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

Spot the Drowning Child (2015)

spotthedrowningchild.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 424 posts

Re: Spot the Drowning Child (2015)

#401

Post by mygo »

mattferderer wrote: post #371
mygo wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lay on your back technique works for those who it works for, and it should absolutely be taught to everyone just so that whoever it works for knows about it and uses it when they find themselves in a situation when it could save their life. Less drowning in calm waters is a net positive. But there is a percentage of the population who can’t simply float. Some of us literally sink if we don’t swim. One time my fri…

Have you ever tried tilting your head back farther into the water & swimming with your feet slightly? These 2 things are the difference for me between sinking & floating. Mostly tilting my head further back though. Of course this fails miserably with even the smallest waves.

That’s one of the things we tried. My head was tilted so far back at one point that water started running up my nose.

Re: Spot the Drowning Child (2015)

#402

Post by mygo »

js2 wrote: post #373
mygo wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lay on your back technique works for those who it works for, and it should absolutely be taught to everyone just so that whoever it works for knows about it and uses it when they find themselves in a situation when it could save their life. Less drowning in calm waters is a net positive. But there is a percentage of the population who can’t simply float. Some of us literally sink if we don’t swim. One time my fri…

My feet sink if I try to float on my back w/o swimming. But there's another float called the dead man's float that works fine for me. It also works well in rough water: https://www.sportsrec.com/survival-float-6582.html

Thank you for this. I don’t think we tried this technique — but yes my legs are usually the first thing to go down, pretty much instantly. And I have a shorter torso, longer legs (when I sit down with someone several inches shorter than me, we are at the same eye level)

Re: Spot the Drowning Child (2015)

#403

Post by slavik81 »

keanzu wrote: post #387
slavik81 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unintentional poisonings have rocketed up the charts in the past few years. It didn't used to be in first place. That's the fentanyl crisis you're seeing.

The document we were looking at for poisoning was from 2011. 10 Leading Causes of Injury Deaths by Age Group HighlightingUnintentional Injury Deaths, United States – 2011

It seems I'm getting old, but you can watch it happen:

2007 - https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/unintentional_2007_bw...

2008 - https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_injury...

2009 - https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_injury...

2010 - https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/10lcid_unintentional_...

2011 - https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_inj...

All Data - https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/LeadingCauses.html

Re: Spot the Drowning Child (2015)

#404

Post by qzx_pierri »

smileysteve wrote: post #255
ben7799 wrote: post #202

Like others who commented I worked as a life guard and water safety instructor when I was younger. (Everything I am saying pertains to the US only.) I rescued quite a few children, it's hard to see in this video because the video quality is poor and the camera is at an angle that is worse than what the lifeguard in the video is seeing. Overall this victim is fairly active and should not have been very hard to spot in…

> teaching 5 year olds the butterfly and other high energy/low safety strokes without teaching elementary backstroke, breaststroke, sidestroke. I am amazed at how few of my early millennial peers have never heard of the elementary backstroke.

I was taught this in my university’s swimming course. They called it the survival stroke as well. I’m glad I learned it, because if I were ever caught out and needed to swim farther than normal, I could totally see myself making it back (although a lot slower)

Re: Spot the Drowning Child (2015)

#405

Post by xythum »

keanzu wrote: post #99
Hamuko wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But apparently only on the pool bottom.

Exactly, seems a bit late. Hasn't serious injury already occurred by the time a person is motionless on the bottom of the pool?

That'll teach me to pay more attention to the details rather than going "Welp, there goes my start-up idea".

Yes, that doesn't look great - I assumed when I saw it was underwater that it was effectively looking up at the people on the surface and detecting people in distress from that angle. On closer inspection that doesn't seem to be the case.

Re: Spot the Drowning Child (2015)

#406

Post by pmarreck »

Defenestresque wrote: post #257
yCombLinks wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drowning far outweighs all of those categories for ages 1 - 9 https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_inj... In the large majority of motor vehicle incidents the child is an occupant of the vehicle : https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

The graph in your first link is absolutely fascinating. I found the number of "Unintentional Poisoning" and "Suicide" deaths especially surprising (due to the high numbers)

Jesus. Multiple types of suffocation for babies < 1 yr old

Re: Spot the Drowning Child (2015)

#407

Post by nkrisc »

mygo wrote: post #363
aetherspawn wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone should be taught this technique. Nethertheless: I did this in the ocean once about 200m off the shore (at that point I wasn’t really in trouble and just wanted a rest) and the waves were too high and I ended up eating a lot of salt water and nearly choking and sinking. It put me in a far worse situation than had I stayed off my back.

The lay on your back technique works for those who it works for, and it should absolutely be taught to everyone just so that whoever it works for knows about it and uses it when they find themselves in a situation when it could save their life. Less drowning in calm waters is a net positive. But there is a percentage of the population who can’t simply float. Some of us literally sink if we don’t swim. One time my fri…

I'm a tall, lanky guy and I can't float at all. Well I do float, but my point of neutral buoyancy is with my head a few inches below the surface.

That said I learned to properly tread water while getting my open water SCUBA cert and turns it it's really easy. Last time I tried, from completely fresh, I was able to tread water for 40 minutes before I got bored and quit. I probably could have done it for another 40 minutes, at least. This was in a pool though so I was relaxed and the water was calm.

Re: Spot the Drowning Child (2015)

#408

Post by adamredwoods »

mark-r wrote: post #359
ben7799 wrote: post #202

Like others who commented I worked as a life guard and water safety instructor when I was younger. (Everything I am saying pertains to the US only.) I rescued quite a few children, it's hard to see in this video because the video quality is poor and the camera is at an angle that is worse than what the lifeguard in the video is seeing. Overall this victim is fairly active and should not have been very hard to spot in…

There's a resort in Wisconsin Dells that I've been to quite a few times now, with an indoor wave pool. When we started going they had industrial clear inner tubes that you could bring out into it; about half the people in the pool would have a tube. As you say the pool was nearly impossible to monitor as a parent from the sidelines, but there were lifeguards all the way around. Every once in a while they would stop t…

I learned the side stroke, from my mother, and it saved my life. I was swimming too far in a lake, tried to back-float, but the waves kept going into my mouth. I got very tired and frightened, then attempted to side stroke to keep the waves from going into my mouth. It worked and I barely managed to make it back. It took longer to get back because I had to swim at an angle against the waves, but at least I could breathe.

Re: Spot the Drowning Child (2015)

#409

Post by wutbrodo »

notRobot wrote: post #338
invisiblerobot wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Is it really "exploitation" in the human sense of taking advantage of someone else? Yes. Obviously. And whether or not the exploitation is "programmed" is irrelevant. After all everything is programmed.

But. If we're observing as humans and it appears to us that the one creature is taking advantage of another, surely that's just our interpretation from a very limited understanding of their world? I have no idea where I'm going with this, but that phrasing still seems off to me.

I don't think I understand your objection. You can model a lot of human and animal preferences fairly simply, based on axiomatic preferences like "wanting to survive and propagate your genes". Unwitting parental investment in a gene pool you don't share runs counter to this fairly basic and well-founded definition of utility, and it's under this premise that words like "exploit" are used.

Just upthread, "rape" is used in the animal context too. You could similarly apply your argument to that behavior, claiming that the term has moral baggage that's uniquely human, but I think it'd be just as wrong-headed.

Re: Spot the Drowning Child (2015)

#410

Post by wutbrodo »

young_unixer wrote: post #218
dmos62 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of intuition do you have about 1%-2%? I've a crappy grasp of probability. I'd say 1-2% is like being quite certain that you'll experience this or that within 50-100 tries/repetitions. That sounds rare to me. In case of life or death it's not a risk I'd tolerate, but I'd call it rare.

My intuition comes from other uses of "rare" and "very rare" in medical fields. "In Europe a disease or disorder is defined as rare when it affects less than 1 in 2000 citizens." [1] """ In the United States, the Rare Diseases Act of 2002 defines rare disease strictly according to prevalence, specifically "any disease or condition that affects fewer than 200,000 people in the United States", or about 1 in 1,500 peopl…

That's 1 in 2000 of the entire population. 1/100,000th of the US population drowns every year, which means that 1% of drownings has an annual incidence of 1/1million.

(This is annual vs lifetime but if you do the rough math under some basic assumptions, you end up easily within what you're defining as "rare")

Post reply on HN