Similar to the famous Boston cemetery study. It shows the age at death of people in a cemetery drops linear as you approach the current date. whereas people 100years ago all died in their 60-80s
For bombers thats the main cause of aircraft losses, fighters of WWII were pretty ineffective, especially at night.
It's difficult to believe a WWII era fighter diving into a stream of bombers, at night, while the multiple gun turrets on 100s of bombers were returning fire - were making precise tactical decision about which part of the airframe to target.
The nice thing (statistically) about AA fire is that it's rather uniformly random.
Mostly against primitive fighters particularly on the Russian front. Assuming similar exaggeration of successes by each sides publicity offices you can probably divide the figures by 2 or 4.
Even if all these had been against night heavy bombers it's a tiny part of the losses
The RAF didn't fly in formation during night bombing attacks, rather they flew in "streams" often hundreds of miles long. So there wouldn't have been hundreds of turrets to bring to bear on a single fighter.
I think you're also overestimating how easy it would be to spot a blacked out fighter at night. A popular german night fighter tactic was often to sneak up beneath a bomber and then pitch the nose of the fighter up sharply while firing, racking the bomber's belly with cannon fire.
Many fighters were equipped with guns mounted in a vertical configuration called Schräge Musik. The guns would fire automatically when a magnetometer detected an enemy bomber was overhead.
I think that was the result of Dyson's study - a gunner never saw a fighter so they could just as effectively be removed or repalced with fixed guns.
And in Wald's research a night fighter still had some difficulty finding and approaching abomber even with ground radar - so they fired at it (using proximty fuses or upward firing guns) essentially at random points - there was no statsistical bias of the fighter pilot targetting specific systems
The astronomer Freeman Dyson was doing similar work for the RAF (I had heard this story attributed to him)
Two of his calculations weren't acted on because of illogical users.
Very few bombers crashed because of airframe failures as opposed to enemy attacks. Logically it would make sense to make the aircraft weaker but lighter/cheaper/faster the loss of a few % crashing due to breakups would balance being able to escape enemies faster.
Gunners on bombers very rarely hit incoming fighters, it would make sense to remove some or all of the gunners and instead train them as pilots and build more aircraft. The RAF's main problem was losing skilled crews and gunners were just extra wasted human resource when a plane was shot down.
The wrinkle in this story is that both conclusions were eventually discovered by others as well, acted upon, and eventually became the dominant paradigms by the end of the war (Dyson was doing operations research for RAF Bomber Command and claims to have made the suggestion in regards to cutting weight on Lancasters.) Some of the most successful planes in the war embodied this philosophy before Dyson even enlisted. The most successful light bomber in the war was the De Haviland Mosquito, which was made primarily of wood, usually carried no machine guns, and could outrun every other plane in the sky until the arrival of jet engines.
Under the risk compensation theory, helmeted cyclists may be expected to ride less carefully; this is supported by evidence for other road safety interventions such as seat belts and anti-lock braking systems. Anecdotally, many riders report feeling safer with a helmet: "When I wear it, I feel safe..." One researcher randomized his helmet use over a year of commuting to work and found that he rode slightly faster with a helmet.
Motorists may also alter their behavior toward helmeted cyclists. One small study from England found that vehicles passed a helmeted cyclist with measurably less clearance (8.5 cm) than that given to the same cyclist unhelmeted (out of an average total passing distance of 1.2 to 1.3 metres).
According to John Forester, being struck by an overtaking car is among the least likely bicycle accidents, even though it is the rationale used to justify mandatory bike lane usage. http://www.johnforester.com/
His book, Effective Cycling is a great way to improve bicycle safety.
Reminds me of Neal Stephenson's character whose strategy for bike safety at night was to assume he was wearing reflective clothing and that everybody in a car would be paid a million dollars to kill him.
Another strategy is to actually wear OSHA-certified hyper-reflective clothing, such that the anyone would assume that a driver who hit him must have been paid a million dollars to do it.
A friend of mine does this, he has a whole closet full of orange and silver sweatshirts that he wears every day. Last time he got hit by a car was years ago, but when the cops showed up they took one look at him and arrested the driver before he'd uttered a word.
Here in England, everybody wears that terrible neon reflective stuff every time they leave the house. Bicycle optional in many cases. They have no shame here.
The downside is that it makes me comparatively less easy to spot.
Another strategy is to assume the drivers are wearing hyper-reflective clothing and that you've been paid a million dollars to hit them. Someone try that out and report back.
I couldn't for the life of me remember the name of the book or the character - I do remember perfectly the gas-masked fish on the cover of the mass-market paperback, though.
His book is a mixed bag. His thoughts about how to ride are good, but his conclusion in favor of wide curbside lanes and against bike lanes did lots of damage, as many locales/planners used his book as justification for not putting in bike lanes. This thinking was difficult to unwind. Of course bike lane use shouldn't be mandatory, as they aren't in California at least. I don't know any cyclists here who aren't grateful for the great bike lanes we have, thanks mainly to good codified, standards for their implementation. [I think I read his book 20 years ago :-)]
The closest I've ever been to being killed on a bicycle was in a traffic configuration where the presence of a bike lane completely upset the rules of the road. It was in Gainesville, Florida which has bike lanes everywhere and where drivers are familiar with people using them.
While I appreciate that some people favor bike lanes, in my experience riding in the traffic lane as a vehicle is safer than accepting secondary status in a separate lane. And the technique is not dependent on infrastructure...and saying, "But California does it," won't help the cause in most places. [I bought the book about 20 years ago, recently returned to it now that I'm teaching my son to ride]
Do you have any citations for that? I'm not doubting you, but genuinely curious (and ambivalent about helmets).
There seems to be a pervasive attitude in the US that if you're a cyclist hit by a car when you're not wearing a helmet, you're automatically at fault, because you're not being responsible. Which is weird, because the risk isn't coming from the bikes...and there's a good chance that it makes cycling seem more dangerous that it is, which
makes cycling more dangerous (by making safe cycling techniques more obscure, making it less likely that drivers know how cyclists are likely to behave, etc.).
As a data point: I've been in two collisions in eight-ish years of cycling as my primary transportation (in and around Grand Rapids, Michigan). The first time resulted in a skinned knee and elbow, the second time a bad mood, a bent wheel, and a hurried (but passed) Islamic history exam.
I don't think urban cycling is particularly risky, once you know what you're doing. I feel more in control cycling than when I'm driving on ice (physics!), and I've been driving here for a decade. (Fixed-gear bikes are particularly stable on ice, though.)
Can't remember the name but an experiment by a prof from UCL showed that cars approached him more closely when he was wearing a helmet - but they gave him more space when he was wearing a long blonde wig.
So the safest solution is a transvestite without a helmet.
American drivers' attitudes may differ from UK/Austrailian drivers', especially regionally (i.e. rural Texas vs. New York City). I'm curious how drivers would behave around bikes with a (scientifically fake) baby / child seat, with a man or a woman riding.
My experience (in the urban midwest) has been that most drivers are agreeable as long as you ride predictably (not weaving erratically, running red lights, etc.), but drivers high on testosterone should be given space - whether it's a red car full of teenagers with something to prove or (in my worst case) a skeezy, ponytailed, balding 40-something man with a considerably younger woman in his convertible. That guy tailgated me for over a mile on a clear two-lane street, trying to prove something (?). I turned off just to let him have his stupid moment and get on with my life.
Places I have lived where more people cycle the drivers have a better attitude. Cambridge, Amsterdam and Vancouver are great to cycle in, London reasonable, smaller industrial cities where cycling is rare = terrible
I used to commute on a motorbike and the cars to be very careful of were:
SUV with mom in the front and a kid in the back, BMW with guy wearing suit, hot hatchback with 4 teenagers in - you just gave any of those a wide berth!
This is why I hate people quoting sociology studies. A comparison between wearing helmets and wearing long blonde wigs gets summarized as:
> research has shown that cars drive closer to people with helmets than they do to people without them
I've taken to just assuming any surprising result from sociology is bullshit unless I really trust the source or have thoroughly investigated the methodology.
Helmets turn fatalities into head injuries but also head injuries into non-head injuries. You need the real statistics for each case before making a judgment.
Also, a metal helmet has the obvious problem that there's no damping for an impact. A Styrofoam helmet absorbs shock.
I'm not talking theory but facts. Metal helmets increased head injuries substantially, and reduced bullet and shrapnel to-the-head fatalities substantially.
Unfortunately the enemy are rarely cooperative in allowing your aircrash investigators to visit the site and examine crashed aircraft.
You could examine enemy bombers that you had shot down but apart from the design and vunerabilites being different you would miss those that had exploded leaving little wreakage or had been crippled and crashed over the sea on the way back. You would still select for a set of damage that allowed an enemy place to crash reasonably intact
Might not be possible, it's not the format or algorithm thats patented - in many cases it's the concept.
A patent on compressing an image by only storing some spatial frequencies gets you however you code the DCT.
It can also be used by good (or at least inquisitive) people.
The back door isn't going to be built into super encrypted military stuff, but a lot of government traffic travels over commercial links, using commercial hardware and software.
Since this government backdoor is going to be leaked or hacked about 3.2 femtoseconds after it's introduced then every internal government memo, every cell phone/sms between a politician and their mistress or lobbyist and every conversation between lawyer and client is going to be on wikileaks.
