THE CUNNING MAN (ROBERTSON DAVIES) AND THE TWELVE CRANEAL NERVES

 I tried to pass the time by recalling mnemonics which had helped to get me through my medical examinations, but for so many the "clean" form gave way to the form preferred by young men in excellent health whose instruction in science and medicine had done nothing to quench their natural lusts -- did, indeed, encourage them.

Consider, for instance, the Twelve Cranial Nerves of the brainstem:

I Olfactory On Oh!

II Optic Old Oh!

III Oculomotor Olympus' Oh!

IV Trochlear Towering To

V Trigeminal Tops Touch

VI Abducens A And

VII Facial Finn Feel

VIII Acoustic And A

IX Glossopharyngeal German Girl's

X Vagus Viewed Vagina

XI Accessory Some And

XII Hypoglossal Hops Hymen!

Science students have always had the ability of taking unbelievable detours to study. I have seen for myself how some people used to do strange things to study the periodic table.Mnemonic techniques  tend to be naughty because then you reach a win-win situation, I mean, on the one hand you end up learning the twelve Cranial Nerves of the brainstem but on the other hand, you make laugh your mates. And although many of these rules have a collective authorship, there is usually someone talented for these jokes.As Gerardo Diego said about his future and hypothetical students on toasting for his position of a teacher,

And another , surely the most clever one,

will give me a definitive alias

The naughty mnemonic techniques and the definitive alias of a teacher are stuff not well appreciated in your official CV but they give you a lot of prestige with your mates. However, students of tough sciences as Physics or Chemistry are not very keen of this method, even they disregard it, as we can see in what The physic Enrico Fermi said when the subatomic particles began to increase: ´if I could remember the name of all of these particles, I´d have been a botanic´

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (CORMAC MCCARTHY) AND THE SPEED OF BULLETS COMPARED TO THE SPEED OF SOUND AND LIGHT

Even with the heavy barrel and the muzzlebrake the rifle bucked up off the rest. When he pulled the animals back into the scope he could see them all standing as before. It took the 150 grain bullet the better part of a second to get there but it took the sound twice that. They were standing looking at the plume of dust where the bullet had hit. Then they bolted. Running almost immediately at top speed out upon the barrial with the long whaang of the rifleshot rolling after them and caroming off the rocks and yawing back across the open country in the early morning solitude.

Moss felt something tug at the bag on his shoulder. The pistolshot was just a muffled pop, flat and small in the dark quiet of the town. He turned in time to see the muzzleflash of the second shot faint but visible under the pink glow of the fifteen foot high neon hotel sign. He didnt feel anything. The bullet snapped at his shirt and blood started running down his upper arm and he was already at a dead run. With the next shot he felt a stinging pain in his side. He fell down and got up again leaving Chigurh’s shotgun lying in the street. Damn, he said. What a shot. 

We can see in these two texts some topics that films usually don´t represent quite well. In the first one, some antelopes can see the dust where the bullet had hit and in less than a second after , they listen to the gunshot. So, it´s a rifle with supersonic bullets that they move faster than the sound (340 m/s). This is something usual in rifles and machine guns . I think it would be easy to representate it in films but they don´t do it because the result wouldn´t be very intuitive.

A bit more complicated is the second text because of the inclusion of the speed of light, higher than the speed of sound. If you were shot by a sniper with one of these rifles, you´d notice the following order of things: firstly, the burst of light, especially if you were shot at night. After that, you´d notice the impact of the bullet (or you´d listen to the whistling of the bullet nex to to you) and in the end, you´d listen to the ´bang!´.It´s a bit confusing and the opposite of the natural order you can imagine. I think that´s the reason why film directors don´t take the opinion of fussy people like me into account.

Cormac McCarthy is really into the topic of the speed of bullets as he also talked about it in The Road