Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Making Playgrounds a Little More Dangerous

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 275 posts

Re: Making Playgrounds a Little More Dangerous

#221

Post by burfog »

United857 wrote: post #15

Same can be said for a lot of other things/activities many of us enjoyed during childhood. E.g. I remember playing with real chemistry sets with chemicals that could be potentially harmful if ingested, alcohol burners, glass tubing we had to flame-polish ourselves. Those are long gone; just replaced with "safe" but incredibly dumbed-down kits that are little more than dyes/food-coloring.

Thankfully you can still get stuff at the hardware store. The plumbing supply section has copper sulfate, sodium hydroxide, and sulfuric acid. The pool supply section has 10 molar hydrochloric acid. The garden section has sulfur. The paint section has xylene, acetone, and methanol.

For example, you can purify garden sulfur by recrystallizing it with xylene. This is plenty dangerous, since xylene is almost like gasoline (a bit less volatile) and you'll be heating it up nearly to boiling. The aromatic ring structure is required; most other solvents produce deadly hydrogen sulfide gas.

Re: Making Playgrounds a Little More Dangerous

#222

Post by quakenul »

ip26 wrote: post #192
quakenul wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By all means, make them safe enough that kids won't get maimed or killed - but keeping kids from ever falling far enough to feel any real pain is probably counter- productive in the long term. There is no room between "overprotection" and "freedom", that guarantees safety from harm. Serious accidents have to be accepted before they even happen. A scary prospect for many parents, I am sure.

I'm not giving my seven year old the freedom to operate a chainsaw. I don't think that counts as "overprotection", and I think it confers considerable margin of safety from harm by chainsaw.

> I don't think that counts as "overprotection"

Rest assured, I don't think anyone else does either.

Re: Making Playgrounds a Little More Dangerous

#223

Post by robocat »

alexhutcheson wrote: post #184
PetahNZ wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he means wood chips hurt, so kids don't jump off things from so high, so its less likely to break bones.

My understanding (not an expert) is that it's a combination of less high jumps/falls because "wood chips hurt", and reduced long bone injuries for the jumps/falls that due occur due to differences in the way the material responds to the impact. Wood chips slide and absorb some of the kinetic energy, while rubber matting (and probably rubber chips?) stay in place and rebound the energy back.

As a kid there was gravel under the monkey bars. Not sure if it taught you not to fall (I did fall, a lot!), but it definitely hurt when you did!

Re: Making Playgrounds a Little More Dangerous

#224

Post by ahoka »

9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #139
fjsolwmv wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kids feel safe when they don't know what the dangers are. My kid would feel safe sticking his hand in a pan of boiling oil

Once, but they won't do it again. I wouldn't recommend starting with a pan of boiling oil, but my five-year-old loves helping to make pancakes, and it took exactly one glancing touch for him to learn that the edge of the frying pan is hot.

These are the small dangers we rob our children of.

Re: Making Playgrounds a Little More Dangerous

#225

Post by Firadeoclus »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #63
redff0000 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your child could have slipped when getting off a train and permanently injured themselves, or in any other number of ways. Low probability high severity events trigger a cognitive bias that makes people attempt to make things '100% safe'. There are two problems with that. 1: nothing can ever be made 100% safe so those low probability high impact events still happen from time to time. 2: making things safe hits a stee…

To put it bluntly, the increased happiness of millions of children is worth a couple children's health, or even lives. That's a tough sell, but that sounds reasonable (well, I can talk, I don't have children). This is basically the same reasoning Yudkowsky presented with his dust speck vs torture argument argument: a sufficiently widespread benefit, however small, will outweigh a sufficiently improbable horrible even…

> To put it bluntly, the increased happiness of millions of children is worth a couple children's health, or even lives.

I don't think that's an accurate reframing. The opportunity cost isn't just happiness (by making playgrounds boring, presumably) but also safety, and therefore lives, in other areas. When you hit diminishing returns trying to make playgrounds 100% safe, spending the same resources on e.g. road design will save more lives.

Re: Making Playgrounds a Little More Dangerous

#226

Post by baud147258 »

justasitsounds wrote: post #175
hyperdunc wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing snapshots of organisms isn't that useful. C. Elegans is never going to turn into a conscious human being.

Well, if we're talking about potential, most pro-lifers make exceptions for cases of rape or incest. However, if it's one's "sincerely held belief" that a ball of cells is a human because it has the potential to become a conscious human being then such exceptions are the equivalent to killing an adult who's only crime is to have been conceived as a result of rape or incest. Personally I am pro-choice, but if you are…

I'm pro-life and wouldn't make any exception in case of rape and incest; there's already been a crime, no need to add another (innocent) victim to the tally. But I think that we would need to also put into place to help women with unwanted pregnancies too.

Re: Making Playgrounds a Little More Dangerous

#227

Post by baud147258 »

justinator wrote: post #198
souprock wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I have a dozen kids, and I agree. Of course, part of the reason for so many kids is to minimize the percentage of my family that would be lost if one did die. My wife's uncle had the postcard family, one boy and one girl in a cute little city house with a picket fence. The daughter died, and the father completely fell apart. He lost 100% of his daughters. It is too late for him to create a replacement. Most fam…

Of course, part of the reason for so many kids is to minimize the percentage of my family that would be lost if one did die. I think I just read the most insane sentence I'll read all year.

If I remember right, reducing child mortality actually decrease the number of children per family, so it's not that strange. Of course it's bluntly said and reductionist, but I think it has a basis in fact.

Re: Making Playgrounds a Little More Dangerous

#228

Post by Firadeoclus »

TomMarius wrote: post #208
scarejunba wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assume this is true. The NHS is in the UK and run by the government. The NHS has a maximum spend on a single person. The UK is part of Western Civilization. Therefore it rests on the assumption that life has infinite value. Therefore, the UK will spend infinite money to ensure a person lives. A contradiction.

OK, that's the UK, I'm not sure why it split off; thank you for pointing it out. Any continental EU country will spend an unlimited amount of money to save someone. Even Ukraine will. Get your shit in the UK back together, I'd suggest. Suggesting a maximal spend in my country would immediately lead to a revolt and change of government.

While there may be no explicit limit there are practical limits on what will be done to help a single person. Unlimited is not the same as infinite.

Re: Making Playgrounds a Little More Dangerous

#229

Post by geggam »

hexane360 wrote: post #154
magicalhippo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine designs playgrounds for kids, and is very good at it (his designs win 90+% of the competitive bids he enters). He's also worked hard to put in place a playground safety inspector certification system over here. One of his core ideas is that there are two types of safety: subjective safety and objective safety. For example, kids quickly learn that falling from a height is painful, and experiences such…

This seems really similar to techniques I've heard about in road design. A lot of safety improvements are pretty well compensated by changes in people's behavior. For example, if you make shoulders and lanes wider, people will feel like they're going slower and speed up to compensate. Even with things you wouldn't expect, like the dedicated/third brake light made mandatory for cars in 1986, there were significant cha…

Your idea works until you look at something like the autobahn. Having driven on it I can say what I feel the main factor to safety is driver behavior. I see more turn signals used and when someone is going faster the other folks tend to move out of their way.

Its more of a social mindset that creates safe roads than anything IMO.

Re: Making Playgrounds a Little More Dangerous

#230

Post by eadmund »

gumby wrote: post #31

An example from the '00s: We sent our kid to a German school in Menlo Park. He immediately loved it on the first visit because the under-5s' playground was full of old wood with splinters and dangerous tools (hammers, saws etc) and the little kids could cause all sorts of ruckus, like building dams and flooding them. But the reality of a foreign-language school is that you need more than just "nationals" (people who…

Heh, you get the same phenomenon with folks who move from a state because the economic and/or legal conditions are no longer conducive to their desired lifestyle — and then start voting for the sorts of politicians who put in place economic and/or legal policies which are not conducive to their desired lifestyle.
Post reply on HN