Here’s some pretty lazy journalism from the BBC, who ask “How dangerous is firing a gun into the air?”, concluding “it is a potentially fatal activity, which regularly results in the deaths of bystanders”. They back up the claim by citing numerous examples — none of which appear to be about people firing their guns in the air!
For example, the article mentions that “in 2010 a Turkish bridegroom killed three relatives when he fired an AK-47 at his own wedding”. But a Google search reveals that this incident was actually caused when “the groom lost control of the weapon as he tried to fire in traditional celebration in the air at the ceremony […] The guests were sprayed with bullets and the groom’s father and two aunts were killed”. (This was reported by, ahem, the BBC.)
In fact, according to a study conducted by the US Army Ordnance in 1920, a 7.62mm round like that fired from an AK-47 will leave a rifle at a velocity of around 850m/s, but in free fall reaches a terminal velocity of around 100m/s (http://www.loadammo.com/Topics/March01.htm). This makes sense: in free fall it’s propelled only by gravity rather than a ballistic charge, and it will tend to fall base down, giving it a less aerodynamic profile.
According to that previous link, at that speed the round have only half the energy required for a “disabling wound” - it might still injure you seriously, but it won’t kill you.
So it appears the answer is actually no. Having said that, I wouldn’t want to find out the hard way.
Fly España (Taken with instagram)
The quick way…
BASE_URL=https://raw.github.com/github/gitignore/master
for X in Global/OSX.gitignore \
Global/TextMate.gitignore \
Python.gitignore; do
echo "## $BASE_URL/$X ##"
curl -s $BASE_URL/$X
echo
done >> .gitignore
“A collection of useful .gitignore templates” - nifty!
I’ve been trying out Code Pilot 2 - if you develop in Xcode I’d encourage you to check it out. It’s a clever piece of kit, but it wasn’t for me (old dog, new tricks) and I couldn’t find out how to uninstall it. There’s no info in Code Pilot’s preferences pane in Xcode, in the installer or on the website. Anyway, it looks as though all you need to do is navigate to:
~/Library/Developer/Xcode/Third-Party Plug-ins/
and trash CodePilot2.xcplugin. Job done.
“It is not known precisely how the exact value for the magic number was determined.” — Fast inverse square root - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, via @jsn00k. I love stuff like this. The second comment in the implementation from Quake III Arena probably sums it up for most of us; I have no idea how this works, I’m just glad it does.
“At the present moment Bond is particularly anxious for expertise on the weapons likely to be carried by Russian agents and I wonder if you have any information on this.” — Letters of Note: May I suggest that Mr. Bond be armed with a revolver?
Was the name Wendy created for Peter Pan? -
A well-worn myth put to rest.
“When people give you advice, they’re really just talking to themselves in the past.” — Austin Kleon (via marco)
(Source: marco)
“Dates in Excel spreadsheets: In reality, there are no such things. What you have are floating point numbers and pious hope.” — The xlrd Module