Gordon Ramsey's message...

[Saissac]

But chunky for a cyclist though....

[Bonefishblues]

There's a bloke called Hoy who wants to speak to you.

[pjclinch]

I was fairly ambivalent re wearing a helmet. After a Hawthorne branch went through my cap my ambivalence unsurprisingly ended. The prospect of losing any intellectual capacity really is a no brainer.

And yet when people get a head whack doing something where head whacks are actually similarly common to cycling but there isn't a culture of helmet promotion this line of reasoning doesn't typically take hold.
The biggest causes of serious head injury in the UK are car crashes and trips and falls. There are a lot of people who've survived nasty head injuries falling down the stairs or being in a car crash, but I never see people driving in helmets outside of racing and I never see helmeted people on stairs aside from e.g. firemen on duty.
So it turns out it's only a no-brainer in the context of a culture where helmets are constantly pushed.

And your cap and skull weren't obviously inadequate to keep your mental faculties intact.

None of which say not to wear one: if you're happier in one then why not be happier? But it's not the slam-dunk "no-brainer" it's been rationalised as by many, because cycling isn't especially productive of brain damage compared to other stuff you're happy to do without a helmet.

Pete.

[cycle tramp]

Things I have hit my head on include; garage doors, open car boots and at one time, when I was working with a horse, it swung its head around a caught me on my forehead with its jaw (which is large and heavy and really dense). At no time did I think, 'Blimey I must wear a helmet everywhere I go and warn others to do the same.'

[Stevek76]

and I never see helmeted people on stairs aside from e.g. firemen on duty.

Which are of course a different type of helmet anyway. Construction hard hats are primarily designed and intended to reduce damage from lower mass higher velocity objects, not attempt to reduce peak head acceleration during a lower speed impact against a very high mass object (e.g. the planet)

[Airsporter1st]

and I never see helmeted people on stairs aside from e.g. firemen on duty.

Which are of course a different type of helmet anyway. Construction hard hats are primarily designed and intended to reduce damage from lower mass higher velocity objects, not attempt to reduce peak head acceleration during a lower speed impact against a very high mass object (e.g. the planet)

I’m not so sure about your last sentence - construction hard hats are also intended to protect the wearer from banging his/her head against e.g. scaffolding. I’m convinced mine did me more harm than good, because on several occasions I walked full tilt into low pipework (it having been obscured by the hat brim) and did my neck no good at all.

[Stevek76]

Well the helmet is larger than your head also so messes up internal proprioception. Hence why we tend to hit heads/feet whatever more when in protective gear, particularly if not very used to it.

Hence not sure it's good mitigation against hitting your own head on low stuff and unconvinced that's the actual design purpose.

[fastpedaller]

He was sportsing and quite possibly pushing his luck (unclear what the exact circumstances of the crash were?) and as such we have the usual conflating of celeb indulging in high risk activity trying to apply their risk mitigation to any sort of activity involving the broadly the same device (a bicycle).

As usual, those who think wearing a helmet for utility/touring cycling is essential risk mitigation should also be wearing one walking and for a whole host of other daily activities.

It's possible that statistics show the kitchen as being more dangerous....... however, Mr Ramsay has the skills required to work in his kitchen! Maybe he should stick to the activities that match his skill set, and not dabble in others if he lacks the skills.

[Airsporter1st]

Well the helmet is larger than your head also so messes up internal proprioception. Hence why we tend to hit heads/feet whatever more when in protective gear, particularly if not very used to it.

Hence not sure it's good mitigation against hitting your own head on low stuff and unconvinced that's the actual design purpose.

Extract from HSE PPE regs:

“ Potential causes of head injuries
There is nearly always a risk of a head injury on a construction site.
For example:

•Objects falling or being thrown from height
•An unprotected end of a scaffold pole
•Projections not being capped e.g. studs
•Insufficient headroom on a scaffold

Wear your hard hat to prevent or lessen an injury to your head”

[Psamathe]

Safety and precautions are weird in that some activities seem to predominate in public discussion for no reason I can understand. eg how would a health and safety expert react if s/he took part in an offshore yacht race? Standing on a moving narrow deck around ropes continually moving with forces you can't hope to control without winch systems and you have these safety rails around the outside at a height better to trip you overboard than actually keep you aboard. Yet it's all pretty well self-regulating, people doing the sailing setting the standards for the sport - which makes sense.

So why with cycling do non-cyclists keep telling cyclists what to do. Or cyclists with no experience beyond their specific lapse of concentration or meeting a fool driving a car decide they should start telling all cyclists what to do? So much depends on individual circumstances. Cycling organisations adopt policies determined by non-cyclists in insurance companies. The whole thing seems a complete dogs breakfast and individuals who won't reveal circumstances should not be lecturing others where those unknown circumstances may easily not apply.

Ian

[Cugel]

Safety and precautions are weird in that some activities seem to predominate in public discussion for no reason I can understand. eg how would a health and safety expert react if s/he took part in an offshore yacht race? Standing on a moving narrow deck around ropes continually moving with forces you can't hope to control without winch systems and you have these safety rails around the outside at a height better to trip you overboard than actually keep you aboard. Yet it's all pretty well self-regulating, people doing the sailing setting the standards for the sport - which makes sense.

So why with cycling do non-cyclists keep telling cyclists what to do. Or cyclists with no experience beyond their specific lapse of concentration or meeting a fool driving a car decide they should start telling all cyclists what to do? So much depends on individual circumstances. Cycling organisations adopt policies determined by non-cyclists in insurance companies. The whole thing seems a complete dogs breakfast and individuals who won't reveal circumstances should not be lecturing others where those unknown circumstances may easily not apply.

Ian

Part of the problem giving rise to these universal laws of safety procedures & gubbins is that our culture assumes that a particularly prominent and successful mode of understanding physical things (science) is a good model for every kind of understanding. Science seeks and appears to find universal laws that approximate to an absolute truth. Many assume (or desire that) there are simple universal laws and truths about everything, no matter how complex and even chaotic these everythings are.

And our long history of immersion in the assumptions of monotheistic religions gives most of us a similar unconscious assumption (that there are simple absolute truths/laws that are universal - about everything).

Once real physical systems are considered, it becomes clear that there is a vast difficulty in applying the laws of physics in ways that can accurately predict, as an outcome of a theoretical application of these laws and their interactions, every aspect of how that real system will behave in future, under any circumstance. Riding a bike can be a very complex physical system, especially in traffic and on complex roads, all involving various aspects of human control or lack of it, not to mention highly variable human attitudes that can greatly affect how a bike is ridden and how hostile is the environment in which the riding takes place.

So, rather than trying to determine if a typical cycling "accident" can be described entirely theoretically to a resolution that will show whether a helmet will or will not reduce the force of various kinds of accident-imposed blows to the cyclist head, it's a far more successful approach to consider such matters empirically. How likely is it that a particular individual in a particular cycling circumstances will bang their head and to what degree? Only a detailed and extensive history of that person and their cycling is likely to give anything like a useful answer.

The answers will vary widely depending on a thousand factors about the cyclist, their bike, where and how they ride and in what of a another thousand possible environments, many containing all sorts of other highly unpredictable physical systems such as cars driven by all kinds of people with all sorts of cultural installations in their heads about how to drive.

Some cyclists will often bang their head whilst cycling; others never do; and everything in between. The individual cyclist is likely to be the best at determining their need, or lack of it, for a cycling helmet - assuming they can do some sort of empirical risk assessment. (Many can't or don't).

But there are some typical cycling cases where it could be argued a priori that a helmet is a wise choice. Riding an MTB along a forest track overhung with numerous tree branches, for example. Perhaps even riding as a commuter in the mad traffic of a typical city along lengths of roads full of potholes, adamantine road furniture, drain covers with slots aligned to wheels or tram tracks, etcetera, in all weathers, day or night.

Even then, you'll probably find some individual cyclists who ride frequently in such environments but have never fallen off (or got knocked off) and banged their head, over tens or even hundreds of thousands of miles, as a courier perhaps.

********
Wasn't that sweary chef bloke a boxer at some stage? Did he wear a helmet?

[pjclinch]

Once real physical systems are considered, it becomes clear that there is a vast difficulty in applying the laws of physics in ways that can accurately predict, as an outcome of a theoretical application of these laws and their interactions, every aspect of how that real system will behave in future, under any circumstance.

you don't even have to extend the problem in to the multiple extra possibilities of the future to have very non-deterministic outcomes from limited data.
My first degree was geophysics, where you're trying to find out what's underground by measuring how various physical effects interact with it, but there's an element of guesswork because effectively you have more unknowns than you can work out uniquely with the data you have. And that's with static stuff that will react deterministically with the various things we're measuring (magnetic fields, gravity fields, interaction with seismic waves etc.)
I think I've told this one before, but here it is again... A mathematician, an engineer and a geophysicist are up for a job and it's the final interview, final question, and they're all asked what's 2+2.
The mathematician thinks for a while and then states "it's exactly 4"
The engineer scribbles down some equations, draws some graphs and then states "it's 3.99 +/- .015"
The geophysicist asks "what would you like it to be?"

This may in part explain my willingness to accept that finding black and white answers may not be as easy as we'd like.

Wasn't that sweary chef bloke a boxer at some stage? Did he wear a helmet?

Boxing head protection, as with gridiron football helmets, is a whole other can of worms. It has some lessons for cycling head protection but there's a fundamental difference between them and cycling in that using your head protection can be an active strategy to get ahead in contact sports where as you're pretty always worse off if you hit something on a bike (there may actually be exceptions in bunch sprinting, but things are complicated enough as it is not to worry about that!).

Pete.

[Cugel]

Once real physical systems are considered, it becomes clear that there is a vast difficulty in applying the laws of physics in ways that can accurately predict, as an outcome of a theoretical application of these laws and their interactions, every aspect of how that real system will behave in future, under any circumstance.

you don't even have to extend the problem in to the multiple extra possibilities of the future to have very non-deterministic outcomes from limited data.
My first degree was geophysics, where you're trying to find out what's underground by measuring how various physical effects interact with it, but there's an element of guesswork because effectively you have more unknowns than you can work out uniquely with the data you have. And that's with static stuff that will react deterministically with the various things we're measuring (magnetic fields, gravity fields, interaction with seismic waves etc.)
I think I've told this one before, but here it is again... A mathematician, an engineer and a geophysicist are up for a job and it's the final interview, final question, and they're all asked what's 2+2.
The mathematician thinks for a while and then states "it's exactly 4"
The engineer scribbles down some equations, draws some graphs and then states "it's 3.99 +/- .015"
The geophysicist asks "what would you like it to be?"

This may in part explain my willingness to accept that finding black and white answers may not be as easy as we'd like.

Pete.

And let us not forget the nature of the three body problem, as well as the inability of even Maxwell's daemon to determine the course of future events even just a few seconds hence.

[mattheus]

Once real physical systems are considered, it becomes clear that there is a vast difficulty in applying the laws of physics in ways that can accurately predict, as an outcome of a theoretical application of these laws and their interactions, every aspect of how that real system will behave in future, under any circumstance.

you don't even have to extend the problem in to the multiple extra possibilities of the future to have very non-deterministic outcomes from limited data.
My first degree was geophysics, where you're trying to find out what's underground by measuring how various physical effects interact with it, but there's an element of guesswork because effectively you have more unknowns than you can work out uniquely with the data you have. And that's with static stuff that will react deterministically with the various things we're measuring (magnetic fields, gravity fields, interaction with seismic waves etc.)
I think I've told this one before, but here it is again... A mathematician, an engineer and a geophysicist are up for a job and it's the final interview, final question, and they're all asked what's 2+2.
The mathematician thinks for a while and then states "it's exactly 4"
The engineer scribbles down some equations, draws some graphs and then states "it's 3.99 +/- .015"
The geophysicist asks "what would you like it to be?"

This may in part explain my willingness to accept that finding black and white answers may not be as easy as we'd like.

Pete.

And let us not forget the nature of the three body problem, as well as the inability of even Maxwell's daemon to determine the course of future events even just a few seconds hence.

It's a bit ridiculous to suggest physics is no use in complex systems. If I wanted to predict the behaviour of a gas* over the next few seconds - or hours - I would rather ask a physicist than a graduate of the University of Life.

*a system of a few gazillion particles.

[pjclinch]

you don't even have to extend the problem in to the multiple extra possibilities of the future to have very non-deterministic outcomes from limited data.
My first degree was geophysics, where you're trying to find out what's underground by measuring how various physical effects interact with it, but there's an element of guesswork because effectively you have more unknowns than you can work out uniquely with the data you have. And that's with static stuff that will react deterministically with the various things we're measuring (magnetic fields, gravity fields, interaction with seismic waves etc.)
I think I've told this one before, but here it is again... A mathematician, an engineer and a geophysicist are up for a job and it's the final interview, final question, and they're all asked what's 2+2.
The mathematician thinks for a while and then states "it's exactly 4"
The engineer scribbles down some equations, draws some graphs and then states "it's 3.99 +/- .015"
The geophysicist asks "what would you like it to be?"

This may in part explain my willingness to accept that finding black and white answers may not be as easy as we'd like.

And let us not forget the nature of the three body problem, as well as the inability of even Maxwell's daemon to determine the course of future events even just a few seconds hence.

It's a bit ridiculous to suggest physics is no use in complex systems. If I wanted to predict the behaviour of a gas* over the next few seconds - or hours - I would rather ask a physicist than a graduate of the University of Life.

*a system of a few gazillion particles.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that. If it were the case nobody would be e.g. working in geophysics or, indeed, bother studying it.

The trick is having some idea of the confidence one can place on one's predictions. Careful physicists understand that. Someone telling me I have an 88% lower chance of a brain injury if I wear a helmet to trundle to the baker's on a Saturday morning probably doesn't.

Pete.