See if you can guess the unexpected twist
That helpy-chalk was wrong?
That guy's photo makes it even more depressing.
This is a bulletin from that incredibly squalid world that middle-class civilians only see on shows like Cops.
Jammies and I found some immature humor in the whole thing.
I confess. I watched a scattered 20 minutes or so of the Jerry Springer show the other night. Wow. (a) I had no idea that show was still on. (b) Um.
Here's one that's fun with no depressing aspect. Who can not love how much joy this dog is getting out of eating a cop car?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9D9f_ySvkA
I love the video in 6. Cracks me up every time I see it.
I guess now we know what happens when the dog catches the car.
They don't make cop cars like they used to, I guess.
6: Do cops in Chattanooga not carry pepper spray? That's a lot of damage to just sit and watch.
That's a lot of damage to just sit and watch.
Would you want to get out of the car to spray that dog? It's tearing apart a car. I am surprised they hadn't shot it to be honest.
It's just a car. That dog's got moxie! They should give it a prize!
Seriously. I love that dog. But perhaps even more, I'm completely charmed by his brown buddy that just stands behind him the whole time madly wagging his tail like he's got a front row seat at the dog circus.
"Oh shit! Oh shit you're doin' it man! Oh damn! Oh yes you are! Ohhhhh shit! Yeah you got it! Ohhhh damn!"
Great clip. But I can't help thinking that patrol cars should be made of slightly more robust material. Either the dog is super strong or that car has the structural integrity of an egg carton.
16: The bumper is quite soft material with a plastic cover (that's what the dog is tearing). Underneath is stuff like styrofoam. The reason for this design is both pedestrian safety and a requirement that the vehicle survive a collision at parking lot speeds with no damage. The frame of the car is steel, as you would expect.
I'm finding myself thinking nice thoughts about the cop. If he didn't care about hurting the dog, he could have solved the problem by simply hitting the gas without worrying about whether the dog was going to get out of the way.
As the other cop suggests near the end.
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No doubt this has already shown up on Apo's Google News feed.
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19: Yeah, I never listen to the sound on anything in the office -- I figured a dog eating a car would probably come across fine without the soundtrack.
I'm finding myself thinking nice thoughts about the cop. If he didn't care about hurting the dog,
I'm finding it bizarre that getting away without hurting the dog seems to have been his overriding concern. Nevermind that there's a potentially pretty damn dangerous dog which is apparently totally unsupervised and on the loose. Shouldn't some effort have been made to get it to some sort of animal shelter before it tires of car bumpers and attacks a person who happens to walk by?
I mean, maybe there's some context outside of the video clip that makes clear that this isn't a real concern, but the clip alone left me thinking of this as a severe dereliction of duty.
Watching the video, I kept thinking, "why doesn't he just..." and then realizing that the option I was considering had real downsides.
Nevermind that there's a potentially pretty damn dangerous dog which is apparently totally unsupervised and on the loose.
While I'm not totally confident of this, I doubt that's a particularly dangerous dog. He's playing tug with an inanimate object, not fighting or attaching a person or animal. His tail is up and wagging throughout.
I'd expect that if his owner showed up and said "Winston! Drop it!" there'd be a certain amount of reluctance and sulking, but no real difficulty.
Now, yes, no dog should be running around loose, but Winston doesn't seem like a bad dog at all.
23: I get the impression that the dog wasn't so much dangerous as exuberant and perhaps undisciplined. If it had been a genuinely dangerous attack I doubt the other dogs would have been behaving as if it was all just a big lark. I'm no fan of free-roaming dogs in public places, but this one didn't trigger any alarm bells for me.
25/26: Really? Then why does everyone here seem to think it was so reasonable for the officer to be afraid to get out of the car?
I mean, I agree that dog was basically playing, not attacking, but (a) loose and (b) undisciplined and (c) very strong jaws is a bad combination.
27, 28: Well, yeah, an excited loose dog is unpredictable, and the cop has a particular problem with getting out of the car. While I wouldn't worry about a dog acting like that if I were standing nearby, actually emerging from the inside of the excellent giant chew toy he's playing with has some risk of confusing the dog into chewing your feet off as you try to get out.
27: I don't think it was reasonable, but there may be something in the audio that makes it so - I had the sound turned off.
Could be that it was actually dangerous, but I figure that between pepper spray and a handgun the cop's chance of getting bitten are pretty low even if the dog is really aggressive.
As someone who's been attacked seriously by dogs a couple of times, I think people are being pretty bloody blasé about the possibility.
I'm not saying the dog should have been shot and killed, but I do think it should have been taken to a shelter until its owner is located (or more permanently, if it has no owner).
And to be clear, I'm not trying to imply that Winston is a "bad dog", but I do firmly believe dogs like that (or any dogs, really, but especially dogs like that) just shouldn't be running around loose in public. Getting attacked by a stray dog is no joke.
As a society we have to accept a certain amount of risk if we want to enjoy the benefits of having dogs that eat cop cars.
Brock, wouldn't it be best to relocate the dog to one of those farms specially-equipped with police cruisers for the dog to chew on?
Would you rather corral stray Winston or stray 71 year old dad?
If the cops know the dog's name, perhaps they know the dog.
I'm not saying the dog should have been shot and killed, but I do think it should have been taken to a shelter until its owner is located (or more permanently, if it has no owner).
Oh, sure. Although from the number of stray dogs in the clip, that doesn't appear to be a jurisdiction that regards stray dogs as a problem in themselves. I think this is a mistake, but if the general policy is that stray dogs aren't considered innately hazardous, I wouldn't think that Winston there was more of a worry than any other loose dog.
I once saw a Cops-style show about England. The American host asked the cop how he survived without having guns. The cop replied "Control the man's thumbs...control the man."
(This became something of a tagline for me for awhile.)
re: 39
They also carry whacking great sticks, of course.
This account says that the cops did try to pepper spray (and tase) the dog, without success, but animal control eventually got him.
They also carry whacking great sticks, of course.
In order to whack great criminal thumbs, of course.
41 makes me feel better. And I echo 32.
As someone who's been attacked several times by dogs, I have to say that I probably had it coming.
The dog I identified with most was the big black shaggy one who kept hanging around at a distance and barking occasionally. You can tell he totally thinks he's made a meaningful contribution to the effort.
Unverifiably, Winston has no problem with people.
Verifiably, he doesn't have much trouble with bumpers, either.
44:The dog I identified with most was the big black shaggy one who kept hanging around at a distance and barking occasionally. You can tell he totally thinks he's made a meaningful contribution to the effort.
CONSULTANT DOG IS CONSULTING
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Since this thread seems to have died, a bleg: Does anyone know of a place on the web where one can find images of complicated tilings of the plane in black and white? It's for my niece, who loves coloring in her Altair Design Pad but could use still more stuff to color.
There's tons of stuff on the web with large images of tilings, but all the ones I can find are in color, which kind of defeats the point. The absolute best for my purposes would be something scalable.
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Googling 'tessellation coloring' produces some stuff that looks useful.
49: Yeah, there's a lot of stuff that's close but not quite there. It needs to be a black and white line drawing with lots of periods of the basic tiling (or at least lots and lots of tiles - I found some great Penrose tilings, all unfortunately with solid color tiles).
The thing that's really bugging me is that I know that I could learn the relevant math and write the appropriate code in about two weeks to generate lots of cool stuff. OTOH, it's extremely unlikely that nobody else has already done basically exactly that. I bet you can do it in about five lines in Mathematica.
How's this? If you scroll down, some of the links say specifically that they're for coloring.
Some of these look good -- they're not pure geometry, but some get pretty close.
The dog I identified with most was the big black shaggy one who kept hanging around at a distance and barking occasionally. You can tell he totally thinks he's made a meaningful contribution to the effort.
Yes, I love him!
51 is along the right lines. I think I'll try patching together some of those into still larger patterns when I get home.
53.last: Enough to bother you lot, not enough to buy individual images for prices I would pay for whole coloring books.
Or, of course, you could just go straight to the Altair Design website.
54: You have won the bleg! All hail LB!
58: Your tax dollars at work. (If you live in NY. Otherwise, other people's tax dollars at work.)
Make your own with this, freeware that exports postscript:
http://www.faa.hu/english/pen2/index.html
I loved these coloring books as a kid.
57: I already have both the Altair books. I didn't specify designs not already in the books since I figured that's overconstraining the problem. 54 looks really promising despite no being quite what I'm looking for - there's certainly stuff there that she'll like.
60 - I knew something like that had to exist somewhere. I'll have to dig my Windows laptop out from under whatever the cats have piled on it so I can give that a try.
I'll have to dig my Windows laptop out from under whatever the cats have piled on it so I can give that a try.
I read this as "out from under whatever cats I have piled on it" and thought (a) that's a lot of cats and (b) they stay where you put them? and (c) isn't there anyplace better to store them?
I'm more worried by what it is cats are likely to have piled on a laptop. They're usually not much for stacking junkmail.
Cats don't mess with bumpers, they go straight for the human.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1l7prksbcDo
Does anyone know of a place on the web where one can find images of complicated tilings of the plane in black and white?
There are some pretty awesome black and white tessellations in Hofstadter's books. Lots of Escher in Godel, Escher, Bach, of course, but others too, and plenty in Metamagical Themas. Not sure if any are on the web, though.