Talk:Collateral Damage (The Wire)

Plot "summary" too detailed

The summary is about 2.5 times as long as the summary of the pilot. Who cares about characters eating crabs and tying knots? I propose a clean up, or at least to add this fancy "too detailed" tag at the top of the plot summary. 88.73.114.190 (talk) 21:34, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Rawls lying or Wire writers make small mathematical error?

Rawls must be lying to Robbie about the stats. Because it's impossible for the stats to jump from 51.6% to 39.4 as the result of 13 murders (or 14 or any number in that range). This is why: S: Number of solved murders (is a positive integer) T: Total number of murders (is a positive integer) Taking rounding into account: S/T >= 0.5155 & S/T < 0.5165 & S/(T+13) >= 0.3935 & S/(T+13) < 0.3945 There is no integer solution for this system of equations. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.172.217.109 (talk) 12:32, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

Speaking of math, when the coroner is talking about the amount of air available to the women in the container, there is another man in the shot using a slide rule to do the calculation the coroner is describing. Interestingly, the calculation can be done very rapidly "in the head", because the length of the isolated portion of the container happens to be 13 feet, the same number as the number of women, so the number of liters of air available to each woman is (13ft*7ft*7ft/13women)*28l/1ft^3 which is, to a reasonable approximation 50*30l/woman = 1500l/woman. No slide rule required because anyone who works habitually with a slide rule would do it in their head as fast as the coroner described the conditions. Still, nice to see the slide rule in action! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.1.214.5 (talk) 16:27, 6 September 2020 (UTC)