Black Canary Had a Rough Time in High School

July 12th, 2009

Filed under: Comics, Medicine

The boyfriend of high schooler Dinah Lance (eventually to become Black Canary) is a wannabe rocker and convinces her to sing a little for him.

Black Canary

When she sings, her voice knocks him across the football field and knocks him unconscious. He is subsequently admitted to the hospital and the doctor tells his brother:
Whatever sound your brother was exposed to exceeded 300 decibels.

On one hand, I’m pleased to see the writers stick with the previously established value of 300 decibels for the Canary Cry (though at that point she was using an artificial cry). On the other hand, the doctor/scientist in me remains concerned — and somewhat amused — by the misunderstanding of the unit “decibel.”

A decibel is a unit used to measure the strength of sound waves. Decibels are measured on a logarithmic scale, meaning that each integer value is geometrically larger than the one before it.

After a certain point, it is better to think of a high decibel sound as a shock wave rather than simply a sound wave. For example, a sound of 200 decibels would be equal to the shockwave produced at the epicenter of a Richter 1.0 earthquake, and this is also the level at which most humans would die of exposure to the sound.

The power of Dinah Lance’s 300 decibel scream is substantially greater than the force wave produced by the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima…combined. Her scream would have:
1. Killed, if not entirely pulverized, her boyfriend.
2. Destroyed the football field and stadium, and likely most of the town as well.

Black CanaryFor more on Black Canary and decibels, check out my look at her role in JSA #6

Tags:

9 Responses to “ Black Canary Had a Rough Time in High School ”

  1. Kelberon
    July 13th, 2009 at 8:22 am

    A very interesting read. Though this also made me think of the Justice League Unlimited cartoon, where she stated she couldn’t hit somebody with her scream point blank, or it would be lethal…so even though they didn’t give an actual decibel number, it seems they were one step closer to reality than the comics.

  2. Michael T
    July 13th, 2009 at 12:42 pm

    Hmmm, that gives new meaning to Cyborg’s claim that he is able to hit his foes with “a million decibels of white noise.” I always wondered about the “white noise” part – don’t we use white noise generators to soothe us to sleep? Maybe Cyborg is just treating his enemies to a really good nap. But given that decibels has nothing to do with the sound content, doesn’t the logarithmic scale mean that one blast from Cyborg should crumble the Earth to dust?

  3. Andreas
    July 13th, 2009 at 7:58 pm

    You lost most people at logarithmic. ;) That’s the problem. Pedestrians can’t wrap their head around it.

    The decibel count also raises interesting questions about how much energy would be needed.

  4. Psudo
    July 13th, 2009 at 9:47 pm

    For the layman: There are (at least) two kinds of scales. The kind you’re used to are linear scales, like the kind where you rate things from 1 to 10: each step is the previous step plus 1 (or some constant number). 5 is one unit stronger than 4.

    When dealing with really big numbers, sometimes that’s not useful information, so scientific measurements sometimes use logarithmic scales, wherein a score one point higher means 10 (or some constant number) times a large a measurement. It’s a lot like you’re talking about how many digits long the linear scale number would be.

    For example, consider distances in space.
    – the distance from the Earth to the Sun is something like 93 million miles
    – the distance from Pluto to the Sun is 2.8 billion miles
    – the distance from the Sun to the nearest star is about 25 trillion miles.
    Those numbers are all so big they barely make any sense. But you can easily compare the distances to each other by looking at the word used to describe the numbers, namely: millions, billions, and trillions. Anything that is in trillions is WAY too far away to be seen on a map that shows billions of miles of detail, and anything that’s in billions is WAY too far away to be seen on a map that shows millions of miles across.

    If you think of things measured in millions of miles (or less) as being the first step and things measured in billions of miles as the second step, you can fit much more comparative information in your brain before it stops making sense. That’s a logarithmic scale put to good use.

    (FYI, the whole universe is about 910,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles across… or, in other words, it’s on the 10th step on our logarithmic scale. Almost to step 11, but not quite.)

  5. Princess Edamame
    July 14th, 2009 at 6:13 pm

    Hey, Andres, just because I walk to work doesn’t mean I can’t follow “logarithmic”…

    Just kidding – see what I did there?

    Thanks, for the explanation, pseudo. I kind of understand, since I like in CA and get how the RIchter scale works. but that was helpful.

  6. Drew
    July 15th, 2009 at 3:35 pm

    Should I even bother asking how it is that a doctor would be able to determine, from ANY given set of injuries, how many “decibels” someone had been “hit with?” What sort of forensics would even be able to tell that “sound” was involved?

  7. Andreas
    July 15th, 2009 at 7:53 pm

    Interesting question Drew. Perhaps measuring the compression of dust around the victim?

  8. Alberto
    July 16th, 2009 at 6:28 pm

    I think the decibel unit for sound also accounts the strength of the sound at the specific distance… So if the guy was hit at 300 decibels at 10 meters away from Dinah, that means we would be hit at a high decibel value if he was closer to her… or I am wrong?

  9. Andreas
    July 16th, 2009 at 7:30 pm

    Alberto, I believe you are correct. There would be no other way to measure it since sound intensity falls off with distance.

Leave a Reply

« Your Weekend Moment of Psychic Nosebleed Zen: Jackson Dane Buzzy Says “Old Folks Are People Too!” »