Originally Posted by
rydabent
A true life expiriment. Closet and other anti helmet crowd claims that if a helmet breaks it did nothing. Try this. Take an empty styofoam coffee cup. (make that an empty cup--sure dont want EPA nazis getting upset) Push down on it. It will give (that means taking up energy) and then will finally break. Since it took up energy before it broke it is doing its job. A broken helmet does the same thing.
Btw as I have posted before I personally feel cooler with a helmet--mine is white and well vented with a visor. Also it does provide some shade for my ears from the sun. A helmet could even provide some protecton fron skin cancer.
Unfortunately, the helmet is only required to take away the energy of a straight drop of no more than 2 meters (this does not include the speed of the bike or the spped of the car which may have caused the fall) on a flat surface and, get this, 1.2 meters on a curb!
http://www.bhsi.org/testing.htm
Also, see this overly confident article from the same PRO-HELMET site:
http://www.bhsi.org/limits.htm
In other words, yes, I agree they absorb some small part of a direct fall down from a stop, but much beyond that they are basically useless. They would not work for what I would need them for (car/bike incidents) so I will still not wear one...and yes, they may be cooler than a bare head if they have more vents and therefore less protection, but are not as cool as a wet cycling cap.