Far be it from me to disagree from your lunatic bs, but increased rotation with helmets has been proved in tests.

Uh, yes: consumer test of helmets always involve neck breaking experiments! That's why they go through some many testers!

Seriously: you are insane. No helmet is THAT dangerous - a teardrop shaped helmet is still made of foam and tear apart from a fraction of the energy need to break a neck. For any TT and triath readers: NO ONE HAS EVER HAD THEIR NECK BROKEN THIS WAY; THIS MAN IS A LOONIE! So you can go wearing your $500 hat and cutting your times by 0.5 of a second.

That's over complicated: your brain just should not rotate in its skull. That simple.

Interestingly, beside being the major cause of serious brain damage, rotational injuries are also cummulative (think of boxers and NFL.) So that guy who falls his bike a lot and avoids scalp cuts by wearing a helmet might, quite seriously, be making a bad trade off...

But, honestly, rotation is something of a red herring: virtually all serious cyclist head injuries come from fast hits by cars, and they do so much damage that any sort of helmet you can wear is irrelevant. The only smart safety measures are those that aim at not being hit. The reason why anti-rotation helmets matter is sports use - bmx, crit racing, downhill - where a participant might fall off quite frequently and where (obviously) no cars are involved. And of course it matters in motorcycling, because motorcycle helmets are tough enough to survive hits at more than 12mph.

Ok: I was overestimating your intelligence again.

1. In almost all accident where cyclists have fatal head injuries, THEY ALSO HAVE FATAL TORSO INJURIES. Indicating that a helmet can't really do much... for reasons that will probably still elude your intellect, but never mind.

2. Helmets are designed to take 100-200J of kinetic energy. In almost all accidents where a cyclist dies they are hit by a car with something like a thousand to ten thousand times that amount of energy.

High school never gets old, does it?

So can I expect you to be breaking out the body armor?

Except that's not true. What is most likely to kill you is a car crash. In car crashes, it quite often is a lot more than a head injury that kills you. It's often massive internal damage. Now, I don't know if body armor is actually designed to help with those forces, but we don't seem to care that helmets aren't either, so that seems a moot point. The real point: the forces you're going to experience that kill you are beyond what a helmet is designed/capable of handling, and even if it was, in the cases which you're most likely to die, it's injury to the rest of your body that'll be just as likely to kill you, so you should be riding in body armor as well if you're consistent in your goal.

In which case, more power to you. I don't find riding a bike any more dangerous than walking the dog. If I was seriously concerned about my chances at getting injured while riding, I probably just would stay home. As it is, I'm pretty sure I've tripped and fell more than I've crashed on a bike.

Virtually every accident that kills a cyclist involves him/her either going over the hood of a fast moving car or under a truck. In about 95% of these cases (see the source I gave on the last page) the cyclist will have fatal torso injuries as well as head injuries; in the other 5% the head impact will have had at 1000 times the energy a helmet is specced for.

What's real sad is that you see idiots in helmets trying to commit suicide all the time in urban areas. Trucks kill +50% of cyclists who die in cities, and it is usually because a cyclist is in a blindspot at a junction. Very few cyclists know where these are - you often seen people put themselves in the blindspot in front of a truck as well as those to the side. If you want to avoid dying and cycle in a city, staying away from trucks at junctions will do more to keep you alive than anything else: a fraction of the effort spent on helmet promotion would save lives if diverted to educating people on real safety.

You're funny considering you have no intelligence to estimate, which is evident by the fact you never mentioned torso damage. Now you change your story to try to have some resemblance of intelligence? but just like in your statement I quoted you failed big time. Probably the story of your life. You want to get nasty? I can play. Be civil or I can keep this up whenever I'm on the computer with you.

It would seem you missed his point entirely and purposefully. If you decide to misinterpret someone's message it is entire on you. I understood what he meant with no great difficulty.
It's called reading between the lines and understanding what is not clearly written out. The writer trusts his readers to have enough common sense to understand a textual meaning without the whole thing being opened up and intrisically explained (sorry meanwhile, apparently you messed this one up...). It is a skill learned before high school and an adult should already have perfected this skill.

Of course in an organized debate situation it is allowed and encouraged to use the opponents linguistical failings against him. But in a debate the aim is to win. This is not a debate even if some debate features are constantly evident in this discussion. And a discussion it is. The aim is to find the truth about helmets, not to win against all odds.
If you really want to bring a point across, don't mock the other discussers (which you do constantly), counter with evidence and valid points and not by starting a mess because "YA DINNAE WRIT A WURD HURRDURR!"
Seriously, get a clue. You are verging on rydabent level (although he cannot be overcome)

From post 5418:

about 75% of fatal head injuries to cyclists are accompanied by fatal torso injuries. (Front of car made of metal, yes???) This shouldn't surprise anyone intelligent, but there you go..

From post 5420:


Understand what this means: even if you had a helmet that would work perfectly and would protect your head at any speed, there is virtually no chance that thus helmet would save your life. Fatal cycling accident almost always involve a cyclist being smashed against a large piece of metal at high speed, and the odds (about 13 to 1!) say that such an accident will turn the contents of your torso into jam.

...This reading thing is HARD isn't it?

Rydabent is the man who believes that he is safer on his recumbent than a regular bike because if a the grill of a truck or SUV hits him at +30mph, head on, because he won't have as far to fall before he hits the ground. Because it's not the huge bloody piece of metal hitting you at 30 mph that hurts, or being dragged beneath 10 tons of truck, but falling the same height that you would if you stumbled while jogging...

To be fair to Rydabent though, I think a lot of people make the same implicit assumption and don't bother - or deliberately avoid - thinking about what happens in a fatal collision. Which is, almost invariably:

1. Your head and torso slam into said huge piece of metal at high speed. Your brain rotates, tearing neural connections, mushing cells, and causing internal bleeding. Your ribs fracture, your lungs are smashed into mush, your intestines rupture, etc.

Or

2. A truck smacks into you, breaking half the bones in your body, then drives over you. You are then either dragged and smeared like garlic against a cheese grater, or part of you goes under the wheel and you just POP! rather wetly.

In neither case will a 200g foam hat help. Head-only fatalities are rare (see my last post) and head-only fatalities within the operating range of a cycling helmet are just freakishly rare. This might not be what your intuition tells you, it may not be what you want to believe, but is what the statistics say, so get used to it. Watching this 60 second video will do more for your safety than any cycling helmet ever made:

http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct...47244034,d.d2k

And for the advanced course on how not to be killed by a truck:

http://commuteorlando.com/wordpress/...-about-trucks/

http://www.movingtargetzine.com/foru...e-your-life/p1

- The diagrams there are over optimistic - they neglect the effective front blind spot that most drivers have - the region very close to the grill they could check but do not.

In London, 54% of cyclist deaths are from trucks and buses. None of them could be avoided by wearing a helmet; most could be avoided by exercising knowledgeable paranoia around these vehicles - especially at junctions.

My natural instinct in proximity of large vehicles is a very certain _nope_ and to avoid the shiznizzle out of that thing. I hate being close to a truck when I'm driving a car so being on a bike just makes it worse.

Still one sees these vids from london where cyclists squeeze themselves past a truck in red lights from the outer side of the road. Makes me cringe bad.

I think pretty well everyone reading this thread understands and even agrees that a helmet won't "save" your life over a certain speed and impact level... But I would suspect the majority of falls that happen, are below that speed and impact level, over 50,000 visits to the emergency with head injuries and about 1,000 die a year. So the real discussion should be how much did the helmets help with the 49,000 that did not die...?

You are being evasive: the operating threshold for a helmet is, for all practical purposes, below that where death or serious injury are possible.

There about 600-700 cyclist deaths a year in the USA. Statistically:

- 75-95% involve fatal torso injuries as well/instead of head injuries

- +95% involve high speed hits with cars, outside of a helmet's possible operating limit.

If you paid attention you would already know the answer - a helmet cuts out before the level where even concussion is likely, so a helmet will reduce the chances of a skull laceration if the head is hit... at the cost of increasing the chances of a head impact through a larger target and increasing cumulative brain damage through concussion. The only case in which a helmet makes sense is the one they were actually designed for - the special case of protecting children's still growing skulls. If that.

Next time you write something quote the post number, what do you think people have time to read 5,436 posts! Get a freakin clue. I don't just sit behind the computer on forums reading all day like you do, some of us work and have more important things to do. So I read what you said and took it for what you said and not reading between the lines or trying to a brain meld with you, or second guessing what you mean, or reading back thousands of post to again guess at which post you might be referring to while actually never mentioning you were referring to a post.

And all of those websites are just blogs, almost meaningless. HOWEVER, I am reconsidering my hard stance on helmets, not because of you, but because of new information released by the US media yesterday that is agreeing with other studies done in Europe. This does not mean that I will stop wearing a helmet because I still think their useful at low speed; but what it does mean is that I won't be buying a new helmet for at least a couple more years until new regs come out and helmets are made to meet those regs.

Sometimes people are squeezing past to get to what they think is a position of safety - but it is actually one in the truck's blind spots. Intuition is a very dangerous guide and should only be used where you can't obtain definite knowledge...

While this is about meanwhile's posts, I'm directing this inquiry to sudo bike, because we have a little history on the subject. :) :)

Is this a "shifting the goalpost" situation?

The argument was made that you shouldn't wear a helmet because it doesn't protect your brain.
It didn't get a lot of traction. mconlox even mentioned MIPs helmets and their improvements in protecting the brain.
Then it was shifted to you shouldn't wear a helmet because it's the damage to your torso that's going to kill you.

Good times in the helmet thread. :)

You don't.

These posts were actually the ones you seemed to be answering - ironically you didn't quote the post (or even give a number) you were whining about. (Again, a smarter person would not have put himself in a position where he looks like a hypocrite..)


Nope. Those links are to the BHRI - run by Europe's leading helmet test engineer and co-editted by professional statisticians - and a "blog" run by the director of the University Of Michigan's Risk Science Institute. And all of them in turn reference papers and studies.

Again - this reading thing is hard for you, isn't it?

Except for reducing rotation, you can not make helmets tougher without making them much heavier. Motorcycle helmets and downhill helmets are at the limit of what is possible, and in each case providing protection at, say, 20mph, requires

1. A full face design

2. A weight of around a kilo

3. A cost of around $600

Standards won't change significantly, because helmets that are cheap, light, and effective are technologically impossible - otherwise motorcyclists would already be wearing them.

Also: given virtually every cyclist with a fatal head injury also has a fatal torso injury... is there any point to spending $600 on a helmet, even if you are willing to do so and commute wearing a full face design?

This is argument by conclusion: ie stupid.

Yes: you can now spend $300 a helmet knowing that it will protect you from a mild scalp cut without actually INCREASING brain damage as the cheap helmets - like the ones you actually wear - do. What a triumph! These helmets still won't work in any collision likely to seriously injure you though, because they still have the 12mph failure speed.

It wasn't "shifted" to this: these points were already widely known to anyone who had done any research, and they are valid in ADDITION to the previous ones, not instead of. (And why you imagine otherwise is beyond my ability to comprehend the lower intellectual orders...)

In conclusion: I really can't help wondering how much cumulative brain damage some helmetoids have already taken if they find "There are several reasons why one should doubt the efficacy of helmets" complete mental overload....

Then perhaps you should be posting in the Torso Damage thread. It's a shift because a helmet, by definition will not protect your torso, but helmets are the subject of this thread.

As I mentioned, it was directed to sudo bike because he and I had a rather extended discussion about shifting the goalpost a few months ago. But thanks for sharing.

This is Idiot Logic. Once again, if 95% of cases of fatal head injury are accompanied by fatal torso injury, then 95% of the maximum possibly fatality reduction from a helmet is lost. This is only irrelevant to wearing a helmet if you are (see first sentence) an idiot. No one wears a helmet because they would rather die only of a fatal torso injury - people wear helmets to stay alive.

Plus, for extra Idiot Points, you have failed to realize that stats for possible "saves" from helmets are incorrect if you don't understand the above. The usual figure of 600 fatal cyclist head injuries implies a perfect helmet would save 600 lives - but of course the actual figure is more like only 30, because of the 95% fatal torso injury rate. If you are not smart enough to understand this - well obviously you weren't - then maybe you shouldn't be posting to this thread? Because the difference between 30 and 600 is pretty damn big....

Again, this is the helmet thread. The guy who crashed and broke his ankle because he couldn't get free from his SPDs didn't post it here because that wasn't a helmet issue.
But keep going with the name calling. It has really helped your case. :)

calling each other stupid is not allowed, please desist and don't make me read back to find all instances of it.

This is correct; it is not a helmet issue.

But if helmet advocates claim that 600 lives a year would be saved by helmets AND 95% OF THOSE PEOPLE HAD FATAL TORSO INJURIES AS WELL AS FATAL HEAD INJURIES then that it IS a helmet issue. Because it means that they are overclaiming by a factor of about 20 for the potential life saving benefit of helmets (and these are the actual figures.)

I think at this point anyone whose brain is worth saving will look at your posts and and say much worse things about your intelligence than I have: If you can't see that a 20 times misclaim for helmet benefits is significant, than I'm not sure that the English language can sufficiently express your lack of intelligence.

Really: you are now committed to a position where you are saying that people should wear helmets to prevent fatal head injury, even in circumstances where death is virtually certain anyway, from other causes - and that helmets don't save a meaningful number of lives in any circumstances... but you know, a corpse with less brain injury is better than one with more... Doesn't this strike you as, well, stupid??? I mean, if I was going to put your entire body into a mincing machine, would you want to i. try to avoid going into the machine, or ii. put a helmet on, so your head comes through intact, even though the rest of you will be hamburger? Because until I met you, I didn't think anyone would be an option ii...

Please show me where I said or even implied any of that.

You're acting as if the helmeteers have decided that a helmet allows them to go dive in front of cars and head-first off of bridges. Accident avoidance is the priority for the vast majority of cyclists. Whether they have the skills and knowledge to avoid dangerous situations is a matter for another thread. The helmet is a last ditch effort to avoid or lessen injuries.