Yearly TV update!

What I'm watching that I wasn't watching last year, or I feel the need to tell you to watch again:

Agents of SHIELD (ABC, Tuesdays 8 PM): I LOVE THIS SHOW. Everyone's so shippable! And so pretty! And the MCU references! And the Marvel Comic references! And how it all ties into the movies and hints at the movies! And a Dollhouse reference! And Samuel L. Jackson cameos! EVERYTHING I WANTED AND HOPED FOR OUT OF THIS SHOW! (Except they haven't had a musical episode yet, and I expect this from the exact same production team that made a musical supervillain web series)

Almost Human (Fox, Mondays*): It started only months before the Robocop reboot, but this is definitely much better, and yay for Karl Urban! However, Fox decided to Firefly it, meaning they pushed back the premiere after all the advertising was already printed/filmed, and then aired it all out of order, then shuffled the finale around with the Sleepy Hollow finale and the premiere of The Following. So there's been basically no character development, and if there was supposed to be a plot arc, I can't see it. Hopefully it'll get another season.

Arrow (CW, Wednesdays 8 PM): The first season skipped right over all that typical first-season cheesyness, making the finale feel like a second or third season finale. The second season has only improved, and it's one of the most underrated shows on TV.

Cosmos (Fox, Sundays 9 PM): Neil DeGrasse Tyson rebooting a Carl Sagan thing with good science and glorious HD space photos. It's everything I never knew I wanted... it's like the total antidote to Ancient Aliens.

Intelligence (CBS): This is only on the list because I wasn't watching it last year. It's not spectacular, but it's a nice solid action-y filler for when the DVR is running low.

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (Hub, Saturdays 10:30 AM EST/7:30 AM PST): Oh, I love this show, and this season just keeps increasing the quality. From exposing shame homeopathic cures to realistic depictions of fashion week to the Doctor Whooves thing just keeping on going, there's nothing I don't love about the show.

Orphan Black (BBC America, returns April 19th): LET ME TELL YOU HOW I LOVE THIS SHOW. I may love this show about as much as Agents of SHIELD. It's a unique concept with stellar acting and a storyline that really picks up at the end and amazing acting and a whole boatload full of female characters who do stuff and their lives don't revolve around men and did I mention that Tatiana Maslany was totally robbed of that Golden Globe?

Rizzoli & Isles (TNT, Tuesdays, on hiatus): NOOOOOOOO! I love this show so, so much, but I am still procrastinating on watching the midseason finale because we know what's going to happen....

Sleepy Hollow (Fox, Mondays*): This was possibly sillier than National Treasure at first. And then there started being supernatural elements... so now it's some kind of horror show. There's also very little on TV as entertaining as seeing a character from the 1700's get outraged over the tax on Starbucks, or try to use Siri.

The 100 (CW, Wednesdays 9 PM):  England a space station holding the post-apocalyptic remnants of humanity is getting overcrowded, so they decide to send their convicts juvenile delinquents down to Australia Earth and see if they can survive and found a new civilization while all the local fauna trying to kill them. Given how Australia contains almost 0% unattractive people and it started from convicts and idk, sheep ranchers? and this show is populated with CW actors, several generations on their descendants will probably be simply too beautiful to look at directly.

The Tomorrow People (CW, Wednesdays on hiatus): Follow up Stephen Amell in Arrow with his cousin Robbie Amell: How could you not watch, at least at first... I kind of gave up because it just didn't hold my interest.

Warehouse 13 (Syfy, on hiatus): I'm so excited for the second half of the fifth season to return, but sadly, it's the final season. This is another show I've stuck with for years on end and loved very much. If you haven't watched this, catch up while you can!

*Fox has not learned one single thing from Firefly. Not. One. Thing. Sleepy Hollow premiered, like usual. And then when Almost Human premiered it was supposed to have a special premiere timeslot and a normal timeslot, but then after all the advertising for the special premiere time, they pushed it back by a week or two and changed the special timeslot. Then, in the middle of all the out-of-order Almost Human episodes, there were more "special time slots" for the season finale of Sleepy Hollow and the season premiere of The Following. And then, they not only shuffled around those timeslots, but the weeks on which those things would take place, and stuff like that. I couldn't keep track of any of it.

Spectrometers... on the roof!

Does anyone remember the scene in Avengers where Bruce Banner is like "Hey, that glowing cube that Loki stuck in a briefcase is emitting gamma rays!" and Nick Fury is like "put all the spectrometers on the roof and triangulate and we'll magically find Loki!" and you probably completely ignored it as science-speak, but any of the RL scientists you've seen the movie with just flipped out? (And probably didn't stop talking about it for two months straight?)

So I'm going to try to explain why this was our favorite example of bad movie science from the summer: First of all, let's get a basic idea about what a spectrometer is: Wikipedia defines it as "is an instrument used to measure properties of light over a specific portion of the electromagnetic spectrum..." You can also use the word "spectroscopy" to refer to the process of using a spectrometer.

There are lots of portions of the electromagnetic spectrum that you could measure: You can have infared spectrometers, for example. Here's a basic idea of what the inside of one kind of infared spectrometer (FTIR, for those who are curious) looks like, or if you want to see more here's a video. In any case, the light that's being measured goes along that yellow arrow, which you'll notice is entirely inside the device. This thing isn't measuring anything originating from outside that little desktop-printer-sized box, so it's going to be doing absolutely nil to detect glowing cube things, whether on the roof or anywhere else.

In case you might be getting a little bored now, how about looking at a spectrometer you can hold in your hand and run around pointing at things? Things like, oh, traces of lipstick? Seriously, check out this video, doesn't that just look cool? This is one case where reality is kind of sort of vaguely like CSI, except still probably a lot slower. Anyways, I'm not gonna bore you with the details (but I will link to them for those of you who do care) but look at this. Doesn't it look so fun and high-tech? These are spectrometers that you can carry up to the roof - in fact, our heroes could've stuck one in their pocket and flown around in the Quinjet or hitched a ride with Tony Stark if height was what mattered - but these spectrometers still fail in one important factor: They can't detect gamma rays.

Gamma ray spectrometers are portable, too. Really, really portable. Portable enough to be put on the Apollo 16 mission. And a satellite or two or three. And a robot that we sent to Mars. You can hold one of these in your hand, although it looks more like a Star Trek: TOS thing than a pretty futuristic CSI thing like the last one. So, I suppose that could work, but you'd have to at least know what city the cube was in, and then deploy people to scan metal briefcases... but how strong would that radiation have to be?

and oh yes I'm gonna answer that question, how could I not