I just assumed - apparently wrongly - that the "worked for me" is the way you say what people often claim : "the helmet saved my life"
I don't know how you can ignore the benefits of a helmet with a straight face.
I don't say that helmets don't reduce the risk of head injury, but IMO, this benefit is so small (under normal conditions of operating a bicycle with no competition involved) that it does not make it worth the hassle of wearing a helmet - similarly to playing the lottery with 1 in 50 000 000 chance to win.
Taking hits to the head with a bat : I don't think this is a good model for representing biking accidents so there is no point. You can go ahead alone, though, at your pleasure...:)
I commute by bike all year round in the northern suburbs of Washington DC, without a helmet.
My impression is that apart myself, most people - everybody wears a helmet where I commute - don't respect stopsigns, redlights and often do not have adequate lightning in the evening.
As for wearing it because why not : then why not put helmets on all babies once they start sitting up and then learn to walk? They keep falling all the time...
People have been biking for over a century, and except for racing, it is remarkably safe unless someone hits you with a car.
Then there's a bunch of guys who (Cochrane Collab) I doubt ever got on a bike since they were kids and start working hard to prove that riding a bicycle is a high-risk activity even though we know from past experience that it is not.
Instead of getting your data from the poisoned well of BSHI, why don't you go over to Bicycle Helmet Research Foundation for a change, to widen you perspective?
As I wrote somewhere above, I had a similar accident - fork broke above the crown. Two teeth gone, passed out, face bruised over an area comparable to an average palm.
I did not wear a helmet. Your statement that the "helmet saved your life" is simply not verifiable - you should ride the same speed, same bike at the same spot and have the bike fail the same way dozens of times, while wearing a helmet or not, and look at the statistics of survival in order to be able to state that.
I still ride without a helmet; have been working in the US for the last few years and I can tell you, the most dangerous thing in biking here is the morons driving cars you have to share the road with.
I have to point out one thing, though : the same guys who started this "helmets save lives" craze with their New England Journal Of Medicine paper, failed to find a quantifiable protection by helmets for lacerations on the face, including the orbits : paper in pdf here
FYI, I fell once with a bike - the fork broke just above the crown. I passed out and lost half of two incisors. A helmet would not have changed anything and I have ridden 30000+ miles since, without a helmet. But I always make sure my bike is in excellent mechanical condition...
I find the swedish system correct, this is the way it should be everywhere.
In many countries though, your period of working in research while a graduate student counts as "studying" and you receive a "stipend/fellowship", this is their excuse to make you work for peanuts while you are in fact an M. Sc. level employee. This also means that in most countries those years don't count towards the number of years employed, etc...
I believe a number of other European countries have similar PhD salaries
Not really. I was paid by a government contract in France 2002-2005 and had ~$1300 / month. Holland might be paying better, and Germany somewhere in between, the only way to make remotely decent money during the years of graduate studies is to do it working for a company.
Monsanto did not invent GMO : scientists in the 60's, 70's started inserting pieces of genes into E. coli, a basic step in manipulating DNA. At the same time, there were intense debates how to handle this and what the consequences might be. Monsato, a private company took this much further and personally I don't agree with their approach.
Funny is, there is a big difference between a plant that has a resistance gene to a herbicide and the golden rice project that could prevent hundreds of thousands of kids from going blind every year.
In the first case, if the inserted gene escapes, it will make other, regular plants resistant to the herbicide - clearly bad. In the second case, the only problem that could arise is that some weeds would start producing beta-carotene.
There is no point of educating scientists if the private sector does not need them.
Here you suggest there is no need for publicly funded research but let's just consider the following :
Watson and Crick were publicly funded scientist when they discovered the structure of DNA. This started the era of molecular biology and enabled, among others, the production of human insulin, instead of extracting it from pigs, 20 years later (1956 --> 1977).
The company Genentech was started with recombinant insulin as their first product and became extremely successful but: it was not the industry and scientist working in the private sector who made the discoveries necessary to start producing the product - they were working in academia / government.
Of course this will not convince you based on your beliefs in invisible hands and such.
I have yet to see a developed western country where political leaders realize that cutting back on research will harm future competitiveness of their country.
Products and services made with cutting edge technology are harder to copy and less likely to have production delocalized to places where workers are cheap and relatively unskilled.
Without strong basic research you won't have discoveries that can be applied to problems and result in the new technology. Interestingly enough, China invests like crazy in research funding - maybe this will bring back jobs and we will be making T-shirts for the far east 40 years from now...
So, you'll be getting back to me to explain why the murder rate in DC is higher than in Virginia and Maryland, right?
As a european who have spent the last 3.5 years in the DC metro area, I have my ideas why the murder rate is so high in the DC area. Racial segregation and poverty, with no chance for social ascension, effectively creating ghettos, play a key role. you can bet on it, the murder rate is not driven up by the murders in Georgetown...
Of course murder rate is lower both in Maryland and Virginia, the parts of these states neighboring DC are mostly where the more well-off part of the population lives in the suburbs and in general they face much less crap. Still, you might see a real difference between Prince Georges and Montgomery counties of MD, for example.
From your I guess you are for the "right to bear arms". For long I have not cared. Since I have seen a ~25 years old father of three in Virginia walking around with a gun in his belt at the kid's playground of a Burger King . Since that I just think these people are idiots. Yes, pick up a gun when you go hunting or when you go shooting to the range. Otherwise, when you spend long periods of time in public, there is no reason to have one on you. Point.
Population of DC might be 600K but the reality is that it is sitting in the middle of a 5 million big agglomeration. Firearms being illegal in DC does not mean a thing since you can have all you need in Virginia, a mile away. Just keep the above in mind when you mix in the debate over gun control.
You know very well that at least 90% of trips made using a car are to get everyday chores done - commute, kids to/from school, grocery getting. I don't say that such things as going for a drive, just for pleasure, do no exist.
No wonder you don't enjoy driving. No I don't - at least not in the US. But worry not, I do not drive to work - I bike. I actually bike more miles than drive on average, saving hundreds of hours of frustration in traffic jams where the problem is not "am I going to fast?" but "damn it, I'm faster on a bike"
I guess you speak of the 17-25 age group. Because I really don't know many working age adults who enjoy driving their daily commute on congested highways.
X seemed pretty stable for me over the last 5?6?7 years, it was not the bottleneck / lowest common denominator for the usability of the distros I used over the years.
Does your browser die when a webserver dies?
Just don't start your webserver from a terminal you opened while logged in to X.
You know, CTRL+SHFT+_1-6_, log in and start your webserver. Or have it started at boot time. Or put it into background.
The scientific output of the US is supported by the foreign students and researchers who come here to either get their PhD degree or spend a few years as post-doctoral scientists. Since most research work is effectively done by the students or postdocs, while bosses writing up the results, it is safe to stay that US science is turning on imported brain and manpower. This is true for both Universities and Federal research organizations.
I have to agree that research and science is great in the US but not because of the school system.
I don't think that many F/OSS projects lack documentation. Having said this, MythTV is definitely not a good example; the documentation and installation is a nightmare IMO.
I have no problem with fixing a broken system. Neither have I suggested that the current system should be completely abolished, I just said the current system looks very much like organized extortion of money.
The funny thing is, I can see that health care is not the only domain that smell of oligopolies and broken markets here in the US, a good example of how the free market regulates itself.
While I was living in France I never went to the hospital to ask for any kind of intervention, just for fun.
The fact that you still argue by the virtues of the for profit healthcare when it is well known that the US is among the least efficient countries when you look at health vs. money spent, just shows your short-sightedness.
Let me break this on you : the reason why US healthcare is so expensive because the insurance companies - providers duo drives up prices using racketeering. If you are not insured, the provider will bill you with a profit margin of 300-1000%. If you are insured - you payed the protection money - the insurance company will negotiate the price down.
Example : bloodwork in DC reagion : If you have no insurance, the provider will charge you $500. If you are insured, the insurance company pays, but only $50.
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I didn't claim that it saved my life.
I just assumed - apparently wrongly - that the "worked for me" is the way you say what people often claim : "the helmet saved my life"
I don't know how you can ignore the benefits of a helmet with a straight face.
I don't say that helmets don't reduce the risk of head injury, but IMO, this benefit is so small (under normal conditions of operating a bicycle with no competition involved) that it does not make it worth the hassle of wearing a helmet - similarly to playing the lottery with 1 in 50 000 000 chance to win.
Taking hits to the head with a bat : I don't think this is a good model for representing biking accidents so there is no point. You can go ahead alone, though, at your pleasure ...:)
Funny, I have the exact opposite experience.
I commute by bike all year round in the northern suburbs of Washington DC, without a helmet.
My impression is that apart myself, most people - everybody wears a helmet where I commute - don't respect stopsigns, redlights and often do not have adequate lightning in the evening.
As for wearing it because why not : then why not put helmets on all babies once they start sitting up and then learn to walk? They keep falling all the time...
People have been biking for over a century, and except for racing, it is remarkably safe unless someone hits you with a car.
Then there's a bunch of guys who (Cochrane Collab) I doubt ever got on a bike since they were kids and start working hard to prove that riding a bicycle is a high-risk activity even though we know from past experience that it is not.
Instead of getting your data from the poisoned well of BSHI, why don't you go over to Bicycle Helmet Research Foundation for a change, to widen you perspective?
As I wrote somewhere above, I had a similar accident - fork broke above the crown.
Two teeth gone, passed out, face bruised over an area comparable to an average palm.
I did not wear a helmet. Your statement that the "helmet saved your life" is simply not verifiable - you should ride the same speed, same bike at the same spot and have the bike fail the same way dozens of times, while wearing a helmet or not, and look at the statistics of survival in order to be able to state that.
I still ride without a helmet; have been working in the US for the last few years and I can tell you, the most dangerous thing in biking here is the morons driving cars you have to share the road with.
Sorry to hear what happened.
I have to point out one thing, though : the same guys who started this "helmets save lives" craze with their New England Journal Of Medicine paper, failed to find a quantifiable protection by helmets for lacerations on the face, including the orbits : paper in pdf here
FYI, I fell once with a bike - the fork broke just above the crown. I passed out and lost half of two incisors. A helmet would not have changed anything and I have ridden 30000+ miles since, without a helmet. But I always make sure my bike is in excellent mechanical condition...
Maybe you should take more attention not to fall...
If the dents and gouges come from mountain or off-road biking : the story is about urban cycling.
50 days paid annual leave? Florida is not France...
I find the swedish system correct, this is the way it should be everywhere.
In many countries though, your period of working in research while a graduate student counts as "studying" and you receive a "stipend/fellowship", this is their excuse to make you work for peanuts while you are in fact an M. Sc. level employee. This also means that in most countries those years don't count towards the number of years employed, etc...
I believe a number of other European countries have similar PhD salaries
Not really. I was paid by a government contract in France 2002-2005 and had ~$1300 / month.
Holland might be paying better, and Germany somewhere in between, the only way to make remotely decent money during the years of graduate studies is to do it working for a company.
Monsanto did not invent GMO : scientists in the 60's, 70's started inserting pieces of genes into E. coli, a basic step in manipulating DNA. At the same time, there were intense debates how to handle this and what the consequences might be. Monsato, a private company took this much further and personally I don't agree with their approach.
Funny is, there is a big difference between a plant that has a resistance gene to a herbicide and the golden rice project that could prevent hundreds of thousands of kids from going blind every year.
In the first case, if the inserted gene escapes, it will make other, regular plants resistant to the herbicide - clearly bad.
In the second case, the only problem that could arise is that some weeds would start producing beta-carotene.
So there is difference between GMO and GMO.
There is no point of educating scientists if the private sector does not need them.
Here you suggest there is no need for publicly funded research but let's just consider the following :
Watson and Crick were publicly funded scientist when they discovered the structure of DNA. This started the era of molecular biology and enabled, among others, the production of human insulin, instead of extracting it from pigs, 20 years later (1956 --> 1977).
The company Genentech was started with recombinant insulin as their first product and became extremely successful but: it was not the industry and scientist working in the private sector who made the discoveries necessary to start producing the product - they were working in academia / government.
Of course this will not convince you based on your beliefs in invisible hands and such.
I have yet to see a developed western country where political leaders realize that cutting back on research will harm future competitiveness of their country.
Products and services made with cutting edge technology are harder to copy and less likely to have production delocalized to places where workers are cheap and relatively unskilled.
Without strong basic research you won't have discoveries that can be applied to problems and result in the new technology. Interestingly enough, China invests like crazy in research funding - maybe this will bring back jobs and we will be making T-shirts for the far east 40 years from now...
You felt it wrong.
And so you have just invalidated any argument you may have that guns themselves are the cause
You would be right if I had ever stated that.
So, you'll be getting back to me to explain why the murder rate in DC is higher than in Virginia and Maryland, right?
As a european who have spent the last 3.5 years in the DC metro area, I have my ideas why the murder rate is so high in the DC area. Racial segregation and poverty, with no chance for social ascension, effectively creating ghettos, play a key role. you can bet on it, the murder rate is not driven up by the murders in Georgetown...
Of course murder rate is lower both in Maryland and Virginia, the parts of these states neighboring DC are mostly where the more well-off part of the population lives in the suburbs and in general they face much less crap. Still, you might see a real difference between Prince Georges and Montgomery counties of MD, for example.
From your I guess you are for the "right to bear arms". For long I have not cared. Since I have seen a ~25 years old father of three in Virginia walking around with a gun in his belt at the kid's playground of a Burger King . Since that I just think these people are idiots. Yes, pick up a gun when you go hunting or when you go shooting to the range. Otherwise, when you spend long periods of time in public, there is no reason to have one on you. Point.
Banning guns in the US would be less successful than banning alcohol or drugs.
Hardly, neither of them really succeeded.
It's part of the price of a free country.
It looks like there are many countries who manage to stay free with many less intentional homicides...
Population of DC might be 600K but the reality is that it is sitting in the middle of a 5 million big agglomeration.
Firearms being illegal in DC does not mean a thing since you can have all you need in Virginia, a mile away.
Just keep the above in mind when you mix in the debate over gun control.
You know very well that at least 90% of trips made using a car are to get everyday chores done - commute, kids to/from school, grocery getting.
I don't say that such things as going for a drive, just for pleasure, do no exist.
No wonder you don't enjoy driving.
No I don't - at least not in the US. But worry not, I do not drive to work - I bike. I actually bike more miles than drive on average, saving hundreds of hours of frustration in traffic jams where the problem is not "am I going to fast?" but "damn it, I'm faster on a bike"
as a lot of people enjoy driving
I guess you speak of the 17-25 age group. Because I really don't know many working age adults who enjoy driving their daily commute on congested highways.
X seemed pretty stable for me over the last 5?6?7 years, it was not the bottleneck / lowest common denominator for the usability of the distros I used over the years.
Does your browser die when a webserver dies?
Just don't start your webserver from a terminal you opened while logged in to X.
You know, CTRL+SHFT+_1-6_, log in and start your webserver. Or have it started at boot time. Or put it into background.
The scientific output of the US is supported by the foreign students and researchers who come here to either get their PhD degree or spend a few years as post-doctoral scientists. Since most research work is effectively done by the students or postdocs, while bosses writing up the results, it is safe to stay that US science is turning on imported brain and manpower. This is true for both Universities and Federal research organizations.
I have to agree that research and science is great in the US but not because of the school system.
I don't think that many F/OSS projects lack documentation. Having said this, MythTV is definitely not a good example; the documentation and installation is a nightmare IMO.
I have no problem with fixing a broken system. Neither have I suggested that the current system should be completely abolished, I just said the current system looks very much like organized extortion of money.
The funny thing is, I can see that health care is not the only domain that smell of oligopolies and broken markets here in the US, a good example of how the free market regulates itself.
While I was living in France I never went to the hospital to ask for any kind of intervention, just for fun.
The fact that you still argue by the virtues of the for profit healthcare when it is well known that the US is among the least efficient countries when you look at health vs. money spent, just shows your short-sightedness.
Let me break this on you : the reason why US healthcare is so expensive because the insurance companies - providers duo drives up prices using racketeering. If you are not insured, the provider will bill you with a profit margin of 300-1000%. If you are insured - you payed the protection money - the insurance company will negotiate the price down.
Example : bloodwork in DC reagion : If you have no insurance, the provider will charge you $500. If you are insured, the insurance company pays, but only $50.
This is extortion. Fuck them.