Question: In a few episodes, the FBI agents will walk into a room and say "smell that?" and the reply is "shots fired", supposedly because they can smell the distinct odor of burnt gunpowder. Then they'll look behind a desk and find a dead body in a pool of blood. But wouldn't the smell of a dead person, or the blood, be way more overpowering? Or would it take too long for a dead body to start to smell? And how long would the smell of gunfire in an enclosed room last?
Numb3rs (2005)
1 question in Power
Starring: Judd Hirsch, David Krumholtz, Rob Morrow, Alimi Ballard
Continuity mistake: When Charlie Epps is writing a quadrillion on the whiteboard, the writing alternates between shots. Most noticably when he first writes it down, there is a significant downward tendency of the 000 groups. In the next shot, they are pretty much horizontal. Also the shapes of the commas alter.
Amita Ramanujan: Charlie, where did you learn all this stuff about assassination?
Charlie Eppes: If I told you that I'd have to kill you.
Amita Ramanujan: Okay, seriously.
Charlie Eppes: Seriously.
Trivia: Judd Hirsch is an astro-physicist and can actually do the math Charlie does on the show. He caught the acting bug in school and chose that over physics.
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Answer: It takes 24-48 hours before a decaying body begins producing a decaying odor. It takes a number of days for it to intensify enough to be immediately noticeable when walking into a room.
raywest ★