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

Sledding athletes are taking their lives

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 241 posts

Re: Sledding athletes are taking their lives

#131

Post by roel_v »

stareatgoats wrote: post #94

Our culture is rife with such, arenas where (mostly young) people put their life and health at risk for the merriment of the couch potatoes that make up the bulk of the public. We can't outlaw it as long as there are people who rely on it for their livelihood, and large swathes of the populace are insensitive to the sufferings of strangers to the point of enjoying it, immensely.

"people put their life and health at risk for the merriment of the couch potatoes"

This is not true. People would do it anyway, it's just that the couch potatoes now provide a way for the people doing it to actually get paid. You cannot be an athlete with your only motivation being 'it'll amuse others'. You need some sort of intrinsic motivation to get at least somewhat good at something. People would fight for fun before the UFC, long before they got paid for it. Same with any other 'extreme' sport. One can argue that the couch potatoes now enable these people to do their activities a lot more, or in more intense ways, but that's a different argument all together imo.

Re: Sledding athletes are taking their lives

#133

Post by kgwgk »

hug wrote: post #120
im3w1l wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the only way to read I was able to find. What's the other?

He says he’s a bit dopey, but I’m okay with that because he has a girlfriend to take care of him.

In that case the subject of the "attributes it" is lost, while with the "he says he's a bit dopey but [he says] it's okay" reading it naturally flows into "and [he] attributes it".

Re: Sledding athletes are taking their lives

#134

Post by imtringued »

yetihehe wrote: post #118
doublesCs wrote: post #113

Isn't this a really small problem? If you were to sort by importance all the problems in the world, how close to the bottom would sledding athletes injurying themselves be? I feel sorry for those who already incurred lasting damage, but for the rest... it only depends on them to stop.

We can't have all people working just on most important problems. Many will just waste time doing this (me for example, I don't know how to end poverty), so we have to have people attached to many different problems. Now this problem may not be the most important, but still maybe if someone has time, she should look at it at least briefly?

What authority decides whether a problem is important and how important it is? It probably doesn't or at least shouldn't exist because that power could be equivalent to a dictatorship. Here is a little bit of hyperbole. "Voting for anyone other than Trump for president is not an important problem" The other extreme would be to assign every person on earth to work on fusion power.

Even if we are generous and define importance loosely as reward divided by needed investment (aka ROI) we just end up with the current system. It's still not perfect because it doesn't account for time and corruption. People will optimize for the short term and powerful corporations can create feedback loops by lobbying the government to declare their business as "important" which makes the corporation more powerful and that additional power can be used for lobbying again. However, despite all the shortcomings we still have yet to find a better system.

I just realized that this comment was mostly aimed at doublesCs. Feel free to ignore it.

Re: Sledding athletes are taking their lives

#135

Post by WalterBright »

tomcam wrote: post #55
WalterBright wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make the helmet bigger, and put a liner filled with gel in it.

Not to be overprotective or anything, but after reading this I am just going to put my kids in giant rolling blocks of gel to keep them safe. Look for my YC Winter ‘21 startup GelBlok.io. If we need another compiler writer I will DM you

Haha, my degree is in mechanical engineering. So I do know a thing or two about kinematics :-)

The nice thing about gel is it squishes out of the way, and that squishing turns the spike into a more gradual push. It wouldn't take much gel to substantially reduce the spices.

Of course, this would have to be tested. It shouldn't be too hard to test various designs.

Re: Sledding athletes are taking their lives

#136

Post by willis936 »

etrautmann wrote: post #41
nimih wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? To me (a layperson in the physics of helmets and brains), they would seem to be quite directly related, especially when the cause of the gees is not related to an impact.

The helmet is a light mass, which can move relative to the head, and experience drastically higher g-forces for very short times. Sampling an accelerometer at kHz rates as a helmet is vibrating (without translating all of the vibrational energy into the head), will measure larger peak G's than the head experiences. For this reason, when studying head impact for football players, they mount the accelerometers in the m…

What would you say is the maximum frequency that the helmet is coupled to the head at? Filtering is a trivial operation and I would expect the g forces felt by sledders to be sustained for the better part of a second. You lose a lot of fidelity, but if you’re still over the line then you know there’s a problem.

Re: Sledding athletes are taking their lives

#137

Post by willis936 »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #76
djmips wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A helmet can just protect the skull So a helmet doesn't have to be padded or help with g-forces to be a helmet. I think helmets were initially just to prevent skull fracture.

well, yeah when those helmets were worn by knights in the middle ages, but many helmets nowadays have to withstand g-forces to do their job. If English was like Italian there might be a specific word for a non g-force withstanding helmet and otherwise.

And every war in the first half of the 20th century.

Re: Sledding athletes are taking their lives

#138

Post by secondcoming »

usgroup wrote: post #101
gnramires wrote: post #19

This seems totally unacceptable. We should stop having this sport in the Olympics (implicitly supporting this madness) -- of course athletes are free to do as they chose, but we cannot encourage such pointless self-destruction and misery. An alternative to save the sport is completely redesign it to limit maximum accelerations. Usually injuries follow power laws so I doubt even that much reduction would be necessary…

I think the Olympics is just generally physically bad for the athletes. Runners, weightlifters, wrestlers, boxers, rowers, etc all these folks end up working so close o the edge of sustainable human tolerance and capacity that’s it’s unlikely they are not constantly going over it.

Isn't that the whole point of the Olympics though? To push humans to the limit.

Re: Sledding athletes are taking their lives

#140

Post by DavidVoid »

saeranv wrote: post #36

Ugh, I cannot get beyond the NYTimes paywall, ever. Something about their paywall standards blocks me out pretty much every time.

If you're using firefox the click on the padlock next to the URL and clear the site's cookies and data, then reload the page.
Post reply on HN