Wow, Hollywood had brainwashed me too. I had no idea that drowning doesn’t look like drowning:

The Instinctive Drowning Response – so named by Francesco A. Pia, Ph.D., is what people do to avoid actual or perceived suffocation in the water. And it does not look like most people expect. There is very little splashing, no waving, and no yelling or calls for help of any kind. To get an idea of just how quiet and undramatic from the surface drowning can be, consider this: It is the number two cause of accidental death in children, age 15 and under (just behind vehicle accidents) – of the approximately 750 children who will drown next year, about 375 of them will do so within 25 yards of a parent or other adult. In ten percent of those drownings, the adult will actually watch them do it, having no idea it is happening (source: CDC).

Definitely click through. Fascinating, and the stuff of parental nightmares. (via kottke)

Love this powerful seatbelt commercial from the Sussex Safer Roads Partnership. (thx alec)

You may have heard of the SawStop; it’s a safety device for table saws that can instantly stop the blade if it comes in contact with a finger, preventing injury. Until now the videos I’ve seen have involved hot dogs being saved from grievous injury. But in this Discovery channel clip, SawStop’s inventor puts his actual finger where his mouth is.

Madness. He’s gotta have quite a bit of confidence in his engineering, but also whoever does his manufacturing and QA. Remind me never to invent anything that guarantees you can fall into a wood chipper and come out the other side unscathed. I doubt they’d be able to air that on the Discovery Channel.

(via core77)

The latest issue of Outside has an article on Rod Liberal's brush with death via lightning:

Watching an electrical storm from afar is a natural spectacle, but there's good reason to feel fear when it comes closer. If you could stop any one of the 25 million flashes that touch down in the U.S. each year—gargantuan electrical discharges created by the buildup of excess negative charges in clouds—you'd feel heat of up to 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit, five times hotter than the surface of the sun. A single flash can carry more than 100 million volts, the equivalent of 833,000 people sticking paper clips into electrical outlets. And lightning has been known to roam as far as 15 miles from the storm that bred it before striking from a clear blue sky. One minute you're the master of a fourteener; the next you're on a gurney with a tube down your throat and a lifetime of recovery ahead of you—if you even survive the current ripping through your nervous system, which can instantly shut down your heart.

Even though I'm pretty good at getting off the field when death from above threatens, I'm probably not good enough. This got me to thinking about the stats, because inevitably somebody wants to keep playing, citing various quoted miniscule odds of being killed in a given year. Conveniently enough, the National Safety Council has an Odds of Dying page (1 in 1, given enough time :-). For lightning, 66 people were killed in 2002, so the NSC rates that as you having a 1 in 4,362,746 chance of dying from lightning in a given year. However, these odds are calculated based on the total US population, which includes the vast majority of people smart enough to stay inside when the thunder booms. What you really need to know, and which is probably unknowable, is how many people in a given year spend time outside during a lightning storm. Divide that number by 66 and then talk to me about odds...