Posts by Grace Dalley
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Given that head injuries in cyclists in NZ stayed static while cycling decreased by 1/3 in the years immediately after the helmet law,
Does anyone have more recent figures? Could the numbers of cyclists have rebounded since?
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they're talking about what has already happened in countries with compulsory cycle helmet laws.
I get what you're saying, but aren't there NZ figures on numbers of people cycling since helmets were compulsory? Are they included in the stats you're talking about?
And:
Net effect: you've just shortened her life.
Net effect: you've just shortened your own life.isn't quite true. Since were talking about population statistics, we can only talk about average chances of having a fatal accident, and average chances of poor health as a result of average reduction in exercise. As you so rightly pointed out earlier, this says nothing about the individual.
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"I'd rather look like an egg than get scrambled." The beginning of his brilliant career as a Great Persuader...
Oh that's brilliant!
Regarding motorist behaviour, passing too close etc., I find if it make eye-contact with motorists they give me more room and generally are more considerate. This may involve turning your head and glaring if you hear someone roaring up behind.
I had a boyfriend who did gardening jobs via bicycle, for which he would take his own fork. Cycling with a gardening fork over your shoulder gets you LOTS of space on the road :-D
As does wearing brightly-coloured satin outfits, which many years ago was my usual attire.
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"Oh, that was easy, said Man, and for an encore proved that black was white, and got killed on the next zebra crossing."
-HHGTTG. -
Interesting piece on cycle helmets.
Regarding force and velocity, isn't the velocity (and mass) of the cars, trucks and buses that might hit you more relevant than your own velocity as you cycle?
Do you have local figures on cycling? I remember when the cycle-helmet law came in, and my purely-anecdotal feeling is that there are a lot more cyclists on the roads here in Chch now than there were in the late 80s and early 90s.
I read somewhere that the more safety features a car has, the more recklessly people are prepared to drive it.
However, I will sure as hell be always wearing my helmet, law or no law. I well remember the time I lent my bike to a friend and couldn't immediately find my helmet, and she said, "don't worry I'll be fine", and I said "no, no, I'll find it"; I did find it and she put it on, and five minutes down the road she was hit by a car pulling out, and hit the road with her head. She was badly concussed, but without the helmet it would have been a lot worse.
Helmet-hair is a problem, paticularly for those of us with long hair who like to put it up, but I'd rather have that than, uh, a hole in the head. :-)
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Knowing the often hotly political nature of PA blog topics, I was bracing myself for a scorching essay on Bob Parker, but it's The Return of Bob-the-Boy! Hurrah!!
Totally with him on the OK GO videos, they are very rewatchable. Does he like their one with the treadmills?
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Soylent Green is Plankton!
Soylent Green was said to be plankton, but was recycled humans. ;-)
A lot of people eat spirulina, which is processed algae. It's full of vitamins, but one cannot live by vitamins alone.
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GM crops in the US have reduced environmental damage of monocultures not as is claimed increased it.
How?
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Nice analysis Jeremy, disclaimers and all ;-)
The National Geographic has a very comprehensive (long) item on the future of world food, including the use of GM, and reflecting on the "green revolotion", I think everybody should read it. By far the best, most balanced article I've read on the subject.
For those without the time or inclination to read the whole thing, here are some excerpts:
"Thomas Robert Malthus, the namesake of such terms as "Malthusian collapse" and "Malthusian curse," was a mild-mannered mathematician, a clergyman—and, his critics would say, the ultimate glass-half-empty kind of guy. When a few Enlightenment philosophers, giddy from the success of the French Revolution, began predicting the continued unfettered improvement of the human condition, Malthus cut them off at the knees. Human population, he observed, increases at a geometric rate, doubling about every 25 years if unchecked, while agricultural production increases arithmetically—much more slowly. Therein lay a biological trap that humanity could never escape."
"So what is a hot, crowded, and hungry world to do?"
"That's the question von Braun and his colleagues at the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research are wrestling with right now. This is the group of world-renowned agricultural research centers that helped more than double the world's average yields of corn, rice, and wheat between the mid-1950s and the mid-1990s, an achievement so staggering it was dubbed the green revolution. Yet with world population spiraling toward nine billion by mid-century, these experts now say we need a repeat performance, doubling current food production by 2030."
"In other words, we need another green revolution. And we need it in half the time."
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While I think many Greens retain a horror of GM that dates from a time when it wasn't well understood, my anti-GM feelings are because many applications of GM technology worsen poor land-management issues, and end up causing ecological harm.
That's true, but the big agricultural monocultures in the US aren't actually a consequence of GM. There were specific government decisions there, in the 1970s and 80s, to favour an overwhelming focus on soy and corn crops that can be made into very cheap food products. That's more the problem.
Sure, of course, but such things as pesticide-resistant crops take monoculture to a whole new level. And that pesticide-heavy monoculture is at least partly responsible for the decline in honeybees, which has potentially-catastrophic effects for many food crops.
As I said, I don't think GM is inherently evil, but it allows bad choices to have more far-reaching implications. I think the further our technology develops, the more responsibility we have to use it sensibly and conservatively.