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| Top Sift for Nov 22nd, 2009Friends O' the Sift Top New Love Videos by Vote  Subscribe Top 15 Love Sifters of All Time Top 10 Love Sifters of the Past Week 10. dan00108
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Palin Screws Her Stupid Fans
Michael Moore Helps the NYPD Distinguish Wallets from Guns
I keep a 9mm next to my bed in case of a break in, and if something ever happened, I would call 911 and get my ass out of the area...no way am I waiting in my house when a bunch of officers storm my house looking for a perpetrator. A (white) guy on the news caught a home-invader and told his son to call 911 while he held the guy at gunpoint...the cops came in and shot in him the back like 10 times.
I'm sure racism is the root of some small percentage of these issues, but most of the time its probably the suspect doing something sketchy because he feels innocent. Think about the worst-case scenario going through their heads, or risk getting shot, its that simple.
Michael Moore Helps the NYPD Distinguish Wallets from Guns
Michael Moore is such a simpleton. He exemplifies everything I hate about television and mass media and socio-political discussions. And no, I'm not a conservative, I used to like Michael Moore. I bought his "The Awful Truth" series on VHS when it came out. But I now see his movies as cheap, manipulative, over-edited 4-panel comic strips, just like so much of modern mass media.
It was a tragic mistake when the police shot and killed Amadou Diallo. From what I understand his English wasn't all that great and was probably confused with what the cops were telling him to do. He pulls out his wallet and the cop nearest to him starts back-pedaling in panic, as he doesn't know what it is. And the cop trips as he is retreating and falls down violently. The next cop reacts instinctively, thinking the retreating cop sees a gun and is in danger. And he starts firing at Amadou. The other cops respond in kind, thinking that "these guys know something I don't, that this guy is a threat" and they start firing too. It all happened very quickly. Then when they find out it's a wallet and they misread the whole thing they are traumatized and shaken. Quite a different picture than that which I've heard described, which is a comic book image of grinning, evil, trigger-happy racist cops, standing over Amadou in a semi-circle, gleefully pumping bullets into his body and reloading and firing more and giving high-fives and smoking cigars and saying to each other "he got what he deserved for not obeying our orders".
But all these details I've just included wouldn't easily fit on a picket sign or be boiled down to a simple-minded protest chant.
They fired 41 one rounds at him. That's an average to 10.25 rounds per officer. Obviously you can't fire 1/4 of a bullet, but still, that mean each officer had to almost empty his firearm while firing at one suspect. Now we all know he wasn't hit 41 times, and I understand the need to fire until the target has "gone down" but 41 shots is super excessive. Either these cops were trigger happy, or horrible, horrible shots and shouldn't be allowed to carry firearms because they are far more likely to hit an innocent bystander than anything they are aiming at.
Father Separated From Child By Train Door
Visualizing Empires Decline
No offense to Canada, but land area is not the best indicator of empire strength and influence. GDP would be good, or even population would be better.
Agreed, but on the other hand, it is one dimension of potentially interesting information. I took a high-level computer graphics course when I was going to university, and we spent some time talking about how difficult it is to add more dimensions of data to a visualization without making it more convoluted.
We studied one example of a chart by a French historian named Charles Minard showing Napoleon's march to Moscow that successfully included many dimensions of data while being fairly easily understood at a glance, with more information represented in details. Basically it is map with line width representing Napoleon's troop strength over time (420,000 march in, 10,000 leave) and color coded for initial advance versus retreat. It also shows the date and daily temperatures to link the effect of deaths from exposure. Academics will gush on an on about this work, calling it "the best statistical graphic ever drawn" etc. It is actually pretty cool, and watching this visualization made me wonder what a modern Minard would have done with animated computer graphics and this data. Then again, I am a nerd.
If that didn't all sound so very boring, you can check out the graph I am talking about in English here, and then perhaps a larger original version in French with better details here. The wikipedia article on the French Invasion of Russia also references the chart.