Dead Sea Dig 2013-03-25

[Boxilar]

I think we might be spending too much time worrying about which weapon could have caused Not-Becky to become hamburger. Does it really matter? She's roadkill and Kathy is caught in the middle of something that overwhelms the mind. The shock factor alone with the surprise is enough to break anyone. The main point is this shows a lot of what made Kathy the way she is. The rest will show how she survived and support her sudden change on the current field trip. I suspect it is more important on how it affected her than how it happened.

Yeah, were obsessing over minor details. The image is horrific. Katherine is being immersed in a horror that few of us have experienced or can understand. Some of us are dealing with what is a traumatic event happening to a favorite character by focusing on the minutia. It's a method of detachment. Otherwise, I'd cry for her every time I saw that image, fictional character or not.

[Fairportfan]

FYI, it's not just the size and mass of the bullet, it's the speed. Double the speed or mass, quadruple the energy. Double both, 16x energy. The trick is to get the energy to stay in the target instead of just passing through and working on the scenery beyond.

Nope. Kinetic energy is 1/2 * mass * velocity^2.

Double the mass, double the energy. Double the velocity, quadruple the energy.

The famous Colt M1911.45 caliber pistol was designed specifically for stopping power. It was a response to the Moro guerrillas during the Philippine-American War, who used pain-killing drugs prior to their attacks. This video shows how the shock wave does damage to ballistic gel, and concentrates all the energy within the target. Slug is 230 grain at 889fps.

The M1911 was intentionally designed to get its energy from a large, massive round traveling at a rather low speed - that's only 600 MPH - not much faster than an airliner. I can personally attest that, under the right conditions, you can actually see that slug go downrange.

A 9mm round that achieves the same energy level as the heavier .45 ACP round by boosting velocity will have greater penetration and less stopping power than the ,45.

Stopping power/energy transfer is better achieved in general with a larger round traveling more slowly ...because, if nothing else, the faster round spends less time in the target to transfer energy. A relatively localised shock wave as the fast round goes in and comes out the other side will do less overall damage than the larger, slower round carrying the same energy.

[Fairportfan]

Heh, if some people found Pulp Fiction hard to follow, their heads probably exploded (much like our dear departed Jared) when they saw 12 Monkeys.

Try Once Upon a Time in America. Much more complex, without time travel.

A character walks out a door, walks back in, and it's thirty years later. The narrative jumps back and forth over a fifty-plus-year period.

[Fairportfan]

Nothing explosive or Kathryn would have been hit by fragments. Mortars, recoilless rifles, and RPG are definitely out.

Check the next page...

[Grantwhy]

I think we might be spending too much time worrying about which weapon could have caused Not-Becky to become hamburger. Does it really matter? She's roadkill and Kathy is caught in the middle of something that overwhelms the mind. The shock factor alone with the surprise is enough to break anyone. The main point is this shows a lot of what made Kathy the way she is. The rest will show how she survived and support her sudden change on the current field trip. I suspect it is more important on how it affected her than how it happened.

You have a lot to learn about geeks especially geeks with too much time on their hands Geeks have to understand everything

It is also much easier to talk about balistics etc than it is to talk about how this comic makes us feel.

[Yamara]

It is also much easier to talk about balistics etc than it is to talk about how this comic makes us feel.

Indeed. All the mortal ballistics geekery only made me turn to Randall "xkcd" Munroe, who, as always, has the final word:

http://what-if.xkcd.com/1/

[Atomic]

Nope. Kinetic energy is 1/2 * mass * velocity^2.

Double the mass, double the energy. Double the velocity, quadruple the energy.

I stand corrected. Such are the perils of late night blogging!

[Fairportfan]

Nope. Kinetic energy is 1/2 * mass * velocity^2.

Double the mass, double the energy. Double the velocity, quadruple the energy.

I stand corrected. Such are the perils of late night blogging!

Those squares will bite you every time. It makes doing practical SPFX work with miniatures Interesting. Especially if something has to fal.

You wind up over-cranking/slowing down the action by a factor equal to the square root of the model scale to make it look right...

In Fie Hard, the explosion in the elevator shaft was particularly tricky, because the shaft miniature was built with forced perspective, meaning that the "scale" of the miniature changed continuously along its length. They put a rheostat on the camera's speed control, and did the shot several times, manually changing the camera speed as the miniature fireball shot up the shaft, then picked the one that looked best.

[MerchManDan]

I've said before that Wapsi requires a certain amount of in intelligence to follow. Paul doesn't spoon feed us. He gives us the info he thinks we need and lets us draw our own conclusions about what is going on.
Some of the complaints I saw were about jumping to a flashback without warning. I guess those folks hated Pulp Fiction. All that nonlinear storytelling and jumping around must be hard to follow for some people of....limited intelligence.

Hey, now. They have poor attitudes, but that's no reason for us to repond in kind. WS might require an open mind & a willingness to try an unfamiliar way of storytelling, but these things aren't indicative of a higher IQ.

[Fairportfan]

I've said before that Wapsi requires a certain amount of in intelligence to follow. Paul doesn't spoon feed us. He gives us the info he thinks we need and lets us draw our own conclusions about what is going on.
Some of the complaints I saw were about jumping to a flashback without warning. I guess those folks hated Pulp Fiction. All that nonlinear storytelling and jumping around must be hard to follow for some people of....limited intelligence.

Hey, now. They have poor attitudes, but that's no reason for us to repond in kind. WS might require an open mind & a willingness to try an unfamiliar way of storytelling, but these things aren't indicative of a higher IQ.

No, but the contrapositive of that statement (i think contrapositive is the word i want) may apply.

[Jabberwonky]

I've said before that Wapsi requires a certain amount of in intelligence to follow. Paul doesn't spoon feed us. He gives us the info he thinks we need and lets us draw our own conclusions about what is going on.
Some of the complaints I saw were about jumping to a flashback without warning. I guess those folks hated Pulp Fiction. All that nonlinear storytelling and jumping around must be hard to follow for some people of....limited intelligence.

Hey, now. They have poor attitudes, but that's no reason for us to repond in kind. WS might require an open mind & a willingness to try an unfamiliar way of storytelling, but these things aren't indicative of a higher IQ.

No, but the contrapositive of that statement (i think contrapositive is the word i want) may apply.

Living proof that you don't have to be that intelligent to enjoy WS...
My mother enjoyed "Pulp Fiction" greatly, but often complained about the jumpy timeline. I attempted to edit a cut that was chronological for her. Not only was it quite a time and patience sink for someone with only passing knowledge of video editing, the story wasn't nearly as much fun.

[Grantwhy]

It is also much easier to talk about balistics etc than it is to talk about how this comic makes us feel.

Indeed. All the mortal ballistics geekery only made me turn to Randall "xkcd" Munroe, who, as always, has the final word:

http://what-if.xkcd.com/1/

I'm no ballistic geek, but I do like Randall's "What If? Machine Gun Jetpack" http://what-if.xkcd.com/21/
(best part? "Do you know why I pulled you over?")

[shadowinthelight]

I'm no ballistic geek, but I do like Randall's "What If? Machine Gun Jetpack" http://what-if.xkcd.com/21/
(best part? "Do you know why I pulled you over?")

… with a GSH-6-30, you could jump mountains

Must... get... one of these guns.

[Dave]

Well, there are these two little problems with doing any digs in the Middle East...

1. People still live there, and
2. They don't like each other.

In Biblical proportions.

What he said.

My wife and I just came back from a tour in Jordan, Israel, and { Palestine | The West Bank | The Occupied Territories | The Disputed Territories } (choose one entry from the latter list, and be prepared to justify your selection in writing). Lots of beautiful, wonderful, history-and-culture-filled stuff to see... and a tension in the air that you could cut with a dull cheese knife.

A Palestinian journalist we spoke with said that everything is political... no aspect of life is politically neutral. Even the simple act of deciding where to have a cup of coffee has significant political implications (since the popular Aromas chain has branches in several long-established Israeli settlements in the West Bank that are contrary to U.N. resolutions, many Palestinians holding Israeli citizenship consider it a taboo location). The very vocabularies that people use to (differently) describe places, cultural and religious groups, and events convey their own biases. Use the "wrong" term when discussing a matter with somebody and you may be "corrected" quite firmly.

The hell of it is, a high percentage of the people in every group we encountered said the same thing... they just want to get along with one another in peace, somehow. Unfortunately, there are enough people in the "highly positioned, to highly fanatic" range within each group to keep things seriously stirred up, enough long-standing Hatfield-and-McCoy grudges on all sides to keep the situation in a very touchy state, and enough political and religious leaders with their own incentives to "play to the radicals".

Archaeological digs are a very touchy topic, especially if the diggers propose to encroach on an area that members of one faith or another consider sacred or otherwise religiously sensitive... this can be considered to be desecration, and can (and has!) trigger riots leading to dozens of deaths.

It was a very instructive trip... but not a relaxing one. Sure made me appreciate the wisdom of America's founders, when they wrote the "freedom of religion" and "no state religion" and "no religious tests for officeholders" rules into our game-book.

(Petra is breathtaking, both figuratively and literally... the walk up to "The Monastery" is a steep climb but absolutely worth it. Everybody in the countries we visited makes great hummus, and argues over who did it first and who makes it best. The Golan Heights are green, lush, and filled with flowers this time of year. My wife said that seeing the Western Wall during peak prayer time on Sabbath evening of Passover week was one of the most amazing experiences she's ever had. Neither of us is religious, let alone devout... but being in Jerusalem on Good Friday, and seeing the procession and mass in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher was more than slightly moving! We met a Samaritan, had lunch with a Druze woman, met a Bedouin family, sang together in a huge resonant cistern with wonderful acoustics up on the ancient stronghold of Masada, and viewed the remaining portion of what is claimed to be the oldest building known in the world at Jericho. I carried along a small amateur radio, and managed to contact and talk with a guy I went to high school with in Philadelphia and haven't seen in nearly 40 years. I bought a sword. Yeah, it was an interesting trip.)

[KnightDelight]

The hell of it is, a high percentage of the people in every group we encountered said the same thing... they just want to get along with one another in peace, somehow. Unfortunately, there are enough people in the "highly positioned, to highly fanatic" range within each group to keep things seriously stirred up, enough long-standing Hatfield-and-McCoy grudges on all sides to keep the situation in a very touchy state, and enough political and religious leaders with their own incentives to "play to the radicals".

Yep. IMHO, 90% of the worlds troubles are caused by 10% of the worlds population. Those type-A personalities that seem to draw the others into their "games." For every person involved in some violent protest or conflict, there are thousands sitting at home wanting to just get along and wish those idiots in the streets would go home and shut the hell up for a change.