Murder or Suicide?

At the 1994 annual awards dinner given for Forensic Science, AAFS President Dr Don Harper Mills astounded his audience with the legal complications of a bizarre death. Here is the story.

On March 23, 1993 the medical examiner viewed the body of Ronald Opus and concluded that he died from a shotgun wound to the head. Mr. Opus had jumped from the top of a ten-story building intending to commit suicide.

He left a note to the effect indicating his despondency.

As he fell past the ninth floor his life was interrupted by a shotgun blast passing through a window, which killed him instantly. Neither the shooter nor the deceased was aware that a safety net had been installed just below the eighth floor level to protect some building workers and that Ronald Opus would not have been able to complete his suicide the way he had planned.

“Ordinarily,” Dr Mills continued, “A person who sets out to commit suicide and ultimately succeeds, even though the mechanism might not be what he intended, is still defined as committing suicide.” That Mr. Opus was shot on the way to certain death, but probably would not have been successful because of the safety net, caused the medical examiner to feel that he had a homicide on his hands.

In the room on the ninth floor, where the shotgun blast emanated, was occupied by an elderly man and his wife. They were arguing vigorously and he was threatening her with a shotgun. The man was so upset that when he pulled the trigger he completely missed his wife and the pellets went through the window striking Mr. Opus. When one intends to kill subject “A: but kills subject “B” in the attempt, one is guilty of the murder of subject “B.”

When confronted with the murder charge the old man and his wife were both adamant and both said that they thought the shotgun was unloaded. The old man said it was a long-standing habit to threaten his wife with the unloaded shotgun. He had no intention to murder her. Therefore the killing of Mr. Opus appeared to be an accident; that is, if the gun had been accidentally loaded.

The continuing investigation turned up a witness who saw the old couple’s son loading the shotgun about six weeks prior to the fatal accident. It transpired that the old lady had cut off her son’s financial support and the son, knowing the propensity of his father to use the shotgun threateningly, loaded the gun with the expectation that his father would shoot his mother.

Since the loader of the gun was aware of this, he was guilty of the murder even though he didn’t actually pull the trigger. The case now becomes one of murder on the part of the son for the death of Ronald Opus.

Now comes the exquisite twist.

Further investigation revealed that the son was, in fact, Ronald Opus. He had become increasingly despondent over the failure of his attempt to engineer his mother’s murder. This led him to jump off the ten story building on March 23rd, only to be killed by a shotgun blast passing through the ninth story window. The son had actually murdered himself so the medical examiner closed the case as suicide.

A true story from Associated Press, Reported by Kurt Westervelt.

The human eye only has three types of color sensitive cones, which detect red, blue, and green light. Your brain is making up every other color you perceive.

Let’s have a little fun with that thought. This is the visible spectrum of light.

You will of course note that yellow is on the chart. Yellow has a discreet wavelength, and is therefore a distinct physical color. But we can’t see it.

“Sorry, what the fuck?”

What we call yellow is just what our brain shrugs and spits out when our red and green cones are equally stimulated. We have light receptors that can pick up on the physical spectrum of light we call yellow: that’s why yellow things don’t just look like moving black blocks to us. But your brain has no fucking idea what the color yellow looks like. 

Some animals have eyes that can perceive the color yellow! Goldfish have a yellow cone in their eyes. If they could talk, they could tell us what yellow looks like. But we wouldn’t be able to understand it.

What your brain actually sees of the color spectrum:

We can measure the wavelength of light, so we know that when we see ‘yellow,’ we are seeing light in that 550-ish nanometers range. But we don’t have a cone in our eyes that can pick that up. Your brain just has a very consistent guess about what color that wavelength of light could be. We decided to name that guess ‘yellow.’ We can’t imagine what yellow really looks like any more than a dog can imagine the color red.

Here’s the funny thing: your brain is never perceiving just one photon of light at a time. Something like 2*10⁸ photons per second are hitting your retina under normal conditions. Your brain doesn’t individually process all of them. So it averages them out. It grabs a bunch of photons all coming from the same direction, with the same pattern, and goes, “yeah, that cup is blue, fuck it, next.”

That’s how colors blend in our eyes. So sure, if a photon of light with a wavelength of 550 nanometers bounces into our eyes, we see what we call “yellow.” But if we see two photons at the same time, coming from the same object, one of which is 500 nms and the other of which is 600 nms, your brain will average them out and you will still see yellow even though none of the light you just saw was 550 nms.

So how does magenta factor into this?

Well, as we’ve just established, when your brain sees light from two different slices of the visible light spectrum, it will try to just average them together. Green plus red is yellow, fuck it. If it’s more red than green, we’ll call that ‘orange.’ Literally who gives a shit, we’re trying to forage over here. There are bears out here and it’s so scary.

What happens if you take the average of blue and red light, which we perceive to be magenta? What’s the centerpoint of that line?

Fucking green.

Hey, that’s not gonna work? We live on a planet where EVERYTHING IS GREEN. If something is NOT green, that means it’s either food, or a potential source of danger, and either way your brain wants you to know about it.

So your brain goes, WHOOPS. Okay - this is fine. We already made up yellow, orange, cyan, and violet. We’ll just make up another color. Something that looks really, really different from green. 

And so it made up magenta.

So, physics-wise, is magenta “real?”

No; there’s no single wavelength of light that corresponds to magenta. But you’re rarely seeing only a single wavelength of light anyway. And even when you are, every color other than RGB is a dart thrown on the wall by your meat computer. This is the CIE Chromaticity Diagram:

Explaining this thing is a little more than I want to take on on a Saturday morning, but I’ve included a link above that goes into it a little more. The point is that only the colors that actually touch the ‘outline’ of the shape actually correspond to a specific wavelength of light. All of the other colors are blends of multiple wavelengths. So magenta isn’t special.

Given that color is just a fun trick your brain is playing on you to help you find food and avoid danger, is magenta real?

Yeah, absolutely. Or at least, it’s just as real as most of what we see. It’s what we see when we mix up blue and red. It would be disastrous from a survival standpoint to perceive that color as green, so we don’t. Because it’s not green. Light that’s green has a wavelength of around 510 nm. Stuff that’s magenta bounces back light that is both ~400 and ~700. Your brain knows the difference. So it fills in the gap for you, with the best guess it has, same as it does with your blind spot.

Yall.

and then he just whips her out and says “you gotta have one of these things, they can track, and they’re just the best hunting dogs in the world” and that was the whole video and honestly i’ve never wanted a chihuahua more in my life

This guy from uni hit me up and started hitting on me and he kept telling me that I have such an innocent look to me and look way younger and that he thought I was 19 tops (he is 23 and I am 25 actually) which immediately gave me a bad vibe, long story short he followed me on Insta and we kept chatting there and then he randomly attacked me about having a public IG profile and not being bothered about having 3k followers, most of which I don't know personally, and when I kept telling him it really wasn't a problem for me and that I like my followers and 3k wasn't that much to begin with, he hit me with a "you're way different than I thought," and said stuff like he guesses that I am not as innocent as he thought (wtf dude) and that he doesn't approve of the content I post ?????? and doesnt't see a point of the two of us talking anymore??? like, okay creep, I'd rather not be talking to you either and I was just being polite to you but insulting my followers who have never done anything wrong to you and have been nothing but nice, respectful and supportive to me??? Fuck off

not to mention that this is what he deemed to be my scandalous posts

13,000 of you followed me there out of pure spite. I got brave enough and revealed I run this blog to IRL people. It went well, though I am still nervous about it.

The entirety of Tumblr:

Katara: BOY???? HOT BOY?????? HOT TEENAGE BOY?????????

Zuko: *speaks*

And then it hit me.

Iroh: *sitting in a teahouse at a paisho table* Iroh, deadpan: I must capture the last airbender.  Iroh: It is the only way to make sure the powe rof the Avatar won’t be turned on the Fire Nation. Iroh: Only then will I be redeemed in the eyes of the Fire Lord for my failure at Ba Sing Se. Iroh: … Iroh: Anyway, it’s your turn.

‘The prince in the iceberg’

‘Avatar Zuko’

‘The Old Master’

‘Imprisoned’

‘Zuko’s Master’

They’re often used to provide habitats for corals, fish, and other marine life where the natural ocean floor has been eroded or disturbed by human use. They can be purpose-made like those reef balls up there, or they can be made out of recycled objects like cinderblocks.

While not all human-made materials are safe for reef use (tires used to be a popular choice, but then it was discovered that not only do they not stay put, they tend to leech toxins), sometimes marine life doesn’t actually care- they adapt to what we put in the water. A good example of that is the Rigs-to-Reef program, which takes offshore oil platforms and decommissions them by turning them into artificial reefs. While oil platforms are in use, sea life congregates around them, so instead of abandoning these platforms or removing them, which would disrupt what has become the “new normal” for these animals, they’re toppled and coral grows on them. 

It has come to my attention that many people mistake wyverns for dragons, so here’s a post to help you remember

Dragon: 4 legs, 2 wings

Wyvern: 2 legs, 2 wings

Drake: 4 legs, flightless

Wyrms: long snake like body with no appendages, can also appear as a traditional Chinese dragon with 4. Legs and no wings yet can fly

Amphithere: 0 legs 2 wings, can be feathered

Lindwurms: 2 legs, 0 wings, long body

Luck dragon: 4 legs, no wings, can fly, long body, furry with dog like face

Komodo dragon: 4 legs, no wings, real

Bearded dragon: 4 legs, 0 wings, often kept as pets