Originally Posted by
crhilton
Okay. Thanks for the list. I'm gonna go puke now.
I always like to see how a statistic is split up in its entirety. It tells you more about the assumptions which were made while forming it.
sorry for the gorey details. I forget not everyone has the stomach for that stuff I do. I wanted to be an EMT at one point, and have spent a large part of my life around hospitals. My mother is also an RN, so even when we dine together, a lot of the discussion is about patients and medical stuff. It's par for the course, and I get so used to it, that I forget not everyone is.
I also completely understand the desire to break everything down. Being an engineer, that sort of thing is in my nature, too. The more information you have, the better and clearer the whole picture becomes. Even a bit of omitted or missing data can skew an entire study, if that bit of data is important.
Originally Posted by Jaeger
...he should have been able to get up, see to his other injuries and then pose cheerfully for a picture with his cracked helmet. Instead an impact to the head with the helmet on still produced a very serious head injury. <snipped>
OK, the helmet's foam and plastic again absorbs some of the energy of the impact. Without that layer of protection there, he probably would have suffered bleeding into the brain, a crushed skull, or any number of other injuries that could have proven fatal. While we have no way to know what really would have happened without a helmet, I feel it's safe to say that whatever the helmet did absorb from the crash, is that much less his head had to take in damage.
If you wanted him to get up and dust off, he should have been wearing a full exo-skelital body armor suit, like some of the MTB guys wear in downhill. You know the ones, with the hard plastic skid plate armor on the fore and upper arms, a body shell, thighs and shins, HANS device-like whiplash brace, etc.