I’ve always been annoyed by how bulky and ugly traditional bicycle helmets are, but then I’ve also fallen from a bicycle while not wearing one and it wasn’t pretty. This looks really good, sort of like an airbag for your head.
One question though, what do you do with it in warm weather, when you can’t wear it?
Via Likecool
In the 50 years since US insurers organized the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, car crashworthiness has improved remarkably.
Demonstrating this was a crash test conducted on Sept. 9 between a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air and a 2009 Chevrolet Malibu, which you can see in the video embedded below.
In a real-world collision similar to this test, occupants of the new model would fare much better than in the vintage Chevy, which was surprising to me. I wash shocked to see that supposedly rock-solid car literally come apart at the seams, explosively, as if it were built of plastic. The crash test was conducted at an event to celebrate the contributions of auto insurers to highway safety progress over 50 years.
This video from the National Geographic shows different breeds of modern dogs and how they attack their prey. Heavier dogs use their own body weight to bring you down, and lighter dogs build up momentum by running and jumping at you. The video also talks about bite strength and how head size affects it.
Takeaway lesson: do your best not to get bitten by a dog while it’s coming at you. Make it slow down or if possible, only bite you when it’s stationary. Or at the very least, avoid getting bitten by a mastiff. Those puppies pack a massive 500 lbs. bite. If one of them bites your hand, it will crush your bones and quite possibly sever a finger or two.
Dog Attack Styles from the National Geographic
So happy to hear about the good work Betty Makoni is doing in Zimbabwe. She’s put together a support network for rape victims.
Child rape survivor saves ‘virgin myth’ victims – CNN.com
Witch doctors (so-called traditional healers) have spread the rumor that a man can be cured of AIDS if he rapes a virgin. So you have all these HIV-infected men with no scruples and no morals whatsoever who are raping young and younger girls — even babies. Unfortunately Zimbabwe’s culture makes it very difficult to get support after rapes occur, but this woman, Betty Makoni, has organized a country-wide network of support for the poor girls.
I say the filthy men who do this sort of thing, and the witch doctors who spread the unconscionable advice, ought to be rounded up and raped by prison gangs. Either that or they should be castrated, without anesthesia. Let the punishment fit the crime.
To all those people who are worried about swine flu — you should thank the pig farming industry for it, and the rotten politicians who keep it going the way it is, even though it’s one of the worst polluters in the US. It’s no wonder new viruses are getting cooked up in those industrial pig farms, given the conditions in which they keep the pigs.
And perhaps you should also thank your local landscaping companies, who, about this time each year, dump tons of pig offal around your communities at outrageously high prices. Along with the smell, you’re also getting a dose of swine flu, trichinella and other intestinal parasite eggs, and who knows what other poisons, cooked up nicely in fermented pig manure.
Enjoy all this, and keep in mind you’re the one financing the whole shebang when you buy pig meat and you hire landscaping companies based not on how sustainable and non-polluting their methods are, but on how tall they can make your pansies and grass grow…
❗ Updated 5/3/09: Wired Science confirms my hunch that the pig farming industry is to blame for this virus in an article entitled “Swine Flu Ancestor Born on US Factory Farms“.
Raoul Pop 