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Brandon Lee was killed on set by a bullet accidentally put in a gun. Why would this ever happen?
Dave Brown (firearms safety specialist) did a quite interesting Q&A with your question in it:
Q – First of all, let’s open with the question that always comes to mind whenever we think of firearms on film sets. Brandon Lee. What happened?
A – Well, like most serious incidents, it was not one big mistake but rather a chain of contributing factors. It actually began two weeks before that tragic night on the set of “The Crow.” The production needed some dummy cartridges for a close-up shot of loading a revolver. Not knowing better, they purchased real cartridges from a local gun store, pried off the bullets, dumped out the gunpowder and stuck the bullets back into the cases. Now, any firearms expert would be able to tell you that this is highly dangerous because, of course, the primers were still live, but unfortunately they were running out of both time and money at this point and had already sent their only firearms expert home early to save a few dollars.
While filming the close-ups, the actor they brought in for the scene was supposed to be supervised but the props assistant in charge of the firearm was busy doing other props work and left the actor on their own. Some witnesses reported they then saw the background performer pull the trigger while the “dummy” cartridges were still loaded in the chambers.
What people may not know is that if the primer is still live, when you pull the trigger there is no sound but the spark from the primer can expel a bullet an inch or two forward even with no gunpowder in the case. At the end of the day, the props assistant emptied out the cartridges and put the gun away. He knew nothing about cleaning the gun, let alone checking the barrel for obstructions.
Two weeks later, this same revolver loaded with blanks was used to fire at Brandon Lee. Again, the props assistant handling the gun had no clue how to check it for safety and simply loaded it with blanks. There was no firearms expert on set to instruct the actor how to “cheat” the angle to the side so that it doesn’t get pointed directly at the actor when fired.
Now, a blank has as much as twice the amount of gunpowder as a real cartridge and when that bullet was still lodged in the barrel from two weeks previous, the blank propelled the bullet out the barrel with the same explosive force as a real cartridge. The bullet struck Brandon Lee in the chest and he collapsed, never regaining consciousness. He died on the operating room table 13 hours later.
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Why does adrenaline in certain circumstances give people super human strength? (Being able to lift extremely heavy things off of people, etc.)
First its important to note that so called feats of “hysterical strength” are not scientifically recognized, although they are well documented. They clearly happen, but science has a hard time testing them, because its obviously very hard to reproduce in a lab.
However, they have given small tests, like testing grip strength, and then electrically stimulated the muscles and tested again, and found that people exhibit about 25% more strength under electroshock, which definitely verifies people are in general stronger than they’re normally able to access. Additionally, you may have heard of people being flung across an entire room after being electrocuted. This isn’t because of the electricity – electricity doesn’t move things like that – its because the shock caused massive muscle contraction, and the people flung themselves across the room, jumping far further than they would have believed possible under normal circumstances.
So, because they can’t test hysterical strength, we can only hypothesize why adrenaline causes it. More than likely it is because your muscles are under several inhibitory systems, including pain as well as the neurological restriction of simply having not enough signaling at any given time to activate all the muscle fibers in a group. Strength isn’t just about raw strength, its about timing; you need one perfectly timed electrical burst to signal all fibers to work in concert when exerting force. The more fibers activated simultaneously, the more strength you’ll have.
Adrenaline most likely acts to remove several different limiter systems. Your pain sensation is dulled or removed entirely, your blood vessels are dialated and your muscles are more heavily oxygenated, and your neural activity increases; more brain activity = increased signaling, which means you’re better able to activate more muscle fibers at once.
The reason we can’t do this all the time is fairly obvious – it puts much more strain on the body and consumes far more energy. Since our bodies evolved in times of scarcity, our bodies evolved a logical mechanism for limiting the bodies ability to use its full strength and energy; only when the brain sensed certain stimuli (a tiger, a child in trouble), would it release its natural chemicals that overrode its own internal limiters, allowing for a brief state of higher muscle performance.
– ninemiletree
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What is the functional differences between cruisers, destroyers, frigates, corvettes, battlecruisers, battleships, and dreadnoughts?
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“Dreadnaughts” are a type of battleship. Namely, those patterned after HMS Dreadnaught. These are all-big-gun ships. In that they carry a single set of large caliber guns in turrets that can freely traverse through a wide range of motion. Pre-Dreadnaughts generally carried a mixed battery of large guns, in less flexible mountings. The Dreadnaught-style won out because by the 19-teens naval artillery was accurate enough that an all-big-gun ship could expect to kill a mixed-guns ship before the older ship could bring it’s smaller guns into range.
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Destroyers evolved from Torpedo Boat Destroyers. The invention of the powered torpedo was a big deal in naval strategy. It meant a small, cheap, torpedo boat was now a threat to a big, expensive capital ship. Destroyers were designed as a fast type of ship with many smaller guns that could effectively kill torpedo boats before they could reach the big ships. They stayed in service after the torpedo boat era because of their usefulness as scouts, escorts, and anti-submarine/aircraft platforms.
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Cruisers were originally exactly what their name says. A ship designed for long cruises. Big enough to operate independently far from home, and small enough not be super expensive like a battleship. They were your go-to ship for enforcing your policies against local bad-actors if you were a naval power of the 1late 19th and early 20th century. In the late 20th century cruisers and destroyers sort of melded together and differences between them now are basically name only. Destroyers got bigger and more capable, and big-gun cruisers became obsolete so these days “cruiser” just means “big destroyer.”
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Basically spot on. Battlecruisers were envisioned as a big-gun combatant that could keep pace with cruiser squadrons. They sacrificed armor for guns. Fast battleships basically made them obsolete by the 1940s, but they lived on a while as good platforms to cram a lot of AA guns on.
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Modern frigates are basically smaller, less capable destroyers and are generally considered the smallest ships classified as “major surface combatants.” They have a long history back to the sailing era when a frigate was the smallest of the big warships. Not sturdy enough to stand in the line, but big enough to operate independently and overpower any merchant or pirate. Basically the “cruiser” of the age of sail.
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Corvettes are about the smallest warship that is a warship rather than a patrol boat. They generally mount very limited weapon systems, have a small crew, limited endurance, and are expected to engage primarily in littoral combat. They are a good option if your naval ambitions are limited to defense of your immediate local vicinity. Enough range and firepower to be threatening, cheap enough for smaller navies to have a bunch of them.
– rhomboidus
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What’s the difference between a non-profit and a for-profit university?
Focus on each type’s ultimate goal, because that’s what really important.
Non-profit doesn’t have shareholders. So any extra money they make could be saved, spent, invested, etc, but it cannot be distributed to anyone via dividends. So because Universities are competing on research grants, prestige, number of applications, quality of applicant pool, ranking, etc, but NOT on the amount of revenue generated. It’s why a school like Dartmouth with a 9% acceptance rate chooses not to simply grow and enroll more students; they like how selective they are and do not want to let that rate drop, even if it means more tuition paying students. Maximizing dollars is not the ultimate goal. You’ll almost never see money being returned to students (unfortunately ![🙁]()
) because schools do compete on how nice the school is, so they would rather spend that money.
For-profit Universities do have shareholders. They are traded on Wall Street the same way a company like Target or Exxon is. So they are competing to try to maximize dollars coming in and minimize dollars going out. For profit Universities goal is to provide the maximum value to shareholders, whether that means paying dividends or increasing the stock price. So for them, they will do with their money what any other corporation will do, including pay dividends, buy back stock, reinvest it into new ventures, or make acquisitions. But they don’t care how selective it is, or where its alumni go after, or research, the only thing it cares about is delivering value to the shareholders.
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What is the benefits of Wheat Bread vs. White Bread?
Wheat has three parts – endosperm (where the seed’s energy is stored and used to make white flour), germ (the part that will grow and is quite nutritious) and bran (the outer protective layer that is high in fibre).
There’s three types of basic wheat-sourced bread that use different parts:
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White bread – made from pure endosperm bleached flour, and nutritionally almost empty. Because it’s extremely easy to digest, it can spike blood-sugar levels when eaten. Usually gives the softest and highest-rising bread though.
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Enriched white bread – lumped in with the above, made the same way but they shove some nutrients into it so it’s a bit more nutritious.
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Whole wheat bread – bread that also includes wheat bran and part of the germ (at least where I live). You can get “whole wheat breads” that are pretty much nutritionally empty as well though, but the fibre in the bran helps slow down digestion so it’s better for you than white.
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Whole-grain wheat bread – bread that is made from 100% of the wheat grain. Best choice for fiber and nutrition.
(There are other whole-grain breads too, and they can contain other non-wheat grains.)
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What makes the AK-47 one of the most reliable guns in the world? Why can’t other companies replicate this reliability?
The tolerances(spaces between moving parts) in the AK are loose. There’s lots of room for gunk and dirt to get in there and the gun will still fire and cycle when the trigger is pulled. With loose tolerances, failure to properly clean and lube the weapon won’t hinder it from firing like the M-16 from the Vietnam era.
In addition the AK uses a gas piston technology rather than direct impingement. Both systems use the gas from the recently fired round to load the next round. With the AK the gas is directed to a piston rather than directly at the bolt carrier. This keeps the bolt cleaner and results in less jams. However, it creates additional movement not present in the direct method and therefore sacrifices accuracy.
Gun makers today sets accuracy very high on the "important list" so you cant have these clearings between all the parts because everything will not line up exactly the same between shots. For an AK and at its time this did not matter, as more often than not you were so close to your enemy that you could smell their breath. Today its a different age and you make weapons that are reliably accurate and light weight (AK is a heavy bastard) all these three things naturally contradicts each other.
So while the AK enjoys a legendary reputation, by today’s standards, it’s a pretty crappy weapon…yes, its reliable, but it can barely hit anything over 400m and it is much heavier than it looks.
– kevlar_dog
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Why do cars from the 70’s and earlier all have distinctive looks and are easily identifiable while modern cars all mostly look the same?
It called Survivor Bias. Pretty common in stock analysis too. The idea is that most 70s cars looked boring and similar, but the useful life of most cars is maybe 20 years. So now as we approach 50 years from 1970, the only cars that remain are ones people took extra effort to maintain… meaning the nicest and coolest ones stay and the rest all get replaced by Toyota Camerys (or whatever car is bought by the “cars are a tool to get me to work” crowd). People only keep and maintain the cool looking ones, so you look now and see all 70s cars are cool. The truth is all 70s cars which survived are cool, and that’s a critical difference. Ugly ones have long since gone to the junkyard.
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What’s the difference between East Coast and West Coast Rap?
There was really only a distinction during the 1990s. East Coast rap, with artists such as the Wu Tang Clan, Biggie Smalls, Nas, Mobb Deep, they all preferred heavier beats, and they emphasized lyrical storytelling above all else. The beat was there to keep the rapper grounded in his message and to keep the rhythm going, but it wasn’t necessarily the focus of the song. You mostly listened to them for the lyrics and storytelling. West Coast rap was defined by artists such as NWA (and then Dr. Dre), Tupac, Snoop Dogg, and Warren G. They tended to have two main styles of song: statement songs, which NWA liked to do, and which focus on a theme and message rather than telling a story; and g-funk, where the beat itself gets as much (or more) attention than the lyrics themselves, which uses more synths, and where the lyrics flow into each other more (at the expense of lyrical complexity).
Of course these trends were not definitive, and there were plenty of exceptions on both sides. And the East Coast/West Coast theme died out in the early 00’s, as rap became a lot more decentralized, and as big artists started emerging from places that did not fit the West/East Coast mold; in particular, Southern rap became its own unique thing.
That said, the personalities of rappers are often still driven by their birthplaces, and style still sometimes shows itself.
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Why are US healthcare prices are so high?
This seemingly outrageous bill is an artifact of how healthcare is billed in the US. It’s incredibly dumb, but here’s why it’s so ridiculous on its face. The patient will almost certainly pay much less than what’s on the bill. Here are some things to keep in mind:
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Part of the reason costs are so high in the US is because it’s a coy little game (especially in the fee-for-service model). Providers bill far above their actual cost because they know that they’ll be reimbursed pennies on the dollar (about $0.20 from Medicare, less from -caid, slightly more from private insurers). The provider, however, can’t charge different rates to different payers, so even if they wanted to charge you cost + a bit more to, you know, “have an income,” they can’t because they’ll be audited by the government. So, when you get a bill for 10k, without insurance they have to bill that much, but in reality they may get 2k. Additionally, most hospitals will send you the 10k bill, then take the 2k you pay and be happy with that, even if you’re paying cash. But that detracts from the narrative of “greedy doctors and hospitals.”
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In the comments on these sorts of posts, populist appeals just find their way to the top of the discussions. Ever read the posts about how a bag of saline costs $0.44 to create so that’s exactly what inpatients should be charged (who cares about sterilization, standardization, regulation, storage, provider oversight, IV access, etc). Somehow, the fact that administering tylenol costs $6 in the hospital is a reflection of the prescribing physician’s greed and the insane margins that hospital administration can yield. Because, as we all know, everybody pays their bills and those costs are in no way related to high human resource costs, liability, regulation, and displaced reimbursement for services rendered below cost.
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An enormous part of the “high cost” here is also the fact that anyone with coverage is subsidizing all people without coverage. Guess what happens when some gangbanger gets his tib/fib blown up? Ortho admits him and does the floor work/surgery/post-op for free. The radiologists read the studies, the nurses care for the patient, the lab uses reagents to run tests, etc. Plus the opportunity cost of a bed being used by someone who doesn’t pay jack shit. Physicians and hospitals do a ton of what is essentially free work for a significant portion of the hospital population and you, insured responsible adult, are paying for the care of such individuals.
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This is exactly the type of situation that things like the bronze level plan were designed for in “obamacare” – catastrophic medical emergencies. And let’s be very clear here: this person likely would have died without ICU level care and (extremely expensive) antivenom. Even with a bronze plan (the coverage of which is total garbage, admittedly), the total out of pocket maximum for this care should be around $6500. While that’s not cheap, I kinda think that’s a bargain price for something that saves my life. If this person didn’t have insurance… well, that seems like a really bad life decision. It’s now legally required and subsidized for those who can’t afford it.
The post A Few Answers To Questions You Always Wondered About appeared first on Caveman Circus.
) because schools do compete on how nice the school is, so they would rather spend that money.
