Should I wear a helmet?

Simon Brooke wrote:
: Give them their due, they're also useful in hailstorms.

ahh, yes, we have established that. i believe we've also established that
they're good for deflecting low lying branches, keeping your head marginally
wearmer in cold weather and for mounting lights.

i wonder how many other immutable truths there are in this debate?
--
david reuteler

On 23 Nov 2003 09:28:30 -0800, (Carl Fogel)
wrote:
Rick Onanian wrote in message . ..
The theory proposed was that they could encourage MHLs by saying
that in a recent thread on the internet, 98% of people agreed that
helmets must be worn, each citing life-saving stories.

Whose minds does this theory predict will be changed
by pro-helmet posts to mighty rec.bicycling.tech?

Legislators and shallow-thinkers. Nobody cares about pro-helmet
posts to the mighty r.b.t., but they won't say it that way. They'll
say something like:
"99% of people in a recent discussion agreed that helmets save lives
and should be worn by all bicyclists".
Or
"349 out of 360 people who participated in a recent discussion..."

Are you saying that people who take the trouble to
post that they had accidents while wearing helmets
must be presumed to be dishonest?

No. However, a website such as cyclingforums.com would be easily
abused to post hundreds of almost identical messages; and indeed, we
have hundreds of nearly identical messages.

If so, what's your opinion of Peter Chisholm, who
recently posted that he had an accident while not
wearing a helmet?

I think he's a little bit hypocritical for his opinion that they are
silly and useless but that he wears one because he used up his
chance and is now in a delicate position. It's questionable whether
or not it would have helped in his accident, although I think that
it would have; if I understand correctly, he broke the bone just
behind the eyebrow -- and I believe that the thickness of the helmet
would have protected against that injury. I had a similar
unhelmeted accident with similar results (facial lacerations and
abrasions and a laceration to the eyelid, no permanent damage
though, which would have been offset to the cheek had I worn a
helmet -- much preferable) and I wish I had worn it for that
accident. Since then, I haven't ridden without a helmet.

It has definitely protected me numerous times from minor injuries,
and possibly from major ones too, while off-road. Luckily (as well
as carefully), I haven't had any on-road accidents.

Come to think of it, I bored the pants off poor
John Tomlinson recently about my misadventures,
many of which I claimed occurred while wearing a
helmet. My point was that violent accidents may
occur more often than many individuals would predict
from their own experience, but if I'm part of a vast
pro-helmet conspiracy, then I want to know where to
apply for my funding.

You show no signs of being part of a vast conspiracy. You appear
real, and had more reasonable stories; and there weren't hundreds of
others coming from the same server with the same style and almost
identical content.

As for the posts in question running 98% in favor of
wearing helmets, do you expect a lot of people who
have had accidents to post about the benefits of not
wearing helmets?

No, just Chalo, and maybe Peter. However, it's curious that the
posts in question don't include a reasonable percentage of people
who haven't had death-defying accidents.

Questioning the honesty of posts is rarely a
convincing argument. What would you think of

I agree. I generally avoid doing so; look at my history in such
threads as this one, other than concerning these cyclingforums
posts. I've rarely, if ever, questioned the honesty of Frank or
Chalo or Peter or whoever else; although I have questioned conflicts
between what was said here and what was said in other threads.

me if I had called Chalo "a pathological liar"
for claiming an inch-thick scalp in a recent
post in another thread? I think that he's mistaken,
but I don't doubt that he honestly believed what
he wrote.

Well, he's either a liar, miseducated, or ignorant if you're correct
(and I believe you).

Nor do I think that Peter Chisholm is deliberately
spreading wicked falsehoods in his recent reply about
hitting a windshield with one side of his face--I think
that he is also mistaken, but that the matter is far
less certain than the thickness of the human scalp.

Recent? He's mentioned it throughout the thread. Anyway, he's the
only one who matches his style, origin, and content.

Would you question the honesty of people writing about
their experience with greasing or not greasing crank
spindles? Or anti-flat tires? First put together some
clear evidence of dishonesty--then present it. It would,
frankly, be fascinating.

I suppose that if it was a heated debate and we suddenly had so many
nearly identical posts...

From:
ive ridden two milion miles of house demolition debris with my 700 x
19c Gatorskins with ultrathin tubes and have never lost a single
pound of pressure even when i got runned over by a suv
-=-=-
ABF

From:
over two million miles of home destruction garbage riding on my 19c
gatorskins and never pumped them they saved my life from an asteroid
hit once too
-=-=-
FAB

From:
you must be stupid to ride with anything other than 19cx700
gatorskin tires. tehy will save your life by not losing air when you
cut them with a circular saw and then ride on a board with nails
sticking up and a dumptruck comes along
-=-=-
afb

From:
only people with air in their heads ride without life saving
gatorskins. i tried to flat them with a hammer and a spike and
couldnt, and when the hammer bounced off, a force field generated by
the tire protected my eye from the kareening hammer use gatorskins
unless you have air in your head to refill your tire
-=-=-
BAF

Get the idea?

Carl Fogel
--
Rick Onanian

Rick Onanian wrote in message . ..

[snip insufficiently irrelevant matter]

Why is the plural of 'ox' 'oxen', but the plural of 'box' is
'boxes'? I say 'boxen' anyway.

Dear Rick,

Man, men. Brother, brethren. Child, children.
Ox, oxen. Cow, kine. Woman, women. Sister, cistern--

(Sorry, that last is just a dig in at my two feminist
sistern.)

Internal vowel gradation survives with appended
plural suffixen. Note how the internal vowel
changes pronunciation in the serious examples.

This internal vowel pronunciation-change, however,
has been lost in ox-oxen in modern times, where the
creature has also lost importance. It was once
closer to oaks-awksen.

Where a plural-sounding -s already exists, no -n
with excrescent r-flavored schwa was ever appended,
mere internal vowel gradation being sufficient:
mouse, mice; goose, geese.

All such quaint archaisms are by their very nature
archaic--the old, short, often-used words of our rural
forefathers resisted change. Old English became
Middle English in an overwhelmingly agricultural
world bereft of subtle intellectual concepts.

The linguistic parallel is the scriptural fondness
for parables. When you speak a language suited to
plowing fields, moral matters are best addressed by
example--Jesus speaks in parables not merely to
baffle theologians, but because the language of
the times had no esoteric words like "esoteric"
or "recursive" or "morally ambiguous."

Such archaic writing is often superior to effete
modern nonsense like this sentence because it
favors the natural and obvious subject-verb of
a creature doing something. As the popularity of
pornography on the web reminds us, the most
interesting writing is about people doing things,
not pedants pondering trivialities. Make people
your subject and strong, active verbs will follow.

Thus our archaic verbs are often strong verbs that
describe what people actually do and have retained
their out-moded internal vowel gradation for showing
tense: think, thought; leap, leapt; weep, wept; run, ran;
speak, spoke; sing, sung; ring, rung; swim, swam; tear, tore;
teach, taught; seek, sought; find, found; bear, bore
(a good one to end on).

Boxes being a mostly modern invention (chests were
their ancestors and quite valuable), we are merely
being humorous and creating back-formations when we
speak of unix-boxen and VAXen.

Unfortunately, bicycles are modern, so our favorite
verb uses the insipid modern -ed method of forming
the past tense: today I pedal, yesterday I pedalled.

Note our two-wheeled verbs: spin, spun; ride, rode.
A back-formation honoring our roots would be today
I pedal, yesterday I paddled, but the kayakers have
stolen (not steeled) our thunder.

Yourn sincerely,

Carl Fogel

On Sun, 23 Nov 2003 22:27:15 -0500, "frkrygowHALTSPAM"
wrote:
By this time, I've seen the usual helmet arguments replayed, restated,
and rebutted over and over. It's very rare that someone brings up a
point I haven't read and considered before.

So, er...in a bit of an ego-stroking attempt here...did I give you
any new points to consider?
--
Rick Onanian

David Damerell wrote in message ...
frkrygowHALTSPAM wrote:
Carl, I don't know how long you've hung around the rec.bike.* groups.
Perhaps it's not long enough to have a sense of the history, and the
context.
I've been reading and posting since at least 1994.

This will not stop him telling you at length how Usenet works, in spite of
not having two clues to rub together.

Dear David,

Ah, there you are! Another devastatingly
detailed, closely-argued, good-natured
post. Keep up the good work.

Carl Fogel

On Mon, 24 Nov 2003 16:35:05 GMT, Simon Brooke
wrote:
Rick Onanian writes:
Yes, it's okay to say 'ass' here. It's neither necessary nor
specifically polite to censor yourself to 'arse'.

An ass is an equine otherwise known as a donkey, cuddy or moke. When

That's another usage of ass.

Jesus (allegedly) rode into Jerusalem he placed his arse on an ass.

"Uh, huhuhuh...it's coming out of the ass of the ass". C'mon, we
couldn't have that fun Beavis & Butthead phrase with "arse".

The USian usage 'ass' is a euphemism for 'arse', not the other way
around. I have no idea whether it's OK to use 'arse' here, but
you're going to make an ass of yourself criticising others' English
usage if you get things arse end about.

No criticism, just suggesting that it's allowed. I've since been
educated that "arse" is the more vulgar term by more than one
people.

See
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=ass
for more ass definitions. Human butt, donkey, Ted Kennedy, sexual
intercourse, ancient roman monetary unit. Also, unlisted there,
euphemistically used to refer to somebody with whom one has sex
("I'm getting a piece of ass tonight, she sure is hot").
--
Rick Onanian

On Mon, 24 Nov 2003 17:05:03 GMT, Simon Brooke
wrote:
(Fred Hinkson) writes:
If you don't want to have a brain don't wear that helmet.
Remember you can't go to OZ for a brain like the Scarecrow did.

Oh, no, here comes another train wreck.

I was going to try to avoid saying the same thing; after all, this
user may remain an isolated example.

Am I alone in finding something deeply ironic in webtv users posting
about the need to have and to preserve a brain?

Not at all.
--
Rick "Asshole elitist cable modem user" Onanian

(Carl Fogel) wrote:

First put together some
clear evidence of dishonesty--then present it. It would,
frankly, be fascinating.

There are 3 circumstantial criteria that call into question the
authenticity of the flood of posts into this thread from
cyclingforums:

1) They are predominantly from "users" who have no history, zero, of
posting on any other thread or any other group. (Though I have found
at least one sock puppet whose first-ever posts to this thread and
another unrelated thread logged one second apart. That other single
post represented that user's only Usenet history outside this thread.)
You can check this yourself by going to Google Groups and entering:

author:suspiciousnewposter

Use whichever user ID is in question, but do not use the email address
that comes with these postings. It is appended to all postings
originating from cyclingforums.

2) They all originate from cyclingforums. Usenet posts from there are
actually somewhat uncommon in other threads.

3) They all use simpleminded-- and similar-- arguments in favor of
helmet use.

Any one of these criteria would mean nothing. Any two in the context
of this thread would raise my suspicion. In the presence of all
three, I can no longer extend the benefit of the doubt to a previously
unknown contributor.

The sigs appended to the cyclingforums posts occasionally give away
the fishiness that spawned them. I've noted before that the
cyclingforums IDs "Cipher", "531", "DSK", and "Chesapeake Boy" have
all used the sig "Know your limits... Then FK'N Crush'em!!!", which
even if it's a club slogan or the like, is formatted identically in
all those cases.

"Tuschinski" and "jmitting" have both used the sig, "BSA", formatted
the same way.

Sock puppet "jasonaut", when I called him on his ruse, posted in
objection but made the mistake of signing his retort:

David Ornee, Western Springs, IL USA

which is the .sig of a frequent contributor who is helpful and
informative and who always posts under his name. David Ornee has
never posted to a helmet thread in the 3+ years he has been
participating. I contacted Mr. Ornee, and he confirmed that he had
nothing to do with the post in question.

Do you think that "jasonaut" just accidentally used David Ornee's
..sig? To me it looks more like somebody has a buggy, badly automated
system for generating deceitful garbage disguised as normal Usenet
traffic.

The practice of using false identities to skew the perceived drift of
public opinion is known to happen at the behest of business interests,
and when it does, it is called "astroturfing" because it feigns a
grassroots movement. There is a similar phenomenon known as "comment
spam" which appears to be intended to manipulate search engine
rankings.

http://info.astrian.net/jargon/terms...roturfing.html
http://www.jayallen.org/comment_spam/

There are examples of corporate interests using shills to participate
in online scientific discussions in order to create the illusion that
new research findings are in more dispute than they actually are.

I don't pretend to know what particular flavor of bull**** we are
witnessing here-- but that makes sense 'cause I'm not eating it.

Chalo Colina

Dave Kahn wrote:

What you may be overlooking, Benjamin, is that in order to provide us
with the link to the cyclingforums view of the message I linked to, he
must already have followed my link. Otherwise how would he know which
particular message it was? Therefore he must already have seen that
his message had the BSA sig when viewed from Google. Yet he still
posts a reply claiming there is no sig. Tuschinski's position is not
logically consistent.

I'm not overlooking this. I believe he was just confused by the link, not
realizing that cyclingforums is a gateway to usenet.

It is interesting to learn, however, that the sigs are not always
visible in the cyclingforums interface. It goes some way towards
explaining how he lost track of which sig was being used with which ID
and why he continued to make the mistake after it was pointed out.
Once Google links had been provided he apparently realised what must
have happened. His response was to try to persuade people there is a
signature bug. He grabbed a random signature from a genuine poster and
start appending it to his messages. David Ornee is the innocent victim
in this case.

I came to the conclusion that there is a signature bug myself. There are
certainly a number of other bugs in the cyclingforums software, as I
determined after perusing the site for a while. I don't see any logical
inconsistencies in Tuschinski's position; just confusion. I believe you
are being too hasty in removing the benefit of the doubt.

There clearly *is* a .sig bug on cyclingforums; if you view Tuschinski's
posts there, none of them have signatures until he added one after my
suggestion.

--
Benjamin Lewis

Seeing is deceiving. It's eating that's believing.
-- James Thurber

David Damerell wrote:

Benjamin Lewis wrote:
I think what we are seeing is a new gateway to usenet opening up
(cyclingforums), which is being used by a number of people, many of who
are relatively new to the internet.

None of whom _ever_ feel the need to post about any other cycling-related
topic, and all of whom feel that 800 postings just aren't enough?

Nah. It's sock-puppets.

I encourage you to peruse cyclingforums.com for a while, and you will
begin to see why it is so conducive to horrible posting practices.

Threads there are listed by the amount of traffic on them; this helmet
thread therefore usually appears right at the top. Newbies see this
popular thread first and jump on it.

Note that the threads there are *not* sorted using the references headers,
and observe the chaos that ensues

It's certainly possible that some of the posters there are indeed sock
puppets, but I don't believe that is mainly what is going on.

--
Benjamin Lewis

Seeing is deceiving. It's eating that's believing.
-- James Thurber