Using a white board or having a character flat out say the information are both bad storytelling. A better filmmaker would have been able to convey such information organically. At least the saying it flat out approach could have been worked into the movie as an old emergency warning broadcast, or early on in the outbreak when people could conceivably still be ignorant.

Also, I didn't think the weakness to hearing aids was that blatant. It was certainty better than the water vulnerability of the aliens from Signs. It just felt silly that the all the world's militaries with all their armor piercing weapons couldn't do much to these monsters but a wounded mother with a shotgun and her child could.

Just when a fella' gets tired of remakes of remakes on the big screen and tv, and thinks the well of fresh ideas in arts and performance are all used up or just aren't inspiring any more, something like this comes along. Even at more than 5 minutes in length, it holds you until the very end, which is something in these days of instant gratification and click click click click . All this, and an initially unexpected choice of music that wound up really complimenting the dancers. Nicely done.

I'm pretty sure the stupidest war ever was the War of Jenkins' Ear, which not only was dumb in it's own merit but also spawned two additional wars that killed close to 2 million people.

Basically Britain and a trading company decided that a little war would help to spur trade, so they seized on an 8 year old incident involving the Spanish boarding a ship and cutting off the captain's ear to fan the flames of conflict.

While the casualties of this little conflict were only around 30k dead or wounded, and a paltry 500 ships, it nicely helped kick off the War of Austrian Succession. That fun conflict led to around half a million dead.

Not satisfied, the powers of Europe stewed over the previous two incidents and then decided to really get down and dirty. The Seven Years war was the first really 'global' war, involving every European great power of the time and spanning five continents. Roughly 1.25 million people got to shuffle their mortal coil off the world thanks, in part, to a little trade war over an ear.

Ah, good to hear no one was seriously injured. I knew that unconscious guy with the head wound was faking. Probably just trying to impress the ladies.

Your video, How powerful assault-style rifles lead to devastating wounds, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

"There's no other legal tool available to the public capable of mass murders with so little effort."

I disagree. Petrol and cars/trucks. Both are legal and easily used to commit mass murder (and have been). I'll add swords (long knives) into this with a caveat - you need to be a highly trained swordsman to commit such an atrocity.

Cars are so dangerous that they have killed more people in the US in the last 50 years by accident than guns have on purpose. It took 50 years of concerted effort by subsequent US administrations to get the yearly death toll by cars lower than that of firearms (the curve for cars only recently dipped below that of firearms).

Knives can cause as much or more vascular damage than a typical firearm wound. The difference is that knives require the smallest interpersonal confrontation distance (it is hand to hand combat - people don't like this), and to consistently achieve high levels of vascular damage requires a higher degree of training.

The right of non-restricted people to own firearms has little affect on murder rates. E.g. Australia has a higher rate of firearm ownership now than before its lauded firearms laws came into effect in 1997. The majority of studies done on this topic conclude that the restrictions had no effect (or no measurable effect) on the continued reduction in firearm fatalities.

I think the greatest issue in the US is that some people see the use of firearms as a solution to some problems where it is not a good solution. I.e. it is a cultural issue.

They ( other politicians) haven't been asked.

If Trump would have said Yep I will benefit bigley. The media wound piled on even more and might even sway some members to vote against it.

Gather damn if you do damn if you don't.

Hope you had a great holiday.

So many dumb mistakes in the video...

The cop was definitely in the wrong shooting the guy and if he had waited just a half a second longer, his brain probably would have registered that the guy was complying and simply holding his wallet; i.e. not a threat. The cop was likely in a defensible position, behind the squad car, so taking that extra time before using lethal force was likely doable. But that is a lot of assumptions from my comfortable office chair.

Still, to just leave the guy laying on the ground after shooting him and then continuing to bark commands at him like he's still a threat...ugh. I've seen so many wrongful shooting videos where this happens, so it makes you wonder if it is a policy thing to minimize potential for a greater lawsuit (e.g. what if rolling the guy over to address his gunshot wound causes further damage, etc); perhaps it is to protect the officer from viral infection. Who knows, but it certainly seems callous and cold hearted.

With that said, the driver is a moron getting out of his vehicle like that. Wtf. You live in a country where your police officers are all too frequently shooting unarmed citizens by mistake and you decide to jump out of your car with your dark wallet? For what purpose? Turn off the car, turn on your cabin light, roll down the window, and wait for the officer to approach. Only reach for your wallet/permit when you're asked for your ID. Seems like common sense to me.

Another thing to keep in mind is that different forms of elements and chemicals have very different properties.

Pure elemental liquid mercury is pretty cool stuff. Lots of people (myself included) can remember playing with elemental mercury in their bare hands in chemistry classes, etc., and even that sort of cavalier use basically never resulted in cases of mercury poisoning.

In sheer statistical terms, I gather that it is relatively safe to have pure liquid mercury directly on your skin -- cupped in your hands, say -- for short to medium periods of time. Open wounds, even small ones, can make that significantly worse. Even ingesting elemental mercury generally doesn't result in too much absorption into the body, but it remains a terrible idea. Evaporation of elemental mercury even at room temperature can lead to inhalation of mercury vapor, which is drastically more dangerous. So, ventilation and environmental controls are quite important.

This organic mercury sounds like terribly nasty stuff, but fortunately people are very unlikely to be exposed to it outside of a lab or if you are a scientist who is intentionally synthesizing it.

I think it is kind of a shame that those high school chemistry type sessions of messing around with elemental mercury are pretty much gone today. On the other hand, even though the risks are lower with elemental mercury like that, the rewards aren't really all that high either. I have fun memories of messing around with the stuff, but it wasn't by any means necessary or important outside of pure academic curiosity. Better safe that sorry I guess, particularly when the extreme end of "sorry" results in horror stories like this.

Cassowary attacks

Cassowaries have a reputation in folklore for being dangerous to people and domestic animals. During World War II American and Australian troops stationed in New Guinea were warned to steer clear of them. In his book Living Birds of the World from 1958, ornithologist Ernest Thomas Gilliard wrote:

The inner or second of the three toes is fitted with a long, straight, murderous nail which can sever an arm or eviscerate an abdomen with ease. There are many records of natives being killed by this bird.

This assessment of the danger posed by cassowaries has been repeated in print by authors including Gregory S. Paul (1988) and Jared Diamond (1997). A 2003 historical study of 221 cassowary attacks showed that 150 had been against humans. 75% of these had been from cassowaries that had been fed by people. 71% of the time the bird had chased or charged the victim. 15% of the time they kicked. Of the attacks, 73% involved the birds expecting or snatching food, 5% involved defending natural food sources, 15% involved defending themselves from attack, and 7% involved defending their chicks or eggs. The 150 attacks included only one human death.

The one documented human death was caused by a cassowary on 6 April 1926. 16-year-old Phillip McClean and his brother, aged 13, came across a cassowary on their property and decided to try to kill it by striking it with clubs. The bird kicked the younger boy, who fell and ran away as his older brother struck the bird. The older McClean then tripped and fell to the ground. While he was on the ground the cassowary kicked him in the neck, opening a 1.25 cm (0.49 in) wound which may have severed his jugular vein. The boy died of his injuries shortly afterwards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassowary

Um...this ended his 28 hour long stabbing spree, the reason the cops were there and why they recognized him.....sounds like "something stupid"and illegal to me, as did pulling the knife and stabbing people right in front of them, which they continued to just watch until citizens detained and disarmed him, and only then did they take him away, ignoring the mortal wounds he caused to those citizens, so they were not correct at all, he was a known armed public threat that they didn't even warn others about, they just cowered behind the door out of fear of a non existent gun, then offered no assistance to the man that just did their job....and took credit for it....sorry.
I think you need to watch again, assuming you watched at all, you missed literally everything.

This must be the civilian version. I am convinced that, like the hoola hoop, the original metal Slinky was actually a failed experiment by the defense industry to create a hand thrown weapon that could inflict great entanglement on the target, and with sufficient velocity, bleeding. At least that's how things normally wound up when we got bored of walking them down the stairs and started swinging them over our heads.

I don't believe for one second that you could keep up that rate for a full minute, much less over 10. If you take the time it takes to aim a 300 yard shot accurately, you're talking 10-12 shots per minute.
Shooting with your finger at maximum speed is always far less accurate and slower than full auto with the same gun. You have to prove it to me that I'm wrong, because that's simple logic. Full auto is a more stable rate, so easier to adapt to, and doesn't require you to vibrate one hand, shaking the gun, dividing your attention, and tiring you out.
It's silly to imply the full auto functionality didn't exponentially raise the number both wounded and killed. Without the crowd, it might have made less difference. With the crowd, absolutely not imo.

I shoot regularly (often multiple times per week). My lazy firing rate has splits (time between shots) of approximately 0.2 seconds. I can do that for a long time (many minutes before I slow done). That is a rate of 300 rounds per minute. My fast splits are approximately 0.12 seconds. I can't do that for very long (probably one magazine). That is a rate of 600 rounds per minute.

An AR-15 on full auto fires at approximately 600 rounds per minute - twice what I can do on semi-auto. Using a competitive shooter as an example, and taking into account magazine changes (which with training are done much quicker than any of the operators in AR-15 to failure tests I've seen), and assuming lazy splits of 0.30 seconds, a competitive shooter can probably fire at a faster rate per minute than a novice can on full auto (i.e. well more than the approximately 150 rounds per minute a novice shooter achieves when taking into account magazine changes).

The thing is, it is well known in military and firearm enthusiast circles that the massive reduction in accuracy when shooting on full auto does not give the perceived payoff. You have much less control when firing a fully automatic firearm. You hit your target less often. Semi auto plus aiming = hits on target. At the range he was shooting (300 to 350 meters), the same lunatic deciding to aim his firearm would have resulted in less wounding and more fatalities.

Any ex-military here? Chime in.

1. Mass shootings are <1% of the murder rate, and murder is <1% of the death rate. Getting wound up about mass shootings is as dumb as getting wound up about terrorism. They're both very small in relation to how much people freak out.
2. We already have lots of gun control. Especially in places like California, where the killer bought most of his guns legally and passed a background check.

3. Bump stocks were the real problem. Even the NRA is open to restricting bump stocks. Let's do that.

4. Let's not go overboard with the Australian solution. Australia's murder rate almost halved from 1990 to 2015, and people erroneously give the buyback credit for that, but in that same 25 year time span the US murder rate went down even more (from 9.4 to 4.5 per 100,000) The murder rate went down everywhere in that time frame due to banning leaded gasoline that causes brain damage. Also due to some smaller factors (more abortion, better software for predictive policing).