ajb

This is likey to be true. We know that dogs put people of breaking in - convicts have even said this themselves.

The claims that I have found are that the evidence is actually that there is no differnce here. In fact, you just take on all the risk associated with guns in the house for no real benefit. http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0804-hemenway-defensive-gun-home-20150730-story.html It seems that by not using a gun you are actually at less risk!

Do we have evidence for that?

This is a real worry - you just up the game from the start. This may be reflected in the correlation between the level of gun regulations in a state and the deaths - but I am not sure

Okay, but still the statistics suggest that this is not a good idea itself. Maybe from what you have said you can justify having a gun in the house - it is legal for you and the moral judgment is yours. Moreover, it is up to you to assess the risks here. Indeed, the 'good guys' with guns idea is not supported with evidence. Sure, there has been a few cases of this, but not many and not enough to justify everyone carrying guns. Only you can decide that at the time. You have to make a judgement call on the intent of the robber. However, the advice seems to be to give them what they ask for.

And just for fun again... "After adjustment, individuals in possession of a gun were 4.46 (P < .05) times more likely to be shot in an assault than those not in possession. Among gun assaults where the victim had at least some chance to resist, this adjusted odds ratio increased to 5.45 (P < .05)". [1] Reference [1] Charles C. Branas, Therese S. Richmond, Dennis P. Culhane, Thomas R. Ten Have, and Douglas J. Wiebe. Investigating the Link Between Gun Possession and Gun Assault. American Journal of Public Health: November 2009, Vol. 99, No. 11, pp. 2034-2040.

Moontanman, I accept I misspoke. And this is a real risk? Also I would suggest that confronting anyone with a gun could result in the same - the whole game of stealing some of your things is now a deadly battle. Not really making you or anyone else any safter. Even with your story... it is very sad that you think that you need such an item. I really do feel sorry for you.

Moontanman, I accept I misspoke. And this is a real risk? Also I would suggest that confronting anyone with a gun could result in the same - the whole game of stealing some of your things is now a deadly battle. Not really making you or anyone else any safter.

I agree with you here. It is not a one or the other thing. Really it is a deep cultural issue about how one resolves problems, coupled with the avaliability of guns - both legal and otherwise.

I do see where you are comming from... but there has to be some discussion about why people have guns. In general overall it seems that guns in the house full stop is not a good idea. But beyond that I can see a use for hunting and sport - under tight rules and restrictions. But this is not what you said about your shot gun - you even said that it is not really any good for hunting. So why have it? Protection? Maybe, but then this goes back to my question of real risk and not just fear.

I agree, that is how statistics work. But how do we know if he is or is not safer? Unless he lives in a very untypical situation - and I don't know his area and life style - what else can we go on? Feel safter or actually safter? Again, all we can really do is look at statistics and try to ground the discussion in some realism. What are the real risks? Does having a gun reduce these risks? Or does it increase them? So far all the statistics are telling me that guns in the house are not a good idea - for the average person. I think guns overall and across the US.

Really, or are these just the events you are aware of? And still, do we have any real evidence that a gun in the house make your safter. So far all the statistics suggest not. ----------------------- Maybe there is a point of definition here. Most people who enter a home do so to steal things. The term 'home invasion' may mean breaking into someones house to commit crimes other than burglary. I may has misinterpreted the use of the meaning.

Exactly, and part of this must be better gun control. Less guns make it safer for everyone including the police.

You mean to protect your stuff or yourself and family? From what I can gather looking at the statistics is that 'home invasions' as you Yanks call them, that the vast majority do not involve the homeowner getting killed or seriously harmed. All that really happens by owning a gun is that you put yourself at higher risk of suicide, homicide and accidents.

And just because... "A higher number of firearm laws in a state are associated with a lower rate of firearm fatalities in the state, overall and for suicides and homicides individually" [1]. So it seems that stricter rules do reduce deaths. More than that, the US seems to have a culture that violence is the way to deal with problems. Couple this with the avaliablity of guns, social problems, mentally ill individuals etc and you have an explosive mix. The shooting in Dallas is only part of this wider problem - both on part of the normal people and the police. Reference [1] Eric W. Fleegler, MD, MPH; Lois K. Lee, MD, MPH; Michael C. Monuteaux, ScD; David Hemenway, PhD; Rebekah Mannix, MD, MPH, Firearm Legislation and Firearm-Related Fatalities in the United States, JAMA Intern Med. 2013;173(9):732-740 (http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleID=1661390 )

I get the impression that for most Americans this is never really very likely. Indeed, gun ownership is in decline due to the realisation that that a gun in the house offers more risk than the protection it offers.

And we have evidence that waving a gun at a gang is actually making one safer?

Serious question... is US society really that dangerous that normal law abiding citizens need to be armed? If so, then you can make a great case, particularly if the number of accidental shootings and those maked by mistake are pale into insignificance as compared to all the lives saved. This maybe the case, maybe not- but as I said this is what US society has to think about. And so far the very vocal pro-guns lobby is winning this argument.

If you have some new invention related to ultarsound machines, then you may be able to patent it. There maybe some long process of deciding if you really have something new. It it is not really new, then you may still seek to protect your self with trade marks and similar. I don't have any experience in this at all. All I do know is that you cannot patent science or mathematics - only inventions.

It is not really measured against coordinates. We know by set-up that the Riemann curvature tensor for Euclidean space (irrespective of the coorrdinates used) is globally zero. If the Riemann curvature tensor is locally not zero on a manifold then we know that that manifold cannot be Euclidean space. The actual local values of the Riemann curvature do depend on the coordinate system employed - other than when it is zero. If all the components of a tensor are zero in one coordinate system then they will also be zero in another coordinate system. What is a fixed grid? Is it just a coordinate system? How does the metric describe the curvature of the field? (Which is a strange term in this context - we usually speak of connections as having curvature, and when we mean curvature of a manifold we really mean the curvature of some given connection. In the context of GR, the connection is the Levi-Civeta connection. Unless this field is a local connection one-form?)

You should suggest this to the police! Well said.

If you pick standard Cartesian coordinates - which we often do - then you can think like this. Via general theorems of QFT this means that a gravition, if realised in nature, will be massless and have helicity 2.

I really hope that this majority gets it voice.

I agree with Strange here... it is not clear what you are really asking and if you indeed have somthing that one can take a patent out on. We don't want details and don't expect you to give any, but can we assume as Strange says, that you have some project to develop some invention that has potential commercial value? You may not have a final product in your hand, but you have some new technology that you would like a patent on before fully developing the product?

It depends on how you like to think of tensors and where you put the indices. So in physics we usually think about the components of a tensor - for a rank 2 tensor we need two indices. So the metric, which we can think of in different ways - the most clear way is as a symmetric pairing between vector fields [math] g : Vect(M) \times Vect(M) \rightarrow C^{\infty}(M) [/math] [math] (X,Y) \mapsto g(X,Y) = X^{a}(x)Y^{b}(x)g_{ba}(x)[/math] Where I have used local coordinates on the right hand side - I hope you can follow this. As the g has two indices is it rank 2. Or I can say that the metric is rank two as it 'eats' two vector fields. This is very improtant when it comes to looking at how the components of the metric change under changes of coordinates. Okay, space-time is 3+1 dimensional So, if we accept that the gravitational field is given by the metric, then locally we have a spin 2 representation of the Poincare group with zero mass. Weinberg showed this carefully in Phys.Rev. 138 (1965), B988-B1002. Almost, as long as we do have a coordinate system - that is a local diffeomrophism from our 4-d manifold to R^4. There maybe choices of coordinates that make certian problems more clear. The curvature is a measure how how different locally the manifold is to standard Euclidean space (or Minkowski space-time in the context of gravity).