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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • 80%+ of severe injury and death on a bicycle is caused by motor vehicles, or complications of motor vehicle involvement.

    Which would mean ~1 in 5 have absolutely nothing to do with a motor vehicle. That’s significant.

    There is considerable evidence that everyone wearing a helmet in a car would save vastly more lives and prevent severe head injury

    Then that should be an easy [citation needed] for you because my searches are coming up blank for actual studies. Lots of assertions of it, but I’m not finding anything in terms of actual data.

    It’s very easy, on the other hand, to find comprehensive meta analyses on the efficacy of helmet use.

    It’s also worth noting that the introduction makes a point of calling out another common online assertion that you repeated – that helmets make people engage in more risk-taking behavior – as false:

    There has already been an extensive peer-reviewed literature review conducted by Esmaeilikia et al.5, which found little to no support for increased risk-taking when cyclists use helmets and if anything, they cycled with more caution.

    I don’t feel those people should be called stupid for their choice.

    I don’t think they’re stupid. I think they’re bad at risk analysis. That’s a pretty inherent feature of humans. It’s the reason I want to see actual data.


  • A helmet is only needed if you intend to spend significant time in traffic.

    The worst wreck I’ve ever had on a bike was without a single car in sight. Pinch flat while carrying speed through a steep downhill curve. I split an expensive MIPS helmet in two and still hit hard enough that I had a minor concussion, road rash up one side of my body, and cracked the face of a week old watch just to pour salt in the (metaphorical) wound. I mostly landed on my head and that helmet is the reason I didn’t have drastically more severe head injuries.

    Helmets aren’t just for traffic.




  • Seriously fantastic book and it’s a quick read. Definitely recommended.

    It’s written by a surgeon who was involved in helping promote the use of checklists in healthcare. A lot of the book is about looking at their use in other places like aviation and construction and realizing why they work and how they can help in other places. The book spends a lot of time on the idea that some fields have become so complex with so many pieces that it’s impossible for any one person to be able to track it all in their head on the fly and the effect that has in “can’t afford failure” industries.

    A book about checklists sounds like it’d be dreadfully dry and boring but the author is a solid writer and the book is full of a ton of really interesting vignettes – I find people tend to fly through it. I first read it probably 10 years ago and it’s one of those books that has really stuck with me since.


  • They literally show in the video that the majority of the surface area on the RAM truck they filmed was blocked off by plastic paneling because it’s not needed to actually cool the motor. A large part of the point is that these grills don’t have any actual utility and are killing people for purely aesthetic reasons.

    There are plenty of good arguments in favor of EVs; this specific issue is not one of them.




  • Part of what makes all the hatred for Common Core math so hilarious to me is that when I finally saw what they were teaching, it was a moment of “holy shit, this is exactly how I use and do math in real life.” It’s full of contextualizing with a focus on teaching mental shortcuts that allow you to quickly land on ballpark answers. I think it’s absolutely wonderful.

    But it’s so foreign to the rote manner that a lot of parents were taught that many of them have a hard time grasping it, and get angry as a result.


  • The article cites the opinion of an unnamed author of an unnamed “image encyclopedia.” Not really what I’d call definitive, which was the point.

    In my circles back then, soft G was predominant. I wouldn’t cite that as evidence of a One True Pronunciation either.

    There has always been debate about it. Hard G has certainly become predominant, but declaring that people that prefer soft G “weren’t on the internet back then” is revisionist at best.