The Blood is The Life 03-08-2012

[miss_s_b]

• Bradley Wiggins wrong on helmets
  Linking just for the "if you make US wear helmets, we'll lobby for helmets for car drivers then!" paragraph
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• 'Dark Knight Rises': Anne Hathaway's Feline Fitness Regime - YouTube
  Anne H skewers sexist interviewer on his repeated insistence on asking her about her diet.
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• Factcheck: Are cyclists to blame for road accidents?
  Mostly not. Suspect you could say the same for bikers, too.
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• Head injuries and bicycle helmet laws. [Accid Anal Prev. 1996] - PubMed - NCBI
  I'm assuming Accid Anal Prev means accident analysis prevention, not anything more interesting. Still, more grist to the mill of making car drivers wear helmets...
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• What if every Olympic sport was photographed like beach volleyball?
  Not objecting to the hurdler one bit. Objectifying, yes. Objecting to, no.
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• Another unpaid researcher post in UK academia, this time UCL. A shameful tradition. - bengoldacre - secondary blog
  Comments worth reading too
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• Sex testing and the Olympics: myths, rumours and confirmation bias | Vanessa Heggie | Science | guardian.co.uk
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• London 2012 Olympics: US Judoka Kayla Harrison overcomes horror of sexual abuse to aim for gold - Telegraph
  I'm glad this girl won.
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• Atos assessors told to keep disability benefit approvals low, film suggests | Society | The Guardian
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• David Cameron retreats on House of Lords reform - Telegraph
  So, is the Torygraph reporting this because they WANT to scupper Cameron's scuppering?
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Comments

[drunkwriter]

Bale was of course the subject of repeated questions about his regime after his massive weight fluctuations between Batman Begins and The Machinist. But that's sort of the point, his was a radical physical transformation, as opposed to a slender actress becoming a slightly more slender actress. I find it interesting that people obsess about 'fitness'. Sure, there's a certain gymnastic flexibility that Hathaway and Johannsen must have had to attain for their various films but... people do know they can't really kick bad guys through walls, right? There's this little element called acting that people seem to forget about.

(just tossing that out there as an observation, I'm at work and can't watch the actual video yet)

[von_geisterhand]

Not just Batman begins and The Machinist. To quote his tvtropes-page:
he lost 63 pounds for The Machinist, immediately gained it back and then some (100) to play everyone's favorite masked vigilante in Batman Begins, then went skeletal again to star in Rescue Dawn, then gained it back for The Dark Knight, then went skeletal *again* to star in The Fighter. And then made The Dark Knight Rises.

I think the problem is also that the interviewer never really gets into the "being fit to do the stunts"-area (which I thought was bloody impressive) but only seemed to meander at "You look great in a tight catsuit. Tell me more about your body!"

So I thought it was a hilarious comeback.

[londonkds]

Wiggins has rowed back on Twitter and said he doesn't support a compulsory helmet law.

[ggreig.livejournal.com]

I think you mean back-pedalled? ;-)

[freddiefraggles]

Re: first link: Given the choice, why would you not wear a helmet? IF I fell off or were knocked off, it would give me a better chance of not being brain damaged and therefore being able to make a full recovery. And why on earth would me wearing a helmet take more risks than me not wearing a helmet?

That article (and I stupidly read the comments!) really pissed me off.

[bagpuss]

wearing a helmet doesn't make you take more risks but does appear to make the drivers around you take more I thought (I haven't read the article)

[andrewhickey.info]

I don't cycle myself, but I've had people tell me that helmets make it less easy for them to hear.

It's also a fairly well=confirmed fact that safety measures instill an over-confidence in people, so that the more safety measures are taken, the more accidents increase. Hopefully those accidents that do occur are less damaging, but there *is* a trade-off there.

Right now, people *do* have the choice, and a lot of people *do* choose not to wear a helmet. If you want to make helmets for cyclists compulsory, why not helmets for pedestrians, too? After all, they can get knocked over crossing the road, and far more pedestrians get killed by cars than cyclists do -- thousands a year, to the hundred or so cyclists.

And more people than that die from accidents in the home. Perhaps we'd better make helmets compulsory indoors, too?

[miss_s_b]

Given the choice, I wouldn't wear a cycle helmet because most of them provide cosmetic protection at best, and there are not only the trade-offs that other people mentioned, but the fact that if you land anything other than straight on your head the sliding makes weird torsions on your neck and you can end up paralysed from the neck down.

Wearing my motorbike helmet on a pushbike would provide better protection, but would have concomitant reductions in visibility and audibility of traffic...

Incidentally, there is a LOT of research that shows that the wearing of protective gear (not just helmets, but elbow/knee pads, etc) makes riders of both pushbikes and motorbikes engage in more risky behaviour. Also, airbags/rollbars in cars do it to car drivers too. People think that if an accident DOES happen they won't get hurt, so it matters less preventing an accident.