view the rest of the comments
Today I Learned
What did you learn today? Share it with us!
We learn something new every day. This is a community dedicated to informing each other and helping to spread knowledge.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with TIL. Linking to a source of info is optional, but highly recommended as it helps to spark discussion.
** Posts must be about an actual fact that you have learned, but it doesn't matter if you learned it today. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.**
Rule 2- Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-TIL posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-TIL posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Partnered Communities
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
I'm not for capital punishment (because there is always a chance justice failed), but if you are going to do it, might as will do it in a way that is quick, accurate, reliable, will cost little, and have few complexities. Lethal injection is a mess. Electrocution is ridiculous. Hanging is not super reliable. Gunshot it not quick. Maybe we need guillotine 2.0. Like, if we were to create a modern version of it, what would it look like? What would be the improvements to the design? Hell, there is probably a simulator on Steam for this question already. lol
Well, I suppose you first need to consider what's doing the work on a guillotine; as far as I can tell it's only using gravity to drop the blade. So we'd want to reduce any friction caused by the rails, it'd be easiest to upgrade to aluminum and get some sort of ball bearings or something to keep it as low as possible. Obviously we want a sharp a blade as possible - considering our lack of sustained killings it might be best to move to a one use blade mechanism to keep it pointy since we probably don't have to worry about durability with sustained beheadings.
Hmm, after that we should probably try to introduce more energy into the system since we're still just using gravity. Adding more weight would probably help but wouldn't ever make it go faster than terminal velocity. Maybe the cheapest option would be spring-loading the top of the guillotine so after the lever is pulled it shoots down. Or if you want more future-y could try to make some sort of magnet railgun to propel the blade down at increasingly fast speeds.
For the bottom it seems pretty good, though you'll want to make sure you have the executioner line up the blade to be in-between the vertebrae (gotta try and make it as swift as possible). Then maybe add a pillow, because it doesn't look super comfy there.
The modern version just made the news. Death in 20ms by the abyss