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 Discussion on question by Grollo: How…

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Murphy
Jul 11, 2019 16:43
"Doctor, you need to make the incision, he's bleeding internally and he's going to die." "I know... but I can't bring myself to cut into his skin....."
 

 Discussion on answer by fireshark519:…

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Murphy
May 16, 2019 19:03
@JonH this was definitely common in the UK in my parents day... but I've never experienced it while working in the UK. maybe a generational thing?
 

 Discussion on answer by DenisS: Was t…

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Murphy
May 11, 2019 05:30
Examples of home invasions, filed under "mass shooting" and "defensive use" gunviolencearchive.org/incident/1305294 gunviolencearchive.org/incident/1292941 So incidents where gunviolencearchive list the shooter as the victim and unharmed, filed under "defensive use" are also considered mass shootings.
Murphy
May 11, 2019 05:30
A similar example here:gunviolencearchive.org/incident/1329075 "3 bystanders shot by police "
 

 Discussion on question by Ray: Is it …

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Murphy
Feb 2, 2019 13:47
Why are there 2 users called Ray with different ID's and user pages answering queries about this question???
 

 Discussion on answer by Philip Kendal…

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Murphy
Jan 19, 2019 07:21
"Make at least a nominal attempt to reconcile things with the company first." Phoning them until they claim harassment would seem to have already met the criteria for this.
 

 Discussion on answer by Murphy: So, l…

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Murphy
Dec 17, 2018 12:55
Note: the above is without time dilation. with time dilation the incident energy would be about 70x or about 7.21 × 10^8 joules/second.... ish.
Murphy
Dec 17, 2018 12:53
@Vashu this site:

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/quantum/radfrac.html

Gives me 6.66×10^6 joules/second emissions from a black body at 3694K and surface area of 0.6309 square meters.

time dilation would speed incident energy up from the point of view of the sphere which would make it faster/more extreme but rounding off to 7 hours...

2.613×10^11 J / 25200 gives us 1.03× 10^7 joules/second.

Comfortably higher than the 6.66×10^6 needed to reach the melting point of tungsten.

Note that tungsten isn't a perfect radiator so the difference may be larger.
Murphy
Dec 6, 2018 10:27
@Vashu I think my reply to Mooseboys applies. Also, I don't think blackbody radiation is enough, it would imply that you could pump the entire output of an 10MW hydroelectric dam into a vacum-insulated 2-foot ,1 ton sphere of tungsten and have it not melt. with time dilation it would have to do so 70x as fast.
Murphy
Dec 6, 2018 10:21
@MooseBoys I think that may be the other way round. from the spheres reference frame the journey takes 1/70th the time but it's getting hit with the fine mist of gas 70x faster so instead of 7 minutes the sphere would be hit with enough energy to vaporize it within about 6 seconds.
Murphy
Dec 4, 2018 22:04
@J.ChrisCompton I just googled for atoms per cm^3 for solar wind. Cold interstellar medium outside the solar system has a higher density (up to 3x higher than for my calcs) of atoms if it's uncharged. I don't think it's down the being in the plane of the solar system.
Murphy
Dec 4, 2018 22:04
@BillK take the mass of the earths atmosphere, to simplify I'm treating it all as nitrogen. now half it as only half the earth is facing the cloud. that gives you 2.57×10^18 kg or 1.84×10^20 mol. To kick that kind of mass to escape velocity would cost 1.612×10^26 joules. It would take 25000 times as much energy to strip the atmosphere vs what the bullet is carrying. if every joule went into heating the air it wouldn't even raise it by 1 degree. (Of course not really even so more damaging) The dispersion is mostly spherical so much would simply miss the earth entirely.
Murphy
Dec 4, 2018 22:04
@BillK I agree. It's a big deal, there would be major heat flash (though re: other posts, maybe only a small fraction of the cloud hits which would dial it down) but also the radiation wouldn't all be in the same wavelenghts and likely wouldn't be able to pass through the atmosphere as effectively as sunlight and a big fraction of the energy might get dumped into the air itself. but it probably wouldn't kill everyone. If it happened with pacific ocean facing the bullet it might have little effect on most life as the oceans wouldn't even notice it.
Murphy
Dec 4, 2018 22:04
@ash I think that's just the Specific Heat. there's also the Heat of Vaporization to cover the energy cost of the phase change. though I didn't count Heat of Fusion for when it goes from solid to liquid.
Murphy
Dec 4, 2018 22:04
@Yakk that kind of stuff is why I love playing around with these kinds of answers. clouds of plasma filled with space lightling bolts are just so much more interesting as a mental image than a boring block of metal. leftaroundabout: while I agree... there are limits to how far I can go before it leaves the realm of what I can even guess at. At lower fractions of C I can at least pretend it's a little bit Newtonian... but I lack the knowledge to calculate for particle accelerators... Though I'll happily add any details people can do approximate calcs for.
Murphy
Dec 4, 2018 22:04
@CSM shudder nope nope nope. bag-o-worms. Not even gonna try. I'm just gonna seek refuge in the idea that the energy involved is so massive that everything is so hot that it's too hot for there even to be fire.
Murphy
Dec 4, 2018 22:04
@BioTronic When you get up to large enough fractions of the speed of light... you have to think more and more like you're firing bullets into impact gel even for what we'd normally think of as vacuum. atoms from the front of the spear are gonna interact with the sides pushing it out of line, the front will want to go slower vs the back as it impacts matter, it'll quickly be surrounded by an inferno of energy and your spear could very well quickly turn side on and you still just get a cloud of cosmic rays flying at your target.
Murphy
Dec 4, 2018 22:04
I probably would also have to think about time dilation.. but I'm not gonna open that can of worms....
Murphy
Dec 4, 2018 22:04
@Yakk that's extremely informative. I had no idea how to even start on the gas calculations. "atomic cross-section impacts" hmm. I believe that's straying into calculations that are a bit beyond my level of knowledge. It's easier when I don't have to treat matter as hard radiation interacting with hard radiation..... :-P hmm... even at 150,000 km that would imply a lot of the cloud missing the earth.
Murphy
Dec 4, 2018 22:04
@BioTronic if it was a marginal thing I'd agree with you... but it's within minutes and even assuming that it starts it's journey at pluto is probably forgiving. Further, the gas around it is increasing the surface area for impacts and those provide even more opportunity for radiated heat back towards the original bullet, the gas is super-high temperature so it should be pushed away from the core fast. Further, the relative speed difference vs gas it's impacting is so massive that the pressure of the gas isn't going to be overcoming it. again, perhaps if the mass were larger.. but I doubt.
 

 Discussion on question by kenorb: Doe…

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Murphy
Nov 22, 2018 11:56
*correction, "not the length of the sagitta."
Murphy
Nov 22, 2018 11:55
@Rokta I thought the same at first when I checked how large the bulge would be but the posted numbers are actually correct since the 300 feet is the height an object at the far beech would need to be visible, not the height of the length of the sagitta
Murphy
Nov 22, 2018 11:25
I linked to information on a classic experiment about the exact phenomenon. (which you dismiss as "theoretical")

The second half of the answer is entirely for clarity sake to make the "why" understandable to the reader.

It doesn't rely on my own "authority" in any way.
 

 Discussion on question by shitty_auth…

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Murphy
Mar 14, 2018 05:47
@shitty_author in that case almost everyone is in murder-afterlife since everyone contributes a tiny tiny bit towards the deaths of others. The non-murder afterlife is basically just babies and toddlers too young to slightly contribute towards the deaths of others alone with almost no adults.
Murphy
Mar 14, 2018 05:47
@shitty_author re: Unintentional - Indirectly responsible. Say I'm a bartender and one of my customers dies of liver failure. I'm not the only person selling him alcohol but I was directly involved and handed him some of the drinks. Do I end up in murder-afterlife? If someone dies of lung cancer caused by second hand smoke and I smoked in the same room with them? Only 1 degree of separation. If a thousand people in a city die from diseases caused by diesel fumes and I'm one of the million people driving diesel cars creating those fumes there's still only 1 degree of separation.
 

 Discussion on question by Allure: Don…

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Murphy
Feb 11, 2018 19:46
re: 1. there's a number of big trusts like The Welcome Trust and similar founded by very wealthy individuals who do exactly this and have been going for decades. Setting up a trust which funds a smaller number of researchers forever can be very worthwhile to consider. Typical format for funds in the 10million range would be something like a [your name] fellowship which funds a professor or similar to work in the field pretty much forever.
 

 Discussion on answer by Murphy: Are f…

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Murphy
Oct 17, 2017 10:09
@jpmc26 traditionally assessing the likelyhood that such numbers could be chance is a large part of the point of doing statistics, in this case it apparently comes out to an estimate of about a 1 in 25 probability that it's just chance.
Murphy
Oct 14, 2017 04:48
@Hamsteriffic You mean something like "TL:DR: yes the claim appears to match the research paper but the difference is far smaller than it makes it sound"
Murphy
Oct 14, 2017 04:48
@MichaelAnderson I believe they adjusted for multiple comparisons.
Murphy
Oct 14, 2017 04:48
@ChrisH They also matched on surgeon age and years in paractice. Table 1 has a comparison of the 2 matched groups
 

 Discussion on answer by Ben Miller: D…

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Murphy
May 16, 2017 11:31
@Asleepace that is indeed a deeper rabbithole and you might also want to include the idea of what gives money it's value. it helps to separate the idea of wealth/value from cash/money. If you ,say, carve a valuable item from wood you've not created any money but you have created wealth and increased the total wealth in the economy.
 

 Discussion on answer by Myles: Workin…

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Murphy
Apr 3, 2017 06:40
@emory indeed. that's what I was talking about.
Murphy
Apr 3, 2017 06:40
I was under the impression that once you got to the stage of getting people to do work, even if it's a short term trial, that it's traditional to pay them. Whether it's a straight scam or not is only half of the equation.
 

 Discussion on answer by TheBlackCat: …

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Murphy
Mar 24, 2017 23:06
To add another crystallized sugar. it was an extremely expensive luxury. about 50 cent for a kg bag.
 

 Discussion on question by resch: What…

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Murphy
Jan 19, 2017 15:48
I'm unclear on the limits and abilities of this magic. can a mage control the flight of a pebble far from themselves? What's their maximum range or limits? could a mage sit half a mile back hitting the enemy commanders with magically guided thrown daggers coated in poison? Can they create magical traps? What kind of fine control do they have? could mage lift and maneuver a drop of poison into the meal of a general hundreds of yards away?
 

 Discussion on question by Bryan McClu…

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Murphy
Jan 19, 2017 03:02
Does only the person saying the prayer need to believe or also the person who wrote the prayer in the first place? If a prayer of banishment written by a conman who didn't believe is spoken by someone who believes with all their heart does it banish the demon?
 

 Discussion on answer by Raghu Parthas…

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Murphy
Nov 6, 2016 00:09
@LightnessRacesinOrbit I think the implication is that if it were not for all the published work done by others they get to build on they wouldn't be nearly as successful since they'd have to build all their own foundations. Shoulders of giants and all that. If you can't get a patent out of something and monetize it within a few years pharma isn't terribly interested.
 

 Discussion on question by Juan Alvez:…

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Murphy
Oct 28, 2016 03:26
What do you believe the professors job is? to put you through a ritual or to certify that you are competent to a certain level?
 

 Discussion on question by Alpha: Inte…

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Murphy
Oct 25, 2016 16:18
it needs to be asked to clarify: is this code part of an open source project? A reasonable number of employers open source their code and if the person interviewing can point to such a project then that entirely changes the context. I could perfectly ethically hand the whole codebase for some things I've been paid to write to a potential employer since they're already published openly.
 

 Discussion on question by Canadian Lu…

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Murphy
Jul 16, 2016 23:01
Are you part of a registered profession (engineer, doctor, lawyer, accountant etc)?
 

 Discussion on question by cili: Shoul…

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Murphy
Jun 16, 2016 17:58
If various economics experiments are anything to go by: If you negotiate at all you'll tend not to be part of the group getting the short end of the stick with the pay gap. A large part of the gap is explained by most women simply making no attempt to negotiate while more men do.
 

 Discussion between Sklivvz and Murphy

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Murphy
Jun 15, 2016 15:44
I need to heavily edit the answer to better match the question as it stands.
Murphy
Jun 15, 2016 15:44
My initial beef was more with their choice of criteria being then used to support the claim in the graph.
Murphy
Jun 15, 2016 15:42
The motherjones dataset appears to be good/correct as far as I can find with their exclusion criteria.
Murphy
Jun 15, 2016 15:42
With the revised question i agree, the example doesn't fit motherjones criteria.
Murphy
Jun 15, 2016 15:40
I agree, though in terms of the initial question about the legality of the firearms used in mass-shootings I believe that the exclusion criteria of "Crimes primarily related to gang activity, armed robbery, or domestic violence in homes are not included." is very likely to exclude a disproportionate amount of illegal weapons.
Murphy
Jun 15, 2016 15:36
Though I'd need to check that, various articles on it warned that how the FBI treated mass shootings has changed.
Murphy
Jun 15, 2016 15:33
I added an example datapoint from the larger ShootingTracker dataset. I suspect it would have been excluded from the motherjones data since they're using the pre-2012 definition of 4 fatalities not including the shooter but in more recent times the FBI have included shootings with I think 4 or more injuries not including the shooter.
Murphy
Jun 15, 2016 15:30
Fair enough, in that case the graph is indeed based on a reasonable dataset though that dataset may or may not be representative of mass shootings in general.

the motherjones dataset was expanded to cover up to 2016
Murphy
Jun 15, 2016 15:26
You appear to be talking me saying that a claim of yours is factually false as a personal attack.