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Why the First Cowboy To Draw Always Gets Shot
cremeglace writes "Have you ever noticed that the first cowboy to draw his gun in a Hollywood Western is invariably the one to get shot? Nobel-winning physicist Niels Bohr did, once arranging mock duels to test the validity of this cinematic curiosity. Researchers have now confirmed that people indeed move faster if they are reacting, rather than acting first."
The mythbusters need to test this!
This is the opposite of what the article is saying...
The article says that the first person to draw will be the last one to pull the trigger, but the one reacting (drawing second after seeing the first person draw) will draw and pull the trigger quicker but they are less likely to get a hit.
It was always the intent of George Lucas to have Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan ride on Greedo's ship, The Manka Hunter, but Harrison Ford was cheaper than keeping famous actor Paul Blake around (who demanded more money for sitting in a rubber suit most of the day) so he decided to rewrite the script to have Han kill Greedo instead of the other way around.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
A bunch of buddies of mine played paintball in the woods, and after months of nagging I bought some cheap used equipment and joined them. My buddies were high school jocks, and one of the guys they played with had been in the army. The army guy sized me up and made a snide comment, and when they picked teams I was picked last and ended up on the team opposite him. That very first game I personally knocked their entire team out.
In the months that followed I played with them many weekends, and everyone soon acknowledged that I was the deadliest player there. I has shot real guns previously I was as accurate a shot as I could be with my cheap paintball marker. More importantly I have read a lot of WW2 books and I have played a lot of first person shooter games and I had a good layman's understanding about suppressing fire and flanking. Often I would let the rest of my team rush in first to draw fire while I moved around the edge a bit to study the other team's positions. Many of my kills were a single shot from the side or from behind at very close range while the target was otherwise distracted. Even when a match was down to one on one, once I got the opponent to duck behind cover I could approach their position obliquely, keeping him suppressed with bursts of fire, until I had the angle to get in a kill shot.
Then one weekend came where a bunch of serious "speedball" players joined us. My tactics weren't any good against them, because they could not be suppressed. They would use cover VERY well. They knew to return fire regardless of being under fire, exposing only the nose of their gun and just enough mask to get one eye down the sight. They were vigilant about constantly scanning for movement, so I could not flank them without running through a hail of paint balls first. Their expensive guns had long range were very accurate. That day was humbling.
Vonnegut was right: Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been."