
0.15 seconds - Seat clears ejection rails at 50 feet (15 m) per second and is clear of surrounding cockpit; rocket catapult ignites; vernier motor fires to counteract any pitch changes; yaw motor fires, inducing slight yaw to assure man-seat separation. (Burn time of all motors equals 0.10 seconds.)
0.50 seconds - Seat has lifted to about 100 to 200 feet (30.5 to 61 m) from ejection altitude.
0.52 seconds - Seat-man-separator motor fires; cartridge fires to release crewmember and his equipment from seat; drogue gun fires parachute.
2.5 to 4 seconds - Main parachute is fully deployed.

Page 4

Physics of Ejecting


An ejection seat is test-fired at NASA
to analyze the seat's ability to
perform a zero-altitude, zero-
velocity ejection.
Photo courtesy NASA

Ejecting from an airplane is a violent sequence of events that places the human body under an extreme amount of force. The primary factors involved in an aircraft ejection are the force and acceleration of the crewmember, according to Martin Herker, a former physics teacher. To determine the force exerted on the person being ejected, we have to look at Newton's second law of motion, which states that the acceleration of an object depends on the force acting upon it and the mass of the object.

Newton's second law is represented as:

Force = Mass x Acceleration

(F=MA)

Regarding a crewmember ejecting from a plane, M equals his or her body mass plus the mass of the seat. A is equal to the acceleration created by the catapult and the underseat rocket.

Acceleration is measured in terms of G, or gravity forces. Ejecting from an aircraft is in the 5-G to 20-G range, depending on the type of ejection seat. As mentioned in the introduction, 1 G is equal to the force of Earth's gravity and determines how much we weigh. One G of acceleration is equal to 32 feet/second2 (9.8 m/s2). This means that if you drop something off of a cliff, it will fall at a rate of 32 feet/second2.

It's simple to determine the mass of the seat and the equipment attached to the seat. The pilot's mass is the largest variable. A 180-pound person normally feels 180 pounds of force being applied to him when standing still. In a 20-G impact, that same 180-pound person will feel 3,600 pounds of force being exerted. To learn more about force, click here.

"To determine the speed of the [ejection] seat at any point in time, one solves the Newton equation knowing the force applied and the mass of the seat/occupant system. The only other factors that are needed are the time of the force to be applied and the initial velocity present (if any)," writes Herker on his Web site describing the physics for understanding ejections. Herker provides this equation for determining the speed of the seat:

Speed = Acceleration x Time + Initial speed

V(f) = AT + V(i)

Initial speed refers to either the climb or the sink rate of the aircraft. It may also be determined by the initial step of the ejection process in a seat that combines an explosive catapult and an underseat rocket. The seat speed must be high enough to allow separation of the seat and person from the aircraft as quickly as possible in order to clear the entire aircraft.

The use of an ejection seat is always a last resort when an aircraft is damaged and the pilot has lost control. However, saving the lives of pilots is a higher priority than saving planes, and sometimes an ejection is required in order to save a life.

Physics Special Topics
https://www108.lamp.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/pst/article/view/2099
Home > Vol 11, No 1 (2012) > Nelms

P4_8 No Mr Bond, I Expect You to Drive
James Nelms, Declan Roberts, Suzanne Thomas, David Starkey

Abstract
This paper analyses the physics of the ejector seat shown in the James Bond film Goldfinger. By looking at frames from the film and modelling the ejection mechanism as a piston providing constant force, the motion of the ejected henchman was calculated. The henchman was found to reach a height of 2.37m at the apex of his ejection; a height which would not leave him seriously injured. The force required to eject him was found to be 1,930N, corresponding to a pressure of 8,870Pa. With comparisons to a typical piston from an engine, this was found to be a reasonable pressure and force for a piston to be able to generate.

Full Text:

Journal of Physics Special Topics

P4_8 No Mr Bond, I Expect You to Drive

J Nelms, D Roberts, S Thomas, D Starkey
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Leicester, Leicester, LE1 7RH.

November 21, 2012

Abstract This paper analyses the physics of the ejector seat shown in the James Bond film Goldfinger. By looking at frames from the film and modelling the ejection mechanism as a piston providing constant force, the motion of the ejected henchman was calculated. The henchman was found to reach a height of 2.37m at the apex of his ejection; a height which would not leave him seriously injured. The force required to eject him was found to be 1,930N, corresponding to a pressure of 8,870Pa if applied across a modelled seat of cross sectional area 0.218m2. With comparisons to a typical piston from an engine, this was found to be a reasonable pressure and force for a piston to be able to generate.

Introduction
In the 1964 film Goldfinger, the main character is engaged in a car chase with one of the villain’s henchmen in his Aston Martin DB5. However, with the use of one of the modifications to the car, James Bond is able to eject the henchman from his vehicle and into the air [1]. By analysis of frames from the film along with modelling the ejector seat as a piston providing a constant pressure across the passenger seat, the force required to power the ejector seat is calculated.

Discussion
In Goldfinger, the ejector seat is seen to accelerate the passenger of the DB5 through an opening in the roof and into the air. This motion was modelled as being a result of a constant force, acting on the seat and passenger from its initial position to its roof; this could be achieved by a hydraulic piston. Beyond this, the path taken by passenger and seat was taken to be only under the influence of a constant gravity force.

In the acceleration phase of the motion, the velocity at which the henchman leaves the vehicle can be shown as,

v1*v1 = u*u + 2as , , (1)

where v1 is the velocity exiting the DB5, u is the initial velocity of 0, a is the acceleration of the henchman and seat and s is the distance between the base of the seat originally and the roof height of an Aston Martin DB5 [2]. This distance s is taken to be 1.05m from the cars specifications [3].


Figure 1: Frame from the film Goldfinger, at the apex of the henchman’s ejection [1]

Using the footage in Figure 1, the base of the passenger and seat were calculated to be at an elevation of 2.37m from the ground. This was achieved by measuring the pixels in the screenshot from the base of the henchman to the ground, and comparing it against the height of the car, which is known. Neglecting the effects of air resistance and using equation (1), the relationship,

v2*v2 = v1*v1 - 2gH , (2)

can be proven. Here, H is the distance between the maximum height of the henchman and the roof of the car, g is the constant acceleration due to gravity and v2 is the velocity at the maximum of the henchman’s flight, which is zero.

By making v1*v1 the subject of equation 2, it is possible to calculate the resultant acceleration from equation 1,

a = (gH)/s . (3)

Taking g to be 9.81ms-2, with s calculated as 1.05m and H taken as 1.02m, this gives a resultant acceleration of 9.53ms-2. This corresponds to a resultant force of 953N if a combined mass of 100kg is assumed for both passenger and seat.

Factoring in that this resultant force takes into account the balance between the ejector thrust and the force of gravity is important. The thrust required for the ejector seat to function as seen in the film would therefore incorporate the mass of the henchman. This thrust was calculated to be 1,930N by considering the work done by gravity against the initial acceleration.

As this force is taken to be applied over the entire base of the seat, it is also of interest to work out the pressure applied by the hydraulic piston. The authors were unable to find the dimensions of an Aston Martin seat, so instead a Lamborghini seat was modelled [4], with a pressure of 8,870Pa applied over a seat of area 0.218 meters squared. Given that a typical car piston can generate a pressure of around 5,000Pa [5], this seems to be a feasible pressure for a larger piston to be able to generate.

Conclusion
The authors found that the force and pressure required to eject a typical henchman from an Aston Martin DB5 were 1,930N and 8,870Pa respectively if he was ejected via a hydraulic piston exerting a constant force. This would safely eject the henchmen, and from a maximum height of 2.37m, it is unlikely that he would sustain major injuries in the process unless he was ejected from a faster moving vehicle.

There are a few areas in which this ejection could be modelled more accurately in future research. Firstly, as can be seen in the film, the passenger and seat are not attached to one another; as they fly through the air they will act as separate bodies. As a result of this, their motion will not act entirely as described in this paper.

There will also be a force imparted on the Aston Martin. This paper did not look into how this would affect its motion, and whether a force of this strength would be easily dampened by the suspension of a DB5.

References

[1] Goldfinger, 1964, motion picture, Metro Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, USA,
[2] Tipler P.A & Mosca, Physics for Scientists and Engineers, Sixth Edition, Page 39,
Freeman & co,
[3] http://www.carfolio.com/specifications/models/car/?car=33594, accessed on 19.11.12,
[4] http://www.lambolounge.com/Interior/Seats/Seats/Seats.asp, accessed on 20.11.12,
[5] http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jus/0303/kuo.pdf, accessed on 20.11.12.

RichardTheBruce

Welcome to AP Physics C: Mechanics‎ > ‎What if......‎ > ‎
James Bond Car Flip
https://sites.google.com/a/csd99.org/dgsapphysicsc/home/what-if/james-bound-car-flip
By: Kevin; Nolan; Michael

In Die Another Day, would Bond be able to flip his car off its roof
using the ejection seat and live through it?
-Nolan

In Die Another Day, James Bond gets into a very intense car chase and ends up rolling his car over onto the roof. As his enemy closes in, Bond is able to flip his car over and dodge an incoming missile using his passenger ejection seat to flip over the car. But how fast would the ejection seat have to move, and is this even probable? Assuming the seat can reach that speed and flip the car, does Bond live?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0WqjxGeXpk

This would be impossible without a very, very, very powerful ejection system.

This example is very similar to throwing a baseball in space. As you throw the ball away from you, the ball also “pushes” you the opposite way, rotating you around your center of mass.

A better description of this is called conservation of momentum, where since the ball nor you were moving at first, there was none initially, but after the throw the ball had speed and therefore, momentum. Due to there being no initial momentum in the system, there must be an equal but opposite momentum than that of the ball so the total is equal to zero. When you throw the ball, you begin spinning around your center of mass with angular momentum that is equal to but opposite to the ball, which is flying along a straight path. The ball still has angular momentum, even though it is moving linearly. This is the equal but opposite angular momentum of the ball.


The same goes for the case of Bonds car. Initially neither the car was rotating, nor the seat flying, and therefore the system had zero momentum; which must be conserved. After the seat is fired it moves away from where it was propelled with a constant speed and momentum, just like the ball. The car on the other hand certainty had some help from the effects department, as in the movie it launched itself into the air and spun. To launch the car into the air there would have to be a force up on the car that is not applying a torque on it.

Setting these supports aside would leave the car looking something like this, not to mention that it had just been sliding on its roof.


Assuming that Bond drove an unmodified Vanquish, with these dimensions, fitted with a Sparco racing seat, we can approximately find where the seat was located, assuming the center console is about one foot wide.

Now with the location of the ejection seat and angular inertia of the car, watching the video again shows the car completing its flip from roof to wheels in about one second.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0WqjxGeXpk
*Note, width is approximated to 2 meters and seat position is approximated to 1.4m

The seat ends up traveling near mach 2, which is about 1522 mph, versus the seat’s actual speed of 1400 mph. Let’s compare this speed:

Comparison Speed Chart.png
* http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1000+m/s

Bond’s seat is a better weapon to use against other spies, rather than a method of safe exit from his car!

While the seat’s ejection system probably isn’t this powerful to flip the car on its own, it’s more important if Bond will survive the flip. The worst that could happen to him would be experiencing a lethal centripetal acceleration.

During the flip Bond would feel some effect of the flip because of the centripetal acceleration, only experiencing about a 3.8 meters/second squared acceleration due to earth at near the top of his loop. Overall, Bond would most likely go through the flip unharmed, only feeling a bit lighter at the top of his spin, only if his engineers could find a seat this powerful.

Bond may not be able to flip his car with the ejection seat, but neither can astronauts play sports.

Sources:

Human Center of Mass-
http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/exss323/CM_Lab/Center of Mass.htm
Momentum Information-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_momentum#Conservation
Car Flip Scene-
[video not available]
Vanquish Video-
[video not available]
Vanquish in a rollover-
http://db2.stb.s-msn.com/i/A5/10419A675EA3F0669BF95966817248.jpg
Vanquish Specs.-
http://www.cars-data.com/en/aston-martin-v12-vanquish-specs/994
Racing Seat Specs.-
http://www.sparcousa.com/product/r100
Ejection Seats-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ejection_seat
More Seat Stats.-
http://www.racing-seats-usa.com/853.html
Weight Distribution-
http://www.autoweek.com/article/20131014/carnews/131019922
https://sites.google.com/a/csd99.org/dgsapphysicsc/home/what-if/james-bound-car-flip

CommanderRoss

It's a sequence I never liked anyway. What a way to spoil an ice-ballet between a Jag and Aston.

Thunderfinger

It was a cool scene.

RichardTheBruce

Ejector seat round-up of scenes.

GF

GE

TND

DAD

SF

[Threatened only.]

SP

Honorable mention.

Cannonball Run, Hal Needham, 1981.

RichardTheBruce

ALBERT BROCCOLI DIES
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1996/06/29/albert-broccoli-dies/4e316055-7765-4593-951e-509ac55cb3dc/?utm_term=.63a2de24fc93

Albert R. "Cubby" Broccoli, 87, producer of all but one of the 17 James Bond films, which have entertained audiences for more than three decades, died June 27 at his home here. He had a heart ailment.

The James Bond series, which had its roots in the Ian Fleming novels about suave British Secret Service agent 007, has been called the most successful and longest-running movie series ever.

Mr. Broccoli produced a series that blended rousing adventure, none-too-graphic sex, luxurious and exotic backgrounds, unbelievable weapons and other gadgetry, and an almost trademark tongue-in-cheek wit. Although the actor playing Bond has changed several times, and all of Fleming's novels have long since been filmed, the series continues to this day, nearly as popular as ever.

Mr. Broccoli and his co-producer, Harry Saltzman, who died in 1994, launched Bond upon the film world in 1962 with "Dr. No," which was based on Fleming's novel by the same name. Rumor has it that Mr. Broccoli's wife, looking at audition films, saw the then-unknown Sean Connery on the screen and said, "Take that one! He's gorgeous!"

The film made Connery a major star, and he continued as Bond in other memorable films, including "From Russia With Love," "Goldfinger," "Thunderball," "You Only Live Twice" and "Diamonds Are Forever." Other Bond films, with other actors as Bond, included "On Her Majesty's Secret Service," "Live and Let Die," "The Man With the Golden Gun," "The Spy Who Loved Me," "Moonraker," "A View to a Kill" and "The Living Daylights."

Mr. Broccoli and Saltzman parted ways in 1976, and Mr. Broccoli maintained the rights to produce the Bond series. The films that followed included "For Your Eyes Only," "Octopussy" and "License to Kill." His most recent, released in 1995, was "Goldeneye," starring Pierce Brosnan in his debut as the British agent with the "license to kill."

The movie adventures of the dashing and suave British agent have brought in more than $1 billion at the box office. Over the years, in addition to Connery and Brosnan, other "Bonds" have included Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton and George Lazenby.

Connery's last turn as Bond, after a 12-year hiatus, was in "Never Say Never Again" in 1983. It was the only Bond movie not produced by Mr. Broccoli. It was reported at the time that Connery enraged the producer with the independently produced comeback after Roger Moore had replaced him as the official 007.

The show will go on. Mr. Broccoli's daughter and stepson, who produced "Goldeneye" with him, have started work on the next Bond film, which is due out next year and also will star Brosnan.

In addition to the Bond pictures, Mr. Broccoli's film credits included "Fire Down Below," "No Time to Die," "The Trials of Oscar Wilde," "Johnny Nobody" and, in 1968, "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang," based on an Ian Fleming children's story.

Mr. Broccoli, who was born in New York, was an agronomist before entering the film business. Agronomy was in the family: Forebears in Italy invented the vegetable that bears their name by crossing Italian rabe with cauliflower.

In 1938, he became an assistant director with 20th Century-Fox. In the early 1950s, he moved to England, where he founded Warwick Pictures with Irving Allen. His first film as a producer came in 1953, "Red Beret," starring Alan Ladd. The movie was released in the United States as "Paratrooper."

In 1982, Mr. Broccoli received the prestigious Irving G. Thalberg Award for career achievement, presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at the Academy Awards ceremonies. The other recipients of the Thalberg had been Sir Alfred Hitchcock, Cecil B. De Mille and Walt Disney. He also had been named a commander of arts and letters by France, and he received the Order of the British Empire in 1987.

Mr. Broccoli and his wife, Dana, lived for 27 years in England, where he made many of his movies at Pinewood Studios. He returned to Southern California in his later years.

CHARLES R. ARMENTROUT - Public Relations Executive

RichardTheBruce

Humanities 2019, 8(2), 62; https://doi.org/10.3390/h8020062
Article

James Bond’s Biopolitics

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/8/2/62/htm
Wieland Schwanebeck
Institute for English and American Studies, TU Dresden, 01062 Dresden, Germany
Received: 22 February 2019 / Accepted: 22 March 2019 / Published: 27 March 2019
Full Text https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/8/2/62/htm
PDF https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/8/2/62/pdf

Abstract: This chapter traces Foucauldian technologies of power in the James Bond universe and characterises the Bond franchise’s biopolitics in the cultural environment of the 1960s and 1970s, when 007 became a mass phenomenon. The majority of the chapter is dedicated to a case study of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Ian Fleming’s tenth Bond novel (1963) and the sixth film in the EON series (1969). The chapter highlights the intersection between reproduction and fertility on the one hand and the infliction of death and mass genocide on the other, and it examines how James Bond juxtaposes the disciplinary means that are directed against the body (as an organism) on the one hand, and the state-powered regulation of biological processes that control the population on the other. The two versions of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service amount to the franchise’s most straightforward foray into the realm of biopolitics and would pave the way for the franchise’s subsequent biopolitical and eugenic moments, like when the figure of the genocidal villain gets to articulate the franchise’s own subliminal agenda regarding population control and the future of the (British) species.

Keywords: James Bond; Michel Foucault; biopolitics; thanatopolitics; sexual revolution; contraception; genocide; On Her Majesty’s Secret Service; Moonraker

1. Introduction

Biopolitics is and always has been a rather ambivalent term, for it encapsulates the facilitation and management of life and health on the one hand, and the inhumane and racist politics of exclusion, eugenics, and sterilization on the other (Lemke 2007, p. 9). In a series of lectures at the Collège de France in March of 1976, Michel Foucault historicized the political functionalisation of ideas of life and death and the 19th-century’s development of “what might be called power’s hold over life,” as well as the process of “[how] the biological came under State control” (Foucault [1975] 2004, p. 239). Biopolitics, in its original formulation, thus accounts for how individual life became integrated “into the techniques and strategies of a political power bent on optimising the productive forces of life itself” (Heron 2011, p. 36). The exact dating of this process remains a point of contention between Foucault and Giorgio Agamben,1 but in Foucault’s argument, the second half of the 18th century sees the emergence of new technologies of power which are directed at man-as-species, that is: at birth, death, and illness, “something that is no longer an anatomo-politics of the human body” but “a ‘biopolitics’ of the human race” (Foucault [1975] 2004, p. 243). From this moment on, sovereignty no longer just exercises the right to kill, but “the right to make live and to let die” (ibid., p. 241, my emphasis).

Foucault probably meant no conscious reference to the world of James Bond here, though the big-screen adaptation of Ian Fleming’s second Bond novel, Live and Let Die (1954), was still quite fresh (1973) when Foucault delivered his lecture.2 While he never addresses Bond in any of his writings—in fact, he often remains notoriously reluctant to move beyond his immediate jurisdiction, the 19th century—, he may have been all too aware that the idea of the hyper-virile secret service man with a ‘license to kill’ embodies in a somewhat bizarre and perverted fashion many of the ideas he addresses in his reflections on disciplinary power.3 Needless to say, the Bond franchise has always been rich in various other Foucauldian themes, like madness and sexuality.

It is the aim of this chapter to trace some of the Foucauldian technologies of power in the James Bond universe and to characterize Bond’s own take on biopolitics in the cultural environment of the 1960s and 1970s, which is when 007 became a mass phenomenon, drawing upon the case of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Fleming’s tenth Bond novel (1963) and the sixth film in the EON series (1969).4 My main point of debate will be the intersection between reproduction and fertility on the one hand and the infliction of death and mass genocide on the other, and how Bond juxtaposes the two series of mechanisms that Foucault characterizes as crucial to modern biopolitics: the disciplinary means that are directed against the body (as an organism) on the one hand, and the state-powered regulation of biological processes that control the population on the other (see Foucault [1975] 2004, p. 250). Having briefly contextualized my Foucauldian interest in Bond, I shall read the two versions of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service as the franchise’s most straightforward foray into the realm of biopolitics against the background of the 1960s. Moreover, I will discuss how this evolves into the formulation of a biopolitical and eugenic programme; one that rather perversely uses the figure of the genocidal villain to articulate the series’ own subliminal agenda regarding population control and the future of the (British) species. This agenda largely consists in a surface renunciation of mad eugenics (as embodied by the Bond villains and their world-domination schemes), paired with a clandestine articulation of sympathy for this kind of eugenic policy. This constellation makes the Bond films rife with contradictions, and it may have contributed to their ambiguous reputation: they are clearly very contemporary films that are utterly appropriate to the post-war spirit of sexual libertinage, but at the same time, they remain committed to 19th-century notions of imperialism, hegemonic whiteness, and eugenics.

2. A Foucauldian Take on 007

Given how pronounced and regularly several Foucauldian themes occur in the world of James Bond, it appears rather striking how little critical work in that direction has been done so far. Aside from some readings that apply the concept of heterotopia to 007’s geopolitics, for instance (see Drügh and Mergenthaler 2005), or some discussions of how Bond is an agent of ‘discipline and punishment,’ most of the existing Bond criticism has gone down the path of de-historicising the character. In doing so, scholars follow the early semiotic and structuralist invitation of critics like Umberto Eco, who emphasized that Bond was a phenomenon worth studying for its binary set-up and predetermined plotting alone, and that the character was all formalism and zero psychology (Eco [1966] 1992, p. 159). This approach went so far as to excuse Bond’s misogyny, his anti-Semitism, and his racism, as part of an indispensable Manichean ideology that exists “purely for rhetorical purposes”; in Eco’s famous words, Fleming is “Manichean for operative reasons” (ibid., pp. 167–68).
Yet it is worth remembering that Bond, as a belated proponent of Victorian imperialism, as the owner of a ‘license to kill’ and as the personification of neo-colonial delusions of grandeur, amounts not just to a “blunt instrument” designated to ‘discipline and punish’, he also embodies the key dilemma at the heart of modern biopolitics: sovereignty’s struggles to remain powerful in an age of dying sovereignty. In Foucault’s account, sovereignty reacts by resorting to the xenophobic degradation of other ethnicities. Systematic racism thus establishes “a biological type caesura” and serves as “the precondition for exercising the right to kill” (Foucault [1975] 2004, pp. 255–56), and nowhere could this be more evident than in the Bond franchise, with its glorification of “a state-sanctioned assassin” (Tedesco 2006, p. 114) who is also a jingoist.

Moreover, Bond is not just a product of post-war popular culture, consumerism, and the Americanisation of Europe. He is all that, of course, but the cultural and political wars he fights are informed by the same processes that also inform Foucault’s and Agamben’s theorisation of biopolitics: the long 19th century, the rise of eugenics, and the state-sponsored enforcement of sterilization and genocide in 1930s and 1940s fascism, all of which are grounded in the 19th century’s preoccupation with hereditary greatness and the dream of building an empire to outshine and outlive the competition. These themes are constantly mapped onto the life-and-death politics of the James Bond series, nowhere more so than in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

3. “Total Infertility, in Plants and Animals!”

Even though On Her Majesty’s Secret Service provides a template for later Bond films in a number of important ways, it is widely considered an anomaly in the series in a manner that is rather illuminating for my discussion. First of all, it is widely considered the most ‘faithful’ adaptation of a James Bond novel and thus constantly invoked as a major landmark in Bond’s adaptation history, grounded as it is by the figure of Ian Fleming, the author, as the omniscient creator and stern patriarch of the franchise. Whenever the series gets ‘out of hand’ like an undisciplined child, it gets ‘grounded’ again with a reference to Fleming’s father figure (see Schwanebeck 2018, p. 167); crucially, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) offers some real emotional stakes but comparatively few major action sequences. The film is also the first one to come to terms with questions of reproduction both on the level of the plot and that of the film’s production. The story sees Bond get married and ponder the question of his inheritance, while the exit of Sean Connery in the role of Bond prior to the start of production led to a re-casting and made it necessary to address the question whether Bond had a fertile future beyond the 1960s and beyond his ‘original’ embodiment—George Lazenby famously retired from the role because he believed Bond would inevitably go out of fashion in the 1970s. In cinematic terms, the film enjoys a stellar reputation as “the revolutionary James Bond film” (Castle 2004); for some, it is the one James Bond film it is okay to like even if you are not a fan of the series. In the words of Steven Soderbergh (2013), the film is “beautiful in a way none of the other Bond films are,” blending elements of the French New Wave and classic Eisenstein montage in a way that makes it a product of the culture industry that is rather unique at the same time.

The publication of the novel and the release of the film, six years later, frame an interesting time period. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was the first novel that Fleming wrote with the film franchise being under way. The EON series would eventually eclipse the fame of his books and, at the same time, radically re-interpret and re-contextualise them, adjusting the character to a changed cultural environment. Fleming’s hero, it is worth remembering, comes into being in 1953, and he is a Cold Warrior whose missions revolve around the rivalry between the Capitalist West and the Communist East.5 In the books, Bond rarely saves the world but often the integrity and face of the British and Western body politic. The films, by contrast, transgress Fleming’s Cold War dichotomies and see Bond go after self-fashioned, private entrepreneurs and megalomaniacs like Auric Goldfinger, plutocrats who pursue their own mad agenda. In terms of the sex, there is little in Fleming’s novels to indicate the on-set of 1960s Playboy, free-love permissiveness. In the books, sex arises out of the same binary logic that the structuralists found so intriguing about 007: women yield to Bond because this defines their supplementary function, while Bond seduces them because his dominance over them makes him a man. Fleming’s Bond enjoys very little, he ‘consummates’ women almost reluctantly, and often despises them all the more for it. In Moonraker (1955), Bond’s routine is described as “making love, with rather cold passion, to one of three similarly disposed married women” (Fleming [1955] 2012, p. 11). It is important to outline this set-up because, while the two versions of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service might be ticking the same boxes in terms of the plot, to call them identical would be akin to saying that, in Jorge Luis Borges’s famous story, Pierre Menard’s version of Don Quixote is identical to the Don Quixote of Cervantes. Quite on the contrary, ‘reproducing’ the property in a changed cultural environment means it becomes a different text, or, in Borges’s words, “a kind of palimpsest, in which the traces—faint but not undecipherable—of our friend’s ‘previous’ text must shine through” (Borges [1939] 1998, p. 42).

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is the second volume of the so-called SPECTRE trilogy and sees Bond go after his nemesis, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, head of the supranational terrorist network SPECTRE. Bond tracks down Blofeld in the Swiss Alps, where he resides under the name of Bleuville and attempts to prove that he is a descendant of old French and Polish aristocracy. Bond sneaks into Blofeld’s snow palace by pretending to be a genealogist and soon investigates his opponent’s family line and heraldry.6 Blofeld emerges as the sum of all clichés about blue-blooded degeneracy: his ears stick out from his head (Fleming [1963] 2015, p. 414), his nose has been eaten away by syphilis (p. 414), and as a marker of ‘pure-blooded’ family heritage in the vein of the Habsburg lip, the Bleuvilles have no ear-lobes (pp. 371–72)—a characteristic that echoes with Cesare Lombroso’s famous claims about the visible degeneracy of the criminal. The appearance of Blofeld and that of his female helper, Irma Bunt, illustrates that aristocratic inbreeding has no future without the import of fresh blood, and the Nazi tropes could hardly be more pronounced in the book, with Blofeld’s minions “click[ing] [their] heels” (p. 461), and infertile, stern Irma Bunt acting as Eva Braun to Blofeld’s impotent Hitler (German-speakers will detect a pun here), a bizarre and distorted mirror image of the ideas of master race and eugenic cleansing that Blofeld preaches in his mad monologues.

It is in Blofeld’s lair, a luxurious clinic located at the Piz Gloria, that Bond uncovers SPECTRE’s latest scheme: to target Great Britain with biological warfare by brainwashing and re-programming ten young women who will transport biological weapons back home, thus poisoning the country’s crops, poultry and animals, making Great Britain bankrupt. When Bond encounters the unsuspecting young women who are under Blofeld’s hypnotic spell, he is overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of these astonishingly healthy “country girls” (p. 449). They seem to embody rustic country virtues, feeding on a diet of meat and potatoes and showing a rather bizarre interest in all matters agricultural and “how to improve the crop” (p. 439), which resonates with the underlying implication that they are well-bred signifiers of British greatness and genetic, as well as economic, self-sufficiency.

The film version, by contrast, does not go for the satirical and over-the-top image of peasant girls with “splendid, sweatered young bosoms” (Fleming [1963] 2015, p. 397), whose hair “smells of new-mown summer grass” (p. 443) and who are brainwashed into poisoning the countryside. Instead, the viewer is treated to a gallery of international starlets who are framed through the male gaze, not so much a celebration of female diversity among the nation than a concession to contemporary Playboy aesthetics (Figure 1); to show that he is ‘with the times,’ Bond even reads a copy of Playboy in another scene.

All that is left of Fleming’s “beautiful ogresses” who devour huge steaks (p. 405) is the character of Ruby Bartlett, who flirts with Bond while eating a chicken wing, in a sequence that clearly looks to the erotic dinner scene in Tony Richardson’s adaptation of Tom Jones (1963). While the novel is rather detailed on the nature of Blofeld’s plan, going so far as to introduce an expert from the Ministry of Agriculture and Fishing to add much-needed explanations, it is for the film to spell out that what is at stake here is not so much British plant- and wild-life but the future of the human species. Blofeld threatens

total infertility, in plants and animals. Not just disease in a few herds, Mr. Bond. Or the loss of a single crop. But the destruction of a whole strain. Forever! Throughout an entire continent. If my demands are not met, I shall proceed with the systematic extinction of whole species of cereals and livestock all over the world!

Fleming’s own follow-up novel, You Only Live Twice (1964), has Blofeld explain in retrospect that his plan was targeted against the body politic of England, “a sick nation by any standards” (p. 794), and that it might have healed as a result of the culling.7 In either version of the material, Blofeld’s weapon of choice is the female body, which is recruited and symbolically inseminated with poison, to put a spin on the theme of reproduction. The British Secret Service later surmises that one of the girls whom Blofeld promises to cure from her allergy against turkeys returned from Piz Gloria “inspired to improve the breed” (Fleming [1963] 2015, p. 526), though what breed is left tantalisingly open. Fleming’s novel frames this ambiguity by frequently resorting to animal metaphors: while Bond arguably roams among the nation’s most fertile hens, from his perspective, Blofeld is “the fox” (p. 540) who plunders the chicken-house of Great Britain. This makes Britain’s finest girls, simply referred to as “[t]he birds” in one encoded message (p. 541), the nation’s egg-producing hens to whom Blofeld promises that they “will be able to improve the breed of chickens all over England. […] Thousands, millions of chickens made happier because of you.” (p. 446)8 You Only Live Twice, which concludes the Blofeld storyline, follows up on this joke by having Bond admit to Tanner that “I was all set to go into chicken farming” (p. 617), and given the constant presence of this image, it is tempting to add the Derridean wolf figure into the mix, “the beast under the features of the sovereign” (Derrida 2009, p. 18). The metaphor resonates both with Blofeld’s greedy ways, as well as with the figure of Bond’s wolf-whistling, ‘chick’-devouring sexual predator.

The chicken/egg analogy carried an additional weight in the cultural context of the late 1960s, with the baby-boomer years coming to an end. Since 1965, or approximately the time that the Bond films had turned into a global box-office phenomenon, the large-scale implementation of oral and intrauterine contraceptives meant that the birth rate in Britain and in other European countries was in free fall and that, to stick to the metaphor, more eggs than ever before remained unfertilised.9 The birth rate reached its lowest point in the second half of the 1970s, around the same time as when Foucault gave his lectures on biopolitics and when the Bond franchise began to think about global annihilation and breeding again. The success story of Bond’s Playboy-inspired sexual hedonism famously coincides with the first licensing of the Pill in the UK, an event that brings together the two axes that Foucault identifies as the crucial backbone to the politicization of sex: the disciplining regimes of the body and the regulation of populations (Foucault 1978, p. 145). While neither contraception nor eugenics was ever fully regulated top-down on the level of the state in Great Britain, they are arguably bound up with matters of state policy and legislation. Chikako Takeshita, in her biopolitical analysis of women’s bodies and contraception, demonstrates how contraception amounts to “a disciplinary technology [that] simultaneously liberates women while it subjects them to a biopolitical intervention,” and nowhere could this be more evident than in the post-war climate of the 1950s and 1960s, with debates on overpopulation and the First World’s attempts to regulate the fertility of the Global South (Takeshita 2011, p. 27). The year after the release of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, there were congressional hearings in the United States about potential health hazards of the Pill, and in a letter addressed to his colleagues, Senator Bob Dole famously proclaimed that the Pill was not to be underestimated as an “important weapon in the struggle to achieve some control over our ability to multiply ourselves into chaos” (qtd. in Takeshita 2011, p. 40). This attitude would subsequently be adopted as state doctrine to grant contraceptives “the role of the agent of bio-power” (ibid., p. 70), particularly in those Asian countries that resorted to one-child policies.

The development and testing of contraceptive devices is tied up with a number of “colonialist intervention” and Western imperialism (ibid., p. 40), including large-scale testing in economically weak areas like Puerto Rico, often with disastrous effects on the population’s health.10 This kind of experimentation follows in the spirit of 19th-century eugenics, where the idea of population control arose from observations on the reproductive rate amongst the allegedly ‘undesirables.’ As a result, the “number of children born became a matter of public interest” (von Rosenberg 2012, p. 97). Foucault indicates as much in The History of Sexuality when he argues that Francis Galton’s early eugenic work arose from attempts to pinpoint the hereditary qualities of British greatness. He also suggests that the age of eugenics turned “reproductive sexuality into a concern of the state” (Mottier 2012, p. 148) and pathologised female bodies in order to ensure their reproductive function. To Foucault, birth control is located at the very “juncture of the ‘body’ and the ‘population,’” in that it makes sex “a crucial target of a power organized around the management of life rather than the menace of death” (Foucault 1978, p. 147).

The full-scale implementation of population control at the state level is later taken up in more detail by Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacer (1995), where he addresses the biopolitical policies of the National Socialist State and how biopolitics turns into “thanatopolitics” (Agamben [1995] 1998, p. 142). Agamben thus adds to the argument of Foucault, who never delivers on his promise to fully explore the eugenic state, birth control, or how there is a gendered dimension to these policies (see Mottier 2012, p. 154). However, his insightful discussion of how the “eugenic ordering of society” goes together with an “exaltation of a superior blood” remains integral to the field of biopolitics and, I would argue, to any in-depth account of Bond (Foucault 1978, pp. 150–51).

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (and most other Bond films and novels, for that matter) tip-toes around the problem a bit, drawing attention to the eugenic angle but never spelling out the reproductive and biopolitical dimension of Bond’s sexual libertinage. The only exception is the credits scene, which formulates the question of whether or not Bond has a future beyond his past hedonism. The credits use the motif of the hourglass to emblematise the passing of time, and they also set up On Her Majesty’s Secret Service as one of the most self-referential Bond films, one that frequently echoes the most iconic moments of the first five films, in an effort to provide continuity between Sean Connery and George Lazenby’s tenure. The overall effect goes far beyond a celebration of the Bond archive, though. As the silhouette of a man (presumably Bond himself) clinging to the moving hands of a clock-face is juxtaposed with images of the ‘sands of time,’ the sequence implicitly suggests that Bond is fighting his biological clock and reflecting on his past, with each hourglass representing the memory of previous conquests, in chronological order. Tellingly, the sequence starts and concludes with multiple silhouettes of a sexually alluring version of Britannia, and it invokes the spirit of ‘Rule, Britannia!’ on the levels of music and iconography,11 as though it were trying to advertise a more (re-)productive form of sexuality, to serve the cause of the Empire (Figure 2).

Things get a little more explicit in Fleming’s story, "Quantum of Solace" (1960), where Bond’s fear of getting his mistresses pregnant is actually spelled out. Bond claims that “beautiful Negresses […] don’t know anything about birth control” (Fleming [1960] 2006, p. 83), which resonates with a number of racist arguments regarding the overly fertile Third World. The same point is borne out much more frequently and crudely whenever Bond turns his ‘license to kill’ against hordes of faceless, identical-looking minions of different ethnicities whom the films consider disposable and thus tend to execute on a mass scale; look no further than Goldfinger’s Asian henchmen (Goldfinger 1964) or the troops in Blofeld’s lair (You Only Live Twice 1967).

If Bond’s function as a biopolitical agent of imperialism is to exercise small-scale genocide like this—which, interestingly, aligns him very much with his opponents—then On Her Majesty’s Secret Service also asks the question of whether Bond is capable of any positive eugenics, highlighting the fact that procreation is an integral part of stately biopolitics (see Lee 2013, p. 1). Bond’s magnetic sexuality arguably is a political weapon to that end, “a normative and essentialist measure of nationhood” (Bold 2009, p. 216) that frequently manages to convert deviant ethnicities and sexualities to the ‘good cause’ of the West. This entails “compulsory heterosexual[ity],” the possibility of reproduction, and a re-conversion of women to serve the (British) body politic (ibid., p. 209), most notoriously so in the case of Goldfinger’s Pussy Galore, a woman whom 007 ‘saves’ from lesbianism and from villainy by injecting her with his seed (see Fleming [1959] 2012, pp. 371–72). Similar healing powers are attributed to Bond’s lovemaking in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, when a post-coital Bond happily notes that “the cure [for Tracy] had really begun” (p. 358).

Usually, children play no major role in the Bond films, not even as the stereotypical signifiers of innocence in dire need of protection, as it is customary in the American superhero tradition. In fact, Bond himself occasionally disposes of children as unwanted intruders, most evidently so in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), which features actual children (the boy whom Bond pushes out of his boat when he no longer needs his help), symbolic ones (the film’s various incarnations of the infantilised Other), and distorted ones like Nick Nack: Scaramanga’s dwarfish henchman intrudes on Bond’s lovemaking with Mary Goodnight like an unruly child in a version of the Freudian primal scene.

The film version of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service retains the marriage plot, yet crucially, it opts to forego the topic of children altogether. Some implicit acknowledgement of the topic of children remains in the film (when Bond and Tracy reunite just before Christmas and seek refuge in a stable, the scene has clear overtones of the Nativity story), but explicit references are omitted. This extends to the backstory of Bond’s fiancée. In the film version, Tracy is a young widow whose ‘troubled personality’ is blamed on a lack of parental guidance. In the novel, however, her trauma stems from the death of a young daughter. The fact that Bond and Tracy make plans for the future turns Tracy’s death into a two-fold tragedy in biopolitical terms. Jacques Derrida’s seminar on The Death Penalty (Derrida [2000] 2014) contains some musings on Victor Hugo’s abolitionist writings, particularly those chapters in which Hugo argues against the death penalty against women as “a double infraction of the ‘right of life’”: each execution kills not just a woman, but also her potential children (Deutscher 2017, p. 34).12

The fact that Blofeld threatens the reproductive system of the Empire makes the climactic fight at the Piz Gloria a symbolic battle over Britain’s future, and one with a symmetrical outcome: Bond torpedoes Blofeld’s plan to control the future of Britain from the top, while Blofeld kills Bond’s wife Tracy and thus extinguishes Bond’s family tree. Ironically, Bond fathers a child in the next novel, You Only Live Twice, but amnesia prevents him from ever learning about this. This, too, is never taken up in the film version, possibly because the notion of reproduction would introduce epic and serialised elements into a franchise that made a habit of going back to the status quo. Moreover, the franchise is content to understand reproduction in one sense only: as the cloning (or re-casting) of its lead actor at regular intervals, a process tentatively started with On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the first film of the EON series that saw a new actor take over the role of 007 (see Schwanebeck 2018, p. 171).

Figure 1. Blofeld’s biopolitical weapons (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service).

Figure 2. The sands of time and the spirit of ‘Rule, Britannia!’ (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service).

RichardTheBruce

4. Megalomania and Eugenics.

James Bond’s biopolitics are always mapped against the backdrop of imperialism and 007’s various encounters with the colonial Other. Sometimes, he comes up against what Véronique Mottier refers to as an “internal other” in the context of eugenic politics: physically disabled or allegedly ‘anti-social’ and ‘morally defective’ individuals (Mottier 2012, p. 153). In the world of Bond, these are usually the villains. The punchline is that these disabled and deficient rogues are also the ones that voice the most fanatic biopolitical agenda, spelling out and perverting rather than outright negating what is essentially the imperial eugenic mission that Bond himself serves, too, when he is, quite literally, ‘on her Majesty’s secret service.’ This aspect is highlighted in the increasingly outlandish plots of subsequent Bond films of the 1970s, which only bear the vaguest of links to Ian Fleming’s source novels and often just retain their titles and the names of a few characters. With their global annihilation plots and transnational megalomaniacs, they continue to riff upon the themes of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but with more and more subliminal indicators that the villain’s eugenic threat is not opposed to but rather, in a highly over-the-top fashion, in line with the imperial ideology as propagated by Bond himself, the ultimate agent of imperialism.

This is especially true of The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Moonraker (1979), two films that are virtual carbon copies of each other, even by the standards of a franchise that was—and remains—fully committed to delivering more of the same. Their two villains, Carl Stromberg and Hugo Drax, are private entrepreneurs who aim for no less than a global genocide in order to look for a better and more resilient form of zoē elsewhere: Stromberg in the life aquatic, Drax in outer space. Of the two, Drax is the most biopolitically committed Bond villain since Blofeld, and firmly located at the intersection of the old and new forms of sovereignty: routinely dispensing death while also employing ‘bio-power’ in order to control human life. Drax wants to destroy life on earth in order to repopulate the planet anew by way of a Noah’s ark-scheme on a space station. For this purpose, he selects specimens whom he appears to match by ethnicity and common features like physical build and hair colour. As Bond gains entry to the villain’s lair, he initially appears to be stuck somewhere between the Roman priestesses of Vesta and the Garden of Eden, which makes it fitting that he must fight a snake before he is admitted into this Elysium.

Like most Bond villains, Drax is rather sensitive about his “lack of pedigree and breeding” (Taylor 2011, p. 55), and he appears happy to act the part of the asexual and abstinent sovereign who, in outright Foucauldian fashion, merely supervises the corporeal modes of behaviour, putting forth his ‘power-knowledge’ by way of a radical intervention (Foucault [1975] 2004, 251f.). He formulates his creed thus:

Here, in the untainted cradle of the heavens will be created a new super-race, a race of perfect physical specimens. You [the subjects] have been selected as its progenitors—like gods. Your offspring will return to Earth and shape it in their image. […] Your seed, like yourselves, will pay deference to the ultimate dynasty which I alone have created.

Drax’s monologue amounts to the franchise’s most straightforward approximation of Nazism, at least up until A View to a Kill (1985), where Bond is pitted against Max Zorin, “the Frankenstein-like sociopathic, hyper-intelligent result of a former Nazi scientist’s genetic experiments” (Schwanebeck 2016, p. 517). Blofeld still was an entrepreneur who aimed for blackmail and whose biopower was thus not yet a means to an end. By contrast, Drax’s vision of the future is not framed by economic prospects but by complete “control over the biological, of procreation and of heredity” (Foucault [1975] 2004, p. 259). The structural set-up of the film dictates that Bond must foil the scheme and kill Drax, but make no mistake: his own biopolitics are not that far removed from what Drax is planning.

As Bond sneaks upon the ark that carries the progenitors of Drax’s future master race, all of whom are clad in white garments, the ethnic diversity amongst the genetic elite appears no less committed to hegemonic whiteness than Bond’s own, 19th-century informed vision of colonial imperialism (Figure 3). There are Asian and Black women in Drax’s lair, but they are not aboard the spaceship later seen in the film, which might indicate that the repopulation scheme entails segregation. The fact that the passengers begin to mate while still travelling towards their destination finds a match in Bond’s customary reward once the mission is completed: the readily available (white) Bond girl who is consummated right after the showdown, while they are still traversing the orbit in zero gravity. This kind of imperial fornication is the exclusive domain of the Übermensch, similar to what Drax has in mind for the new master race—a troubling proposition that hints at the fundamentally problematic biopolitical subtext of the Bond franchise. Needless to say, Bond’s implied reluctance to father children is a given, particularly with the name of the Bond girl (Holly Goodhead) signalling that she specialises in nonreproductive oral sex. His reproductive capacity as a man is never called upon, quite unlike his longevity as a franchise that undergoes renewal at certain intervals.

Fittingly, the Blofeld/SPECTRE plot was to be concluded in the next Bond film, in a scene with even cruder eugenic overtones. The pre-title sequence of For Your Eyes Only (1981) harks back to the Blofeld/Tracy plot of the 1969 film, as Bond lays some flowers on his wife’s grave, only to be abducted by a wheelchair-bound Blofeld. Following some spectacular stunt work aboard a remote-controlled helicopter (directed by John Glen, who had served as editor and second-unit director on both On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and Moonraker), Bond kills his nemesis, seemingly oblivious to the troubling implications of the scene. As Blofeld (now speaking with a pronounced accent that he never had before in the series) bargains for his life, he offers to buy Bond “a delicatessen”, a type of store that is historically linked to Jewish migrants, only for 007 to dispose of the disabled man in an industrial chimney, the eternally youthful superman extinguishing the series’ embodiment of ‘life unworthy of being lived’ in a manner that triggers historic associations with the Holocaust.

Figure 3. The future master race boards Drax’s ark (Moonraker).

5. Conclusions

Even though some critics of the concept of biopolitics argue that biology, by definition, exceeds the grasp of politics (Lemke 2007, p. 10), it has become clear that the two are firmly linked and cannot be conceptualised without each other in the world of James Bond, where traditional biopolitics are always supplemented by thanatopolitics. In fact, any “government of procreation” arguably carries a thanatopolitical dimension: the abortion debate is constantly aligned with the debate around the death penalty (see Deutscher 2017, p. 7), just as Bond’s sexual politics must be viewed in the context of his routine dispensation of ‘death penalties.’ The fact that Bond frequently ends up killing no fewer people than the actual villain strongly hints at their mutual interdependence. Even though 007 is tasked with killing his mad antagonists, they tend to come across as the only kindred spirits available to him, particularly in those Bond films—GoldenEye (1995), Skyfall (2012), and Spectre (2015) come to mind—where the antagonist is a fraternal character and/or Bond’s mirror image. The last two examples indicate that the overall coordinates have not changed in the James Bond universe, and while the series has made a number of concessions to changing tastes and geopolitics, it remains committed to hegemonic whiteness and the biopolitical programme that I have traced throughout this chapter. Some recent analyses of Bond and of spy fiction in general suggest that Bond embodies Agamben’s ‘state of exception,’ inasmuch as the spy “seeks to uphold the rule of law and power” by resorting to actions that are often “considered illegal by the state that he serves,” which makes him a paradoxical agent of sovereign power who simultaneously “undermines the principles of that sovereignty” (Goodman 2016, p. 8). Derrida has reflected at greater length on this ambiguity in The Beast and the Sovereign (2009), arguing “that terror is equally opposed to the state as a challenge as it is exerted by the state as the essential manifestation of its sovereignty” (Derrida 2009, p. 41). By the same token, Bond occasionally resembles Agamben’s ‘dead man walking,’ the homo sacer who “may be killed” and is “yet not sacrificed” (Agamben [1995] 1998, p. 8). All of these readings come with their own biopolitical implications, but it is the Foucauldian perspective that arguably yields the most insight into the themes of reproduction, sexual hedonism, eugenics, and state-sanctioned thanatopolitics. Out of all the Bond stories, it is On Her Majesty’s Secret Service that brings all of these themes together most forcefully, not least because its two versions bracket an important transitional period in history, and also a crucial moment in which Great Britain ponders the future of its fertility and, by implication, that of its body politic. While Bond has always seemed very much a figure of the (cultural) moment (his state-of-the-art technological equipment and other commodities see to that), he does not seem like a very suitable candidate to lead Great Britain into the future. Not only does the character’s constant rejuvenation indicate an agelessness that seems curiously resistant to having a future, Bond’s sexual antics never produce any offspring, and instead of a narrative of character development and maturation, the series has, for the most part, been content to have Bond protect Britain’s status quo. Fleming wrote his first Bond novel in 1953, when Elizabeth II had just ascended to the throne, which means that 007 has always been ‘on Her Majesty’s Secret Service,’ the female monarch being the only woman with whom he has ever been in a meaningful long-term relationship. With the credits promising that Bond will return, and with his own “sovereign right to kill anyone” (Foucault [1975] 2004, p. 60), his ‘license to kill,’ firmly intact, Bond will continue to dispose of the mad sovereigns that overstep their eugenic bounds, even though he may be secretly rather sympathetic to their cause. Let’s not forget that the family motto of the Bonds, as spelled out in both the novel and film of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, has more than a touch of imperial megalomania about it: orbis non sufficit, “The World is not Enough” (Fleming [1963] 2015, p. 363).

Funding

This research received no external funding.

Conflicts of Interest

The author declares no conflict of interest.

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Footnotes

1
Foucault sees this starting with late modernity, whereas for Agamben, late modernity is only about the state making its “bio-political orientation” explicit: “the state has ceased to veil its essentially biopolitical orientation […], a development emblematized by the concentration camp and the politicization of life in debates about issues like abortion and euthanasia.” (Gil 2013, p. 130)
2
In Fleming’s novel, Bond is informed by the CIA that their policy with Mr. Big “is ‘live and let live,’” prompting Bond to respond that his job dictates “another motto. It’s ‘live and let die.’” (Fleming [1954] 2012, pp. 34–35)
3
The somewhat baffling idea of the ‘license to kill’ (which appears to condone killing in self-defense but at the same time to go beyond that) is discussed in greater detail in (Tedesco 2006).
4
EON have been producing the Bond films since 1962. Many filmgoers (as well as a number of scholars) tend to exclude the few existing non-EON Bond films from the discussion. For a more detailed discussion of the status of the ‘non-canonical’ material, see (Schwanebeck 2018, pp. 167–68).
5
At the dawn of the 1960s, the Bond novels took a different turn, though, as Fleming made his hero go after supranational threats like SPECTRE, an organisation that sides with neither the East nor the West.
6
Kingsley Amis is one of the few stern critics of the novel, arguing that “all the heraldry and genealogy” do not contribute much to the plot (Amis 1965, p. 114).
7
The plot of You Only Live Twice drives home the point, as Blofeld creates a ‘suicide garden’ as a public service to dispense of individuals who are tired of life: “a tidy, out-of-the-way charnel-house which relieves them [the Japanese government] of a constant flow of messy occurrences involving the trains, the trams, the volcanoes and other unattractively public means of killing yourself. You must admit that, far from being a crime, this is a public service unique in the history of the world.” (Fleming [1964] 2015, p. 795)
8
This is not where the novel’s animal metaphors end. Irma Bunt calls the Piz Gloria her “little Eagle’s Nest” (Fleming [1963] 2015, p. 427), while Bond’s father-in-law, the gangster Marc-Ange Draco, refers to his Corsican allies as “[g]reat pigs” (p. 542).
9
The pill went on sale throughout Europe in the early 1960s (see Marwick 1998, pp. 394–95).
10
Scientific experimentation in the 1950s routinely targeted disenfranchised groups like African Americans. For the clinical trials of the Pill, Pincus and Rock turned to Puerto Rico, an island that “suffered from overpopulation” and whose “poorly educated population proved ideal for testing whether illiterate women could handle the cyclic regimen” (Watkins 1998, p. 31). In his book Countdown, Alan Weisman reports on the horrific details of the field-testing, with Puerto Rican women receiving high-dosage pills that gave them “nausea, dizziness, headaches, blurred vision, bloating, or vomiting,” as well as strokes (Weisman 2013, p. 69).
11
John Barry’s main theme also has some overtones of Thomas Arne’s famous anthem, “Rule, Britannia!”.
12
Derrida comments in passing on how the ‘right to life’ debate is instrumentalised in debates on abortion and contraception (Derrida [2000] 2014, p. 123). He also sketched an outline for some remarks on Foucault’s bio-power and his own take on the death penalty, yet his notes could not be deciphered after his death (see Bennington et al. 2014, p. xvi).

© 2019 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

CommanderRoss

Quite an interesting read. But why have you crossed out so much of it? Actually one of the first 'scientific' papers that seem to actually research its topic instead of using Bond for a political message.

RichardTheBruce

The Spoiler function is just used to make the text more manageable on screen, it's all available and complete as on the PDF and the link.

It's also of the length that it had to be split between two posts based on the number of characters.

RichardTheBruce

Why James Bond looks so healthy
According to The Telegraph, shaken martinis might be the secret of
Bond's success. In fact, two UK researchers, a psychologist and a
chemist, are collaborating with a French bartender to prove that 'shaken,
not stirred' martinis are different. They'll show the difference on June 4,
2008, during the Cheltenham Science Festival. Unfortunately for readers,
the event is sold out. But read more...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-james-bond-looks-so-healthy/
By Roland Piquepaille for Emerging Tech | May 22, 2008 -- 10:46 GMT (03:46 PDT) |

According to The Telegraph, shaken martinis might be the secret of Bond's success. In fact, two UK researchers, a psychologist and a chemist, are collaborating with a French bartender to prove that 'shaken, not stirred' martinis are different. They'll show the difference on June 4, 2008, during the Cheltenham Science Festival. Unfortunately for readers, the event is sold out. But read more...

So is it really martinis that help James Bond to stay so healthy? You can see on the left a photo of Sean Connery holding a gun and a martini. (Credit: The Kobal Collection, via the British Medical Journal (BMJ)). This is not the first time that researchers are looking at James Bond martinis recipes -- with a scientific twist. Back in 1999, the BMJ published an article about a research project from the University of Western Ontario in Canada.

...BMJ's comment, "Shaken martinis may be more effective antioxidants than stirred ones." "Speculating on why the secret agent James Bond seems so healthy, Trevithick and colleagues tested the antioxidant properties of Bond's favourite drink "shaken, not stirred" martinis. They tested drinks for their ability to deactivate hydrogen peroxide and found that shaken martinis were more effective than stirred martinis and that both were more effective than gin or vermouth alone."

This paper was called "Shaken, not stirred: bioanalytical study of the antioxidant activities of martinis." (Volume 319, Issue 7225, Pages 1600-1602). Here are two links to
the abstract https://www.bmj.com/content/319/7225/1600.abstract and to
the full paper https://www.bmj.com/content/319/7225/1600.abstract (PDF format, 4 pages, 416 KB).
The illustration above has been extracted from this document.

Now, let's come back to 2008 and the new research being done by Charles Spence, a psychologist who is the director of the Crossmodal Research Lab at the University of Oxford, and Dr Andrea Sella, who works in the Department of Chemistry at the University College in London (UCL).

The Telegraph reports what Sella thinks about the 'Shaken, not stirred' (Wikipedia link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaken,_not_stirred) controversy. "Dr Sella believes that shaken martinis are not only healthier, but also taste better. This is due to what experts call 'mouthfeel' -- the shaken martini has more microscopic shards of ice, making its texture more pleasing."

Sella will check if he's right at the Cheltenham Festival on June 4 during the Shaken or stirred? event -- which is sold out.

Sources: Roger Highfield, The Telegraph, UK, May 19, 2008; and various websites

Shaken, not stirred: bioanalytical study of the antioxidant
activities of martinis
https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/319/7225/1600.full.pdf
C C Trevithick, M M Chartrand, J Wahlman, F Rahman, M Hirst, J R Trevithick

Abstract

Background | Moderate consumption of alcoholic drinks seems to reduce the risks of developing cardiovascular disease, stroke, and cataracts, perhaps through antioxidant actions of their alcohol, flavonoid, or polyphenol contents. “Shaken, not stirred” routinely identifies the way the famous secret agent James Bond requires his martinis.
Objectives | As Mr Bond is not afflicted by cataracts or cardiovascular disease, an investigation was conducted to determine whether the mode of preparing martinis has an influence on their antioxidant capacity.
Design | Stirred and shaken martinis were assayed for their ability to quench luminescence by a luminescent procedure in which hydrogen peroxide reacts with luminol bound to albumin. Student's t test was used for statistical analysis.
Results | Shaken martinis were more effective in deactivating hydrogen peroxide than the stirred variety, and both were more effective than gin or vermouth alone (0.072% of peroxide control for shaken martini, 0.157% for stirred v 58.3% for gin and 1.90% for vermouth). The reason for this is not clear, but it may well not involve the facile oxidation of reactive martini components: control martinis through which either oxygen or nitrogen was bubbled did not differ in their ability to deactivate hydrogen peroxide (0.061% v 0.057%) and did not differ from the shaken martini. Moreover, preliminary experiments indicate that martinis are less well endowed with polyphenols than Sauvignon white wine or Scotch whisky (0.056 mmol/l (catechin equivalents) shaken, 0.060 mmol/l stirredv0.592mmol/l wine, 0.575 mmol/l whisky).
Conclusions | 007's profound state of health may be due, at least in part, to compliant bartenders.

Introduction | James Bond, the well known fictional secret agent (“007”) of the British intelligence services, not only is astute in matters of clandestine affairs at a personal and international level but may also possess insights of interest to medical science. Take for example his insistence on having his martini “shaken, not stirred.” Does this straightforward direction to the barman merely yield a crisper drink, more to James Bond's taste, or is there more to it?

Moderate consumption of alcoholic beverages has been associated with a decreased risk of several age related diseases, including cardiovascular disease,12stroke,3and cataract.45 This effect has been tentatively ascribed to the antioxidant activities of alcohol,6 flavonoids, or polyphenols7 in the beverages, since it has been established that the antioxidant vitamin E reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease89 and cataract development.10

Is it martinis that help Bond stay so healthy?

Methods

Mini-martinis were prepared by mixing two parts (vol/vol) gin (6 ml) with one part vermouth (3 ml). They were either shaken vigorously (9 ml in a 100 ml medicine bottle for one minute), or stirred (9 ml in a 20 ml glass vial, using a vortex mixer). Aliquots of the martinis were then added into a luminescent assay11/12 to see if they altered the luminescence resulting from the addition of a standard amount of hydrogen peroxide. In both cases, the addition of the martinis decreased the net luminescence to a small percentage of control values. When we analysed the net luminescence statistically, using the t[/u] test function of Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet program, the luminescence remaining after we added the shaken mixture to the peroxide was virtually half that afforded by the stirred mixture (table 1, P = 0.0057, see page 2 Table 1 https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/319/7225/1600.full.pdf). This indicates that there was twice as much peroxide remaining after treatment with the stirred martinis than after the shaken variety. Thus, shaken martinis are better able to “neutralise” peroxide than stirred martinis.

The normalised luminescent count rate is reduced by the addition of martinis. Counts per minute were obtained with a Lumac Biocounter M2010 (Celsis, Chicago) when hydrogen peroxide was incubated with the luminol bound to albumin, as described below. Samples consisted of an aqueous portion (0.3 ml), and a dimethyl sulphoxide portion (0.4 ml). The aqueous portion contained luminol and albumin (0.02 ml, 10 mg/ml of each) prepared as described,11/12 and phosphate buffered saline (0.11 ml) containing martini (0.07 ml) or distilled water (for control). Hydrogen peroxide (0.1 ml of 1.0%, final concentration 42mmol/l) was added after the addition of dimethylsulphoxide (0.4 ml), just before the tube was placed in the counter to begin counting of the emitted light. We determined the probability that the means of each set of samples are identical by using Student's t test in the Excel program.

We considered that a difference might arise from air oxidation of reactive martini components during the vigorous shaking. This may, however, not be the reason because when, as an alternative to shaking or stirring, we vigorously bubbled air or nitrogen at similar rates through the martinis (for one minute), the two treatments showed no significant difference in net luminescence (table 1, see page 2 Table 1 https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/319/7225/1600.full.pdf). Nevertheless, the martinis bubbled with both air and nitrogen showed net luminescent counts equivalent to the shaken rather than to the stirred martinis.

Results

To ascertain the relative contribution of the gin and vermouth components, both were assayed in a preliminary experiment for their abilities to reduce luminescence produced by the peroxide challenge. Vermouth was much more potent, causing a 98.1% (SE 0.5%)(n = 3) decrease in count rate, while gin reduced the count rate after challenge with peroxide by only 41.7%(14.1%) (n = 36). This implies that the vermouth contributes more to the antioxidant properties of martinis. Even so, the combination of gin and vermouth is better than either gin or vermouth alone, resulting in a much lower net luminescent count rate (0.072% of peroxide control for the shaken martini) than those found after either gin (58.3% of control) or vermouth (1.9% of control) alone. The remaining luminescence with martinis is substantially lower than that of the vermouth itself.

Since much of the antioxidant activity of wine and whisky has been ascribed to the polyphenols they contain,7 the polyphenol content in the martinis was investigated using Folin reagent.7 As shown in table 2 (see page 3 Table 2 https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/319/7225/1600.full.pdf), the phenolic concentrations in the martinis, in catechin equivalents, were an order of magnitude lower than those in white wine or 12 year old Scotch whisky, and there was no significant difference between the phenolic contents of shaken and stirred martinis.

The martinis, when undiluted, are capable of suppressing counts from 42 mmol/l peroxide by over 99.9%. We calculate that after ingestion an absorbed martini may be able to react with 210 umol/l of hydrogen peroxide. We have previously determined that 5 mmol/l ethanol, a blood concentration of ethanol found after absorption of one or two typical alcoholic drinks, would eliminate 131 umol/l peroxide.6 Theperoxide concentrations detected in the aqueous humour have ranged from 14 umol/l to 31 umol/l:mean 24 (SE 7)Ïmol/l for normal humans, with higher concentrations in cataract patients (82 (155) umol/l and 198 (88) umol/l 13). Both vitamin E and ethanol decrease the risk of cataract45 and atherosclerosis13 by about half. The residual peroxide concentrations in the aqueous humour possibly reflect those in the serum, from which the aqueous humour is formed by ultrafiltration at the ciliary body. After the consumption of shaken martinis, peroxide concentrations of serum and aqueous humour could be half those found after ingestion of stirred martinis.

Discussion
Although the reason for the superior antioxidant activity of shaken martinis is not clear, is it possible that James Bond chose shaken (not stirred) martinis because of the improved antioxidant potential? This added antioxidant effect could result, of course, in a healthier beverage. There is no indication in the literature that 007 suffered from cataracts or cardiovascular disease, hence he must be considered a moderate consumer of alcoholic drinks. The authors have not examined any antioxidant contributions from olives.

Contributors

CCT originated the idea and performed preliminary experiments on the antioxidant activity of martinis. FR and MMC performed the Student's t tests using the Excel spreadsheet program, and MMC performed the Folin phenol content determinations and statistical analysis. JW and FR, with assistance from Darin Lawrence, Adrian Lee, and Ashley MacDonald, prepared the minimartinis and performed antioxidant assays using the luminometer. MH and JRT coordinated the study, aided in the statistical analysis, suggested appropriate tests and controls to perform in group meetings, and were mainly responsible for writing the paper. CCT and MMC suggested editorial changes to the text. JRT and MH are guarantors of the paper.
Funding: Except for MH and JRT, all staff on the project were summer students supported by Work Study, Canada Man≠power, Youth Opportunities Unlimited Ontario, and by grants from Labatt Breweries to MH and JRT. Corby Distilleries provided samples of gin and vermouth.
Competing interests: The research grants from Labatt Breweries were used for a portion of the laboratory supplies, a portion of expenses incurred by CCT, MMC, JW, and JRT in attending the conference of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (1999), and a portion of the expenses of MH in attending the fourth international conference on toxicology in developing countries (1999).

Footnotes

1 Klatsky AL. Epidemiology of coronary heart disease—influence of alcohol. Alcohol Clin Exp Res1994;18:88≠96.
2 Kiechl S, Willeit J, Egger G, Oberhollenzer M, Aichner F. Alcohol consumption and carotid atherosclerosis: evidence of dose-dependentatherogenic and antiatherogenic effects. Results from the Bruneck Study. Stroke1994;25:1593≠8.
3 Sacco RL, Elkind M, Boden-Albala B, Lin IF, Kargman DE, Hauser WA, et al. The protective effect of moderate alcohol consumption on ischemicstroke. JAMA 1999;281:53-60.
4 Clayton RM, Cuthbert J, Duffy J, Seth J, Phillips CI, Bartholomew RS, et al. Some risk factors associated with cataract in SE Scotland: a pilot study. Trans Ophthalmol Soc UK 1982;102:331≠6.
5 Sasaki H, Kojima M, Shui YB, Chen HM, Nagai K, Kasuga T, et al. The Singapore-Japan Cooperative Eye Study [abstract]. US-Japan Cooperative Cataract Research Group Meeting, Kona, HI. Kanazawa: Departmentof Ophthalmology, Kanazawa Medical University, 1997: 66.
6 Trevithick CC, Vinson JA, Caulfield J, Rahman F, Derksen T, Bocksch L,et al. Is ethanol an important antioxidant in alcoholic beverages associated with risk reduction of cataract and atherosclerosis? Redox Report1999; 4:89≠93.
7 Duthie GG, Pedersen MW, Gardner PT, Morrice PC, Jenkinson AM, McPhail DB, et al. The effect of whisky and wine consumption on total phenol content and antioxidant capacity of plasma from healthyvolunteers. Eur J Clin Nutr1998; 52:733-6.
8 Rimm EB, Stampfer MJ, Ascherio A, Giovanucci E, Golditz GA, Willet WC. Vitamin E consumption and the risk of coronary disease in men.N Engl J Med1993;328:1450-5.
9 Stampfer MJ, Hennekens CH, Manson JE, Golditz GA, Rosner B, Willett WC. Vitamin E consumption and risk of coronary disease in women. N Engl J Med1993;328:1444-9.
10 Robertson JMcD, Donner AP, Trevithick JR. Vitamin E intake and risk of cataracts in humans. Ann NY Acad Sci1989;570:372-82.
11 Trevithick JR, Dzialoszynski T. A new technique for enhancing luminolluminescent detection of free radicals and reactive oxygen species. Biochem Molec Biol Int1994;33:1179≠90.
12 Trevithick JR, Dzialoszynski T. Endogenous superoxide-like species andantioxidant activity in ocular tissues detected by luminol luminescence.Biochem Molec Biol Int1997;41:695-705.
13 Spector A, Ma W, Wang RR. The aqueous humor is capable of generating and degrading H2O2.Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci1998;39:1188-97.

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Thunderfinger

Alcohol is a poison. Poison isn t healthy.

RichardTheBruce

Agree, @Thunderfinger. As are most substances when overused. Moderation is key. And maybe an occasional overindulgence for days like this.

Thunderfinger

RichardTheBruce wrote: »

Agree, @Thunderfinger. As are most substances when overused. Moderation is key. And maybe an occasional overindulgence for days like this.

Quite right! Cheers, Richie!

CommanderRoss

Actually, a little bit of poison helps strengthen your resistance against it. So is by definition healthy. From other research though I red Bond is a heavy, not a moderate drinker. The shaken-not stirred, if my folklore is still adequate, has to do with the quality of both drinks. In the olden days stirring wouldn't mix them equally over the whole of the liquid.

RichardTheBruce

March 5, 2015
Great Scene – Casino
Royale (2006)
https://doctorofmovies.com/2015/03/05/great-scene-casino-royale-2006/

Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) is comforted by James Bond (Daniel Craig)

The Shower Scene

During a break in the high stakes poker game at the Casino Royale, James Bond and his companion Vesper Lynd are attacked in the stairwell by a pair of African terrorists/freedom fighters, one brandishing a machete. In one of the film’s many expertly executed action scenes Bond manages to dispatch with both men after a multi-story struggle. He conceals the bodies, cleans himself up and returns to the card game. At the next break – which, if consistent with the last, is four hours later – he returns to his suite. Upon opening the door he is immediately uneasy. He notices a broken wine glass on the table, and hears the shower running. He pushes open the bathroom door to reveal Vesper, fully clothed, sitting and shivering under the shower. Without saying a word he walks over and sits beside her, the water from the showerhead soaking through his tuxedo. Clinging to his arm, clearly in distress, Vesper evokes Lady Macbeth. “It’s like there is blood on my hands. It’s not coming off.” In a symbolic act of cleansing, of absolution, he takes her hand, places her fingers in his mouth and sucks them clean. Asking if she is cold, he reaches above his head to the tap and warms the water, a simple yet incredibly tender act. And then they sit together in silence. Backed by David Arnold’s beautiful Vesper theme, the majority of the scene is captured in one continuous shot, allowing the moment to sit and those emotions to hang in the air.

When I say there is a great shower scene in a Bond film, this is hardly the sort of scene you are likely to imagine. Its significance comes precisely from the fact that it is so unusual within the context of the Bond series. This is not a great scene because it is sexy. This is not a great scene because it is exciting. This is a great scene because it shows us something we have never seen in a Bond film before and does it with such beautiful simplicity.

In a series of films where a near death experience or the dispatching of an enemy is traditionally accompanied by a witty quip and quickly forgotten, this scene marks possibly the first time we are presented with actual psychological consequences. Vesper is not a field agent. She is not even a spy. She is a Treasury representative who has just been attacked with a machete, has seen two men killed – one thrown over a railing and another choked to death in front of her. She is not trained for or accustomed to seeing that sort of thing and is understandably traumatised. Over the course of the preceding twenty Bond films we have taken our emotional cues from the stoic protagonist. In this moment, we see a realistic human reaction to a horrific event, and seeing her reaction draws attention to how abnormal Bond’s responses to these situations are, and how damaged a character even this new Bond is.

But on top of that, what makes this scene stand out is that it beautifully captures a genuine moment of human compassion from Bond. This most misogynistic of heroes, who over the decades has treated his women as entirely disposable, recognises the emotional distress of another person and makes time to tend to them. By simply sitting alongside her he shares her burden. He offers her emotional comfort through the symbolic cleaning of the blood, and physical comfort through the warming of the water. He does not rush her, nor does he dismiss her emotional response. It is a short scene, but an incredibly significant one in this bold reimagining of Bond as a character. It demonstrates the care he has for this woman, a love that goes beyond simple physical attraction and lust. It shows a dropping of his emotional guard, and in doing so it informs the cold, stoic, un-trusting character he will force himself to become after her perceived betrayal at the film’s climax.

Casino Royale is a superbly crafted film, one of the best action films of the last decade and arguably the best in the Bond franchise. It marked an intentional re-invention of the character. “The world has changed a lot,” explained producer Barbara Broccoli. “It is a more serious world and we expect our heroes to fight the battles with better judgement, more responsibility and less frivolity.” These new Bond films are darker and more brutal, but more importantly they give a psychological and emotional depth to the character that was largely absent from earlier screen incarnations. Nowhere is this change in the franchise and in Bond as a character more evident than in this short moment in the shower.

RichardTheBruce

"The Thumblady"
Shari Green, C.O.M.
Certified Orofacial Myologist
http://www.thumblady.com/images/Hygiene_Town_Article.pdf

Shari, why do children suck their thumbs?

Green: The No. 1 reason for sucking is nourishment. Children are born with a suckling reflex–-just stroke a baby’s chin and you see the instinctive response immediately. Babies associate sucking with mommy, warmth, love, togetherness, nourishment and a myriad of other wonderful feelings. Sucking actually produces endorphins, a natural-occurring chemical in our brain, which produces pleasure. With all these early positive associations and pleasurable experiences relating to the sucking process, they soon transfer this sucking action to other items, namely a convenient finger, toe or thumb, and receive those same positive and pleasurable conditioned sensations.

Finger-Suck Healing
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FingerSuckHealing


One of the characters may get their finger hurt (most likely when preparing food). Another character will then come in and suck on the wound in order for the finger to heal better. Expect the person having their finger sucked to blush and act embarassed by this physical intimacy.

This trope is often a form of Ship Tease and/or Intimate Healing. Compare Kiss of the Vampire for a supernatural variant or Suck Out the Poison for a toxic variant. Sometimes not entirely unrelated to Erotic Eating. Contrast Romance-Inducing Smudge.

RichardTheBruce

Webs of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion, Nathalie Nahai, 2012.

CASE STUDY Casino Royale
https://books.google.com/books?id=xINFauAJ0IQC&pg=PT107&lpg=PT107&dq=casino+royale++sucking+fingers+"psychology"&source=bl&ots=OYfuMKPT7N&sig=ACfU3U09GUUXzx0hgkCUNwPmZLhWzeHe5A&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjXiYGtrODiAhUHxVkKHSUyDLUQ6AEwBXoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=casino royale sucking fingers "psychology"&f=false

While it's true that storytelling is a universal communicator,
there are, of course, differences in the ways in which we
respond to particular elements within a given plot. Allow me
to give you an example.

In a study investigating our neural reactions to films,
neuroscientist Professor Ohme set out to compare the brain
activity of women and men in response to the famous Bond
film Casino Royale. If you've seen the movie and if
you're a woman, you may remember a witty verbal scene that
takes place between Bond and his leading lady, Vesper,
during a taxi ride. I say 'if you're a woman' because, at this
point in the film, most male viewers had practically switched
off. So if you're reading this and you're a man, you probably
have no idea which scene I'm talking about, whether you
watched the movie or not.

Now, I hate to play into gender stereotypes, but it seems that
at least when it comes to films, men really are more
interested in visuals than verbals. So, if you're pitching to a
full-blooded male audience, supply a bit of action--whether
it's in the bedroom or the boxing ring.

Women, however, aren't immune to a bit of eye-candy. In fact,
far from it. In another emotionally charged scene, Bond finds
Vesper cowering and drenched on the shower floor, having
just witnessed a brutal murder. Now, if you are a woman,
your attention levels would have spiked as you watched
Bond undo his tie and start sucking Vesper's fingers (yes, it's
fabulously sexy). You'd have been rapt as she started talking,
but, as the shot panned out, your attention would have
plummeted.

Why? Because of a toilet seat that comes into view on the
left-hand side of the screen. If you're a bloke you'd have
probably never noticed--the toilet seat is down, so what's
the problem? Here's the kicker: when asked to identify what
specifically had turned them off, women were unable to
articulate why it was they dislike this particular shot. Their
brain scans told a different story: women had perceived the
toilet peripherally and had responded to it at a subconscious
level without even realising that they'd seen it. No prizes for
guessing what gender the director was.

CommanderRoss

This could go to the 'I never noticed it before' thread. There's a toilet in that scene?

RichardTheBruce

(I had to check. It definitely wasn't on my mind any of the times I watched the scene.)

Also have to wonder if it's actually beyond gender and psychology, something peculiar to the writer to notice that.

CommanderRoss

RichardTheBruce wrote: »

(I had to check. It definitely wasn't on my mind any of the times I watched the scene.)

Also have to wonder if it's actually beyond gender and psychology, something peculiar to the writer to notice that.

Well it probably was with her like it was with the women in the experiment. She was turned off by it but didn't really know by what. Women on the whole to my experience at least are more sensitive to atmosphere and their surroundings. WOuld be interesting to see if the women on here had the same experience.

RichardTheBruce

Psychology in the Bathroom, Nick Haslam, December 2012.

Praise for Psychology in the Bathroom: ‘Dr. Haslam should be congratulated for creating a unique compendium of information that is so entrenched in our human behavior but rarely thought about or discussed. Psychology in the Bathroom details a wide range of behaviors that are linked to excretory function. Topics such as the “anal” personality, latrinalia (toilet graffiti), flatulence, scatologic swearing (potty mouth) and medical conditions like irritable bowel syndrome are well covered with regard to their history, psychology and gender and cultural differences in their societal expression. Some topics, like whether the toilet seat should be up or down, are nicely discussed in a balanced attempt to solve a seemingly unsolvable domestic problem. I highly recommend this book to psychologists, healthcare professionals and anyone else interested in understanding such difficult to obtain areas of knowledge.’ Douglas A Drossman, Professor of Medicine and Psychiatry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA and Past President of the American Psychosomatic Society

‘Why is it that the psychological study of eating and sex enjoy so much attention from psychologists and the general public, while a no-less universal feature of human experience is ignored? Psychology in the Bathroom argues persuasively for the importance of this overlooked topic, then comprehensively rectifies its neglect. In doing so, this glorious, witty and unerringly pitch-perfect book offers an unusual and compelling window to the human psyche. With a scope far grander than its subject matter, this meticulously researched and wide-ranging study of excretion and related phenomena, both typical and pathological, integrates fascinating and often surprising insights from intersections with psychoanalytic theory, clinical research, the study of emotion, the intimacy of body and mind, language, gender and more. Beautifully written with unfailing clarity, sensitivity and humour, this important,captivating and charming exploration of the psychology of a universal phenomenon is a must-read for researchers, clinicians and general readers alike.’ Cordelia Fine (author of Delusions of Gender), Associate Professor, Melbourne Business School, Australia

‘James Bond conducts a sex life that leaves little to the imagination. But does the virile Mr Bond ever use the toilet? The answer is no. Not in literature, movies or television, with rare exceptions... It is high time that psychiatrists have a clear view on the issues involved with toileting, and a book by Professor Nick Haslam, a social psychologist at Melbourne University, is an excellent introduction.’ Australasian Psychiatry

Psychology in the
Bathroom

Nick Haslam
University of Melbourne, Australia

Table of contents PDF https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/bfm:978-0-230-36755-5/1.pdf

RichardTheBruce

CPR – Is It Like In The Movies?
https://www.coastalfirstaid.com.au/cpr-is-it-like-in-the-movies/
Posted on 6th November 2014

James Bond (Daniel Craig) goes into cardiac arrest

James Bond has been poisoned. A fellow player at a poker game has spiked his martini with digitalis sending 007 into cardiac arrest. James’ condition is deteriorating. An ECG shows he has life-threatening ventricular tachycardia. Only a defibrillator can save him but he suddenly collapses and falls unconscious. Thankfully, just in time, Vesper arrives and successfully operates an automated external defibrillator and revives Bond back to life.

This scene, taken from the movie Casino Royal [sic], is just one from the many films that depicts resuscitation and defibrillation in its story line. But have you ever wondered whether performing CPR is just like you see in movies? Is it as simple as they make it out to be? can you successfully resuscitate someone with just CPR like they show? and the defribrillators you see the same in real life?

A recent study has thankfully provided the answers to some of these questions about cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) in movies. The researchers of the study, looked at films released between 2003 to 2012 where resuscitation, and in particular defibrillation, was depicted. They reviewed the scenes and compared them to official resuscitation guidelines and the real-world statistics on survival from cardiac arrest and CPR.

The findings of the study are interesting. One of the major results was just how inaccurate the portrayal of survival rates from cardiac arrest is. In the movies, where resuscitation was performed in a hospital, 88% of the patients remarkably survived. This is in stark contrast however, to the real world figure of 23.9% that is reported in the literature. For movie scenes where resuscitation was performed out of a hospital, patients miraculously survived 67% of the time. Unfortunately this is contrary to actual survival rates of 5-10% for an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest.

Another interesting discovering from the study was the incorrect use of a defibrillator. A defribrillator is a device used to correct a patient’s abnormal and life threatening heart rhythm, an arrhythmia. The study showed that of the resuscitation scenes depicted in the movies, 28% of scenes used a defibrillator where it was warranted. Unfortunately however, there was even a greater proportion of scenes, 39% in fact, where a defibrillator was used inappropriately or was not required. It appears that in many cases, the script writers may have taken extensive poetic license and featured these devices for dramatic effect only.

The researchers conclude that with such an inaccurate portrayal of CPR and defribrillation in movies, an opportunity has been missed to educate the general public on these life saving techniques. The study does show that unfortunately, we can’t just sit back on the couch watching movies like Casino Royal [sic] and get accurately educated to perform these critical skills effectively. Instead, the best recommendation to get properly educated, is to complete an accredited First Aid course.

If you would like to learn how to perform CPR and use a defibrillator appropriately, why not join us at one of our many First Aid courses. We run regular First Aid courses in Port Macqaurie, Taree and Nelson Bay (Port Stephens). These nationally recognised and WorkCover approved First Aid courses can teach you not only these, but many other important First Aid skills and techniques, that one day you might need.