That reminds me of a bad headache I got once after riding on a particularly shaky rollercoaster. It lasted the afternoon and made me feel quite sick. I think some of these rides are not safe either.
Sledding athletes are taking their lives
161–170 of 241 posts
Re: Sledding athletes are taking their lives
#162So what about Formula 1 drivers ???. Typically they experience about 5g when braking and 6g whilst cornering on a circuit completing a distance of about 305km.
Steady acceleration when braking is not significant cause.
High g-vibration and concussions from crashes are.
Re: Sledding athletes are taking their lives
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
So funny thing about unacceptable and lateral g-force — this is a big part of why F1 cars aren’t V10 engines anymore. They were getting too fast and the decision was between g-suits and slower cars. FIA chose slower cars (also more fuel efficient, yay). Now it’s a few years later and cars have again advanced to the point that drivers pull more than 5 lateral G in some corners. It’s kinda bonkers. I wonder if somethin…
I was told that engines were more stable in multiples of 6's from some weird physics going on in the engine. I guess that guy could have been completely full of shit.
Its mostly a trigonometry thing, three sine waves 120 degrees out of phase balance out to constant torque. Also see electrical 3-phase power.
Note that internal combustion cylinder pressure is by no means a perfect sine wave LOL but its a close enough approximation to run smoother.
Its partially a physics thing, in that ICE are usually 4-cycle so they fire every other rotation so if you want three firing pistons per rotation separated 120 degrees you'll need six cylinders total.
Re: Sledding athletes are taking their lives
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
That case though was about safety of the audience, says the article.
True, but nevertheless it shows that it can be done. Formula 1 and motor racing in general is a prime example for that as well. Formula 1 has a strict set of rules that makes sure the speed and cornering speeds aren't going through the roof because of deadly accidents in the past. The same could be done for sledding. Reduce speed by limiting what is technically allowed and improve protection of the athletes. From rea…
Instead of or in addition to all that, wouldn't you just make the course less steep?
Re: Sledding athletes are taking their lives
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would not be the first Olympic sport redesigned for safety concerns. The first one that I am aware of is Javelin. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javelin_throw#Javelin_redesign... for more.
That case though was about safety of the audience, says the article.
There are many instances of redesign due to safety concerns. The clean and press was removed from weightlifting because it was very bad for the back. Some judo throws (such as ones that twisted the knee) where also removed for safety reasons.
Re: Sledding athletes are taking their lives
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
That won’t handle the number of degrees of freedom a bobsled uses.
True. How about suspending a little metal bullet in a gel, chosen such that the bullet will break through the gel if the G-force is more than a certain threshold. This will give a good indication if the forces are within an acceptable range.
This kid of stuff is incredibly hard to use for accurate results. Gels (and all materials) are not perfect in any sense, and you'd need significant effort modeling any material you used - viscosity under all sorts of motions (since nothing is nicely linear), the gel itself is sloshing, compressing, has different lag times...
It's possible in theory, but in practice would not be useful.
Look at what planes (Air Force has lots of R&D) did for the past century to see the state of the art at each point and the methods used.
Re: Sledding athletes are taking their lives
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recommend the YouTube rabbit hole of Alex Honnold interviews, whenever he talks about risk it's interesting.
honnold may be a special case. his capabilities of dealing with risk and fear are exceptional.
Why is he a special case. There are hundreds if not 1000s of people that want to be risk takers for no other reason then the risk its self
Re: Sledding athletes are taking their lives
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
That won’t handle the number of degrees of freedom a bobsled uses.
Just thinking this through, wouldn't three weights on springs get you all the data? Or some sort of membrane containing a liquid than ruptures when a particular amount of force is felt in any direction?
Peak is not enough - you need to know time impulse. A 10G accel over 1 sec has much different effect than a 10G over a nanosecond.
And the measuring devices must also handle this nuance. A liquid has inertia, so won't register quick impulses, and the things it measures might not be relevant to what bio systems are interested in.
Re: Sledding athletes are taking their lives
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Horseback riding Is super dangerous
Lots of activities are dangerous. The main problem is that danger is a function of probability (eg how likely are you to get hurt doing that thing), and people are terrible at estimating probability. While horse riding is dangerous in the sense that when you get hurt it's likely to be severe, it's not that dangerous because the probability of being hurt is quite low. Among the millions of people who go horse riding e…
With google its quite trivial to get actual data rather than estimates.
It doesn't seem controversial that per IIHS stats motorcycles have about 30 times more fatalities per 100K miles than cars.
Likewise I have no reason to disagree with an online Br J Sp Med journal article from '91 that horse riders experience significant accidents once every 350 hours whereas motorcyclists have a serious accident every 7000 hours, or about 20 times more risky, based on ER reports.
So multiplying risk, it seems horse riding is about 600 times more dangerous than passenger car driving.
Another interesting anecdote is "everyone knows" that most accidents happen to noobs because they're distracted so much by learning and not knowing their limitations. So what you're really measuring is the fraction of low time noobs who will be injured by the sport before they escape noob status. That hypothesis would predict that essentially all horse riders will be injured in some way before they escape noob status, a noticeable fraction of motorcycle riders will be injured as noobs although the vast majority will not be injured, and its actually VERY rare for a noob car driver to be injured while learning to drive. In summary, this seems to be a situation where perceived risk matches actual risk.
It would seem as a civilization we do an adequate job preparing teen car drivers as the vast majority of drivers survive their teen driver years, but as a civilization we do a completely inadequate job training horse riders. Or at least based on British data from the 80s as reported thirty years ago; I'm old enough to remember nobody wore bicycle helmets before the 90s; perhaps modern horse rider trainees wear better safety equipment in 2020 than in 1990.
Strange start up tech idea: Smart helmet with GPS and machine vision for horse riders with AI and machine learning to yell in their ear when they're doing something dumb. If essentially all horse riders are injured while learning, they would likely be very motivated to drop some money on your smart AI safety helmet. On the other hand actual risk data indicates a similar product for teen drivers simply wouldn't sell, not having the proposed theoretical magic helm already has a very low accident rate making the helm appear less useful. Edited to note: that's the entire point of my risk rant, do a startup on fixing a problem virtually all of the customers have, not a startup on a problem essentially none of the customers have.
Re: Sledding athletes are taking their lives
#170> On Feb. 22, 2013, Morris attached an accelerometer to his helmet, then launched his body down a 1,500-meter track at the sliding center in Whistler, British Columbia, which is considered the fastest track in the world and was a venue for the 2010 Winter Olympics. Bobsleigh has been a feature of the Winter Olympics since 1924 [1]. Yet it might have taken until 2013 for someone to measure its g force on its athletes'…
Bobsledding isn't as popular as the majority of "international sports", putting it into that category doesn't justify its strong examination. I'm not surprised personally, it's a niche sport without human-on-human violent contact; something like American football is more perceptibly dangerous than some of these rare Olympic sports.