Readings Are Off the Scale: Difference between revisions
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* [[Yu-Gi-Oh!|Seto Kaiba]]'s computer control panels nearly [[Explosive Instrumentation|exploded]] when Kaiba powered up his [[Infinity+1 Sword|Infinity Plus One Card]], [[Names to Run Away From Really Fast|Obelisk the Tormentor]]. A bit peculiar considering that Obelisk was a hologram with no physical presence whose model, animations, and statistics were probably programmed into a Duel Disk with computers probably not too far off from the ones used to gauge its power level. And given that each card's statistics had to be programmed into the Duel Disk to begin with, it's not so clear why Kaiba needed to monitor any monster's power levels at all.
** Clearly, he programmed his computers to explode whenever they try to gauge the power level of any Egyptian God cards due to Rule of Cool. He does have the money to replace said computers as often as needed, after all.
** The Egyptian God cards aren't exactly normal
* In ''Ties That Bind'', the companion movie to ''[[Street Fighter IV]]'', Ryu's [[Super-Powered Evil Side|Satsui no Hadou]] is the target of [[Big Bad|Seth and SIN]]. The first time he's provoked into using his power, the power gauge the scientists are reading max at ...999999999999999 (the camera angle obscures the start of the number, [[Take Our Word for It|but it's big]]). In the final battle, he manages to ''[[Tranquil Fury|control]] the Satsui no Hadou'', and we get a shot of the equipment rolling over from ...999999999999999 to ...000000000000000.
* In the first ''[[Sakura Wars]]'' OVA the developers of the spirit armor are having trouble finding someone who is able to pilot it. After their latest military pilot nearly kills himself trying to operate the mech, the scientists comment that they need to find someone who can move the gauge on the [[Buffy-Speak|spirit-power-measuring-thingy]]. They idly flip it on in the presence of the granddaughter of the chief scientist (and daughter of the owner of the company), and the gauge, of course, promptly overloads and breaks.
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{{quote|'''Mr. Fantastic:''' Power is right off the readouts...
'''Human Torch:''' So I'm guessing bigger readouts wouldn't help? Like that amp in ''[[This Is Spinal Tap|Spinal Tap]]'' that goes [[Up to Eleven]]? }}
* In ''[[Cable and Deadpool|Cable & Deadpool]]'' issue #15, Black Box has [[Deadpool]] hooked up to some equipment that's monitoring him and showing Black Box his thoughts. After some observation, Black Box notes that Deadpool's ferocity and skills are
{{quote|'''Black Box:''' Clowns. He is too funny. But his ferocity--his skills--are off the charts. I should know...I've charted them all.}}
* Semi-lampshaded in an issue of First Comics' [[Humongous Mecha]] series ''Dynamo Joe'':
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** The 2009 video game shows the PKE meter in better detail. The "antenna" on the meter rise higher the closer the meter is to a spectral entity, regardless of power. The bars in the middle are kind of a "hot-cold" mechanic for pinpointing a hidden ghost or cursed object. There's more to it than that, as Ray and Egon both comment on the readings, noting things that are non-obvious, but for the rookie Ghostbuster (that's you), it's just a ghost locator.
* ''[[The Fifth Element]]'': Temperature probes sent to absolute evil jam, one at a million degrees, the other at minus 5000. A bit later, Leeloo's DNA is described as having hundreds of different bases.
** The "minus 5000" part is more than just "off the charts", it's actually impossible in our universe (the lower possible temperature is absolute zero, or −273.15
* In ''[[Star Wars]] Episode I: [[The Phantom Menace]]'', Anakin Skywalker's midi-chlorian level is said to be "off the charts" and "over twenty thousand." It's not entirely clear whether this means that they could only measure them up to twenty thousand, or that a little over twenty thousand was the actual count but unprecedentedly high.
* Midway through ''[[Forbidden Planet]]'', we are shown a power gauge consisting of a (very large) number of lighted displays, each of which shows ten times the amperage of the previous one. (Think of it as a decimal display with a whole lotta digits.) What the protagonists consider a large power output barely registers as a blip on the first gauge. Naturally, by the end of the film, we see the whole panel lit up (and flashing!).
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* Funny inversion in ''[[Good Omens]]'' by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman: The temperature at the evil sigil during the [[Endofthe World As We Know It|Apocalypse]] is never measured correctly. The machines put it at either -150 or +350 degrees. Both are correct, 'cuz that's the temperature in Hell.
* ''The Last Continent'' in [[Discworld]] uses a thaumometer, that measures magical energy. Sure enough, it melts when it detects a magical field of over a million thaums. To be fair, that is a far greater amount than would ever normally be encountered, but they'd accidentally traveled back in time to when a Creator was installing an entire new continent.
** Given the nature of Discworld magic, melting is about the most normal thing one could expect at this
** And who can forget CMOT Dibbler's "dragon detector"? It's a piece of wood on a metal stick. When the stick was burned through, you'd found your dragon.
*** That sounds like a variation on the old weather detecting stone gag - stone is dry: fine weather; stone is wet: rain; stone is white: snow; stone is gone: hurricane.
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{{quote|'''Red Shirt''': ''[[Oh Crap]]. Captain, we have company.''
'''Sheridan''': ''What kind?''
'''Red Shirt''': ''[[Sufficiently Advanced Alien
'''Sheridan''': ''...[[I Need a Freaking Drink|Bring me a bottle of vodka]], [[Russian Roulette|a revolver and one bullet]].'' }}
** In the shortlived sequel series ''[[Crusade]]'', Captain Gideon subverted the trope the first time it appeared by ordering that the Excalibur's sensors be recalibrated so that the readings were back ''on'' the scale. Given that they are adventuring out on the frontier, they run into that kind of all the freaking time, and he'd like to know if the ship's [[Wave Motion Gun]] might actually work on that particular target.
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** In this rare case, they're using equipment that's specifically stated to be ill-suited for measuring its power, so it almost subverts this trope.
*** How ill-suited? They stuck the Shard in the ship's engines and measured the output from there. Being an engine, the gauges only go up so far. Being a Shard of Nethicite (a substance specifically noted for ''sucking in Mist''), {{spoiler|the ship goes down soon after}}.
* In ''[[Lufia]] II'', when the party steps forward to have their personal energy measures by Lexis's kymograph, Guy's results are five times more than the highest reading Lexis had ever seen, then Selan's are shown to be eight times more, then for Maxim, yes, the
* ''[[Homeworld]]'''s Nebula missions feature this. However, it is stated that your personnel are working to recalibrate them to compensate.
** Done straight when the Bentusi are first encountered. Made hilarious by the calm way it's stated.
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** Even more hilarious is the fact that Egon is not astounded, but ''annoyed''. Of course, being the super-brain that he is, he probably just doesn't like having something he can't quantify.
* In ''[[Fallout]] 3'', the player has a radiation measuring device. At the end of the game, {{spoiler|if the player steps into the highly irradiated control room of the Project Purity building, the meter will get maxed at +100,000 (as in, more than one-hundred-thousand rads) and jiggles.}} Mercifully, no-one comments on this.
** There is also another area ( {{spoiler|The above-ground entrance to Vault 87}}) that will irradiate you to
*** This is incredibly annoying seeing as how at some point in the game you get paid to have locations marked on your map. In order to get {{spoiler|Vault 87}} marked you have to run up to it even though you can within five feet of it FROM THE INSIDE OF THE VAULT. The price you get for the mark doesn't justify the means, unless you just want bragging rights. Even more annoying is that {{spoiler|Enclave soldiers make it through the impassible door and instant almost instant death radiation and you STILL can't get through that door.}}
**** Side note: With the user perk Attack of the
* ''[[Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door]]'' had the Iron Cleft Bros. with a defense so high it was even in Goombella's book marked as ???. [[Puzzle Boss|The only thing hard enough to hurt a Iron Cleft is another Iron Cleft]].
* ''[[Free Space]] 2'' had a Vasudan sensor officer describing the mass readings of the Sathanas as "Exceeding superdestroyer class".
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'''Nappa:''' Whaaaaaat?
'''Vegeta:''' I had the scouter upside down. It's over 9000. [[A Glass in the Hand|*crushes scouter*]] }}
* When [[Protectors of the Plot Continuum]] are on a mission, and [[Canon Defilement]]
* According to [[Rational Wiki]], [http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Irony_meter irony meters] have a habit of exploding when this trope comes into effect.
* '' [[Atop the Fourth Wall]]'': when Superman picks up Wonder Woman in "Amazons Attack #3 and 4", his stupidity level percent goes over 9000.
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** Scarily, certain types of radiation detectors, if they are energized while in a strong radiation field, will actually ''read zero'' instead of pegging. Of course, [[Reality Is Unrealistic|don't expect any plot points to hinge on this]].
* In [[Real Life]], a sensor being off-scale may mean the sensor or its wiring has failed. Whether it fails off-scale low or off-scale high depends on the type of sensor and on the kind of damage. On the Columbia Space Shuttle accident, several sensors on the left wing (most of them being left over from early tests from when it was the first space shuttle) registered off-scale readings. By observing the relative timing of the sensor failures and knowing the layout of the wiring within the wing, the investigators were able to determine the path of the damage.
** The driver of a BMW Mini was once issued a speeding ticket...for going 3000
** It still means often enough that the number it's reading is higher than the highest number, or less commonly, lower than the lowest number the sensor is equipped to display or read. Scales and electronic balances (weight/mass), for example, have this problem often.
* C'mon, has nobody else pegged their speedometer on a straightaway at 2am? This is ''especially'' common in cars from the 1980s; most speedometers from that period top at
** Varies from country to country. In the UK, speedometer dials often go up to 120 or 140, even for cars that struggle to do more than 90.
*** I think it's a Commonwealth thing, because here in South Africa that happens as well. I mean, when your bog standard Ford, which maxes out at maybe
*** This is exactly why the depth meter in Das Boot, as mentioned above, only went so high. If it went higher, SOMEBODY would try to beat it. While going faster than your car can safely handle on the road is not so smart, in a submarine it can be positively lethal: hello, "crush depth". As it sounds like, that's [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|the depth]] at which the sub's builders expect a catastrophic hull failure, followed promptly by the tremendous pressures of being far underwater crushing the sub and everything in it. Pegging the meter on your depth counter usually means you'll be staying below for the rest of your life—which, if you're lucky, won't be very long at all.
**** During [[World War II]], submarines often went below their rated crush depth in desperate attempts to evade enemy destroyers. Sometimes they survived, sometimes they didn't. This was because the crush depth rating was an estimate; submarines were too expensive to actually send one down as far as possible to see what depth would crush it. The same is even more true with modern submarines, but computer modeling allows for much more accurate estimates.
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**** Might be more of a 'Desperate Times Require Desperate [[Accidental Pun|Measures]]' type thing.
** Used to be, a candid "No, officer, I don't know how fast I was going; the speedometer doesn't go that high" could get you out of a ticket if the officer was having a good day. Suffice it to say, [[Don't Try This At Home]].
* Subverted in mathematics, where the [[wikipedia:Normal distribution|most commonly used probability distribution]] (and thus probably the closest thing in pure math to the kind of things this trope covers) has a non-zero value for all finite arguments. So if you have something that's, say, 18 standard deviations from the norm all the usual data finding techniques technically still apply to it (obviously, the possibility of it being an outlier would mean that the
** For example, the book "Littlewood's Miscellany" points out that you can use actuarial charts to give a probability of living to be 1000 - it's just ''really'' small (something like 1 in 10^10^20).
** Actually it is played horribly straight, and this trope is truth in general for any theory, including ZFC (the standard Set theory that is used to build Maths). For instance, the very existence of a "Set that contains all existing Sets" would lead into a contradiction, and therefore can't exist. This means that such an object is off the scale for ZFC, and thus off the scale for standard mathematics too. Some alternative foundation theories, such as NBG, will be able to describe "Proper Classes of all Sets", but in the end, due to Gödel's incompleteness theorem, any theory either is incapable of having arithmetic built on it, or has ridiculous large amounts of things that are off the scale.
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* On [[FSTDT]], an overly ironic statement is said to have [[Readings Blew Up the Scale|"busted my irony meter",]]implying that the readings are off the scale.
* An actual example: The US Embassy monitors the pollutants in Beijing air. Their scale goes from 1-500, so readings of "bad" or "hazardous" appear frequently for the city...until recently, when one of the readings broke the 500 mark and the warning read as "crazy bad." The Embassy is now forced to re-evaluate their scale. Article [http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/nov/19/crazy-bad-beijing-air-pollution here.]
* One of the big differences between analog and digital recordings (for both audio and video) is that the "scale" for digital recordings is very tightly
** A lot of music is currently mastered to exploit the limitations of digital audio by boosting quieter parts of the signal to maximum level, thereby creating the perception that the sound is louder than it really is. See [[Loudness War]] for details.
* One of the hottest peppers is the Bhut Jalokia, which reaches 1,000,000 on the [[wikipedia:Scoville scale|Scoville scale]]. Still, there are four peppers that come in above 855,000 on the Scoville scale: Naga Viper pepper, Infinity Chilli, Bhut Jolokia chili pepper, Trinidad Scorpion Butch T pepper.<ref>Your typical jalapeño? Only maxes out at 6,000 Scoville units.</ref> At that level, trying to tell them apart by personal observation is a distinction without a difference.
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