david-z-for-mayor
david-z-for-mayor t1_ja1zgxn wrote
Reply to comment by velifer in Pueblo deputy awarded Purple Heart for injuries suffered during shooting of Richard Ward by Drablit
I'm quite glad you posted your comment. It led me to research those two rulings. I'm making a list of alarming supreme court rulings and these two rulings are valuable additions to my list.
Graham vs Connor 1989 states that claims of excessive force have to be "objectively reasonable." However, police can now use deadly force if they have an "objectively reasonable" belief that there is a threat to their safety. That belief does not need to be based on evidence. See "Police can use deadly force if they merely perceive a threat" on https://www.vox.com/identities/2016/8/13/17938226/police-shootings-killings-law-legal-standard-garner-graham-connor
Tenessee vs Garner 1985 lets police kill fleeing suspects when "the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others."
These rulings seem to let police kill people whenever they want and are part of a broad trend by the Supreme Court to gradually destroy democracy while protecting corrupt power.
Are there any other distressing important rulings that you think I should know about?
david-z-for-mayor t1_j9dvrrs wrote
Reply to How many colors can bioluminescence make? by Aximi1l
Let's divide your question into two parts: what colors can bioluminescence produce and what colors can humans see?
Since I'm more knowledgeable about humans, we will start there.
Let's start with a definition of light. Light is electromagnetic radiation that people can see. People can see radiation from about 400 to 700 nanometers in wavelength.
Most people have three types of color sensors in their eyes, commonly called cones. We have sensors for red, green, and blue light. When our cones sense light they send signals to the visual cortex part of the brain. Through the magic of neural processing, light signals are turned into a great many different colors. People are able to distinguish literally millions of colors as long as those colors are displayed as large uniform patches. When the color patches are small, we can't distinguish colors nearly as well. When it gets dark, we lose the ability to distinguish colors and everything fades toward grey or black.
Here's some of our neural magic: carefully adding red, green, and blue lights together makes white. Red and blue light make magenta, that makes sense. But red and green lights make yellow.
You wrote that bioluminesce can produce blue, green, and red light. If this light can be uniformly mixed over say a couple of square inches, then bioluminesce could produce millions of colors and indeed every color visible by people.
My little discourse talked about additive color mixing or what happens when you mix lights of different colors together as occurs on a computer monitor. There is also a process known as subtractive color mixing when pigments are mixed together as in printing or painting. Each pigment subtracts some wavelengths of light from what we see. In the subtractive process, people typically use 4 primaries: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. Strictly speaking, black as a primary is redundant but it is cheaper to use black ink than a muddy mix of the other primaries to create black.
david-z-for-mayor t1_jcki64u wrote
Reply to San Francisco Cop Gets Revenge on Man Who Insulted His Mom: 'He's in The Clink' by Best_Outcome_5960
There are definitely problems with policing in the United States. Cops are supposed to “serve and protect” the people but focus too much on serving and protecting the government which serves and protects the status quo. Police only get a few months of training (3 months in South Dakota) and too much of that is focused on control and not enough focused on deescalation. The drug policies cops enforce are based on punishment and not treatment. The Supreme Court doctrine of qualified immunity protects bad cops and Congress doesn’t override the court. Police internal review is a sham because people have a natural tendency to protect their own people. We definitely need to reform police training and goals. We also need to reform government.