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Date: Tue, 05 Nov 1996 21:23:06 GMTServer: NCSA/1.5Content-type: text/htmlLast-modified: Tue, 30 Jan 1996 16:59:06 GMTContent-length: 3826<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>The Helmet Sermon Page</TITLE></HEAD><BODY><H2>Short background</H2><P>I once heard that Madison is a city with more bicycles than cars. Idon't know if that's still true, or was ever true, but for an urbanpopulation around 200,000 this statement paints a pretty accurate picture:except in the very coldest Wisconsin weather, when only a few folks (likemyself) are crazy enough to venture out on two wheels, Madison teems withbicycles and bicyclists.</P><P>Madison is also the home to the primary campus of the University ofWisconsin, which is home to roughly 30,000 undergraduates, and 12,000graduate students. That's a lot of students; that's a lot of bicylists.You might think they would be difficult to tell apart ...</P><H2>The Helmet Theory Itself</H2><P>Admittedly, this theory is mostly untested, really little more than anobservation. It is probably not that remarkable, considering kids today :-)<H4>Every person on campus, on a bicycle, wearing a helmet, is a graduatestudent (or faculty member). Stated another way, none of theundergraduates riding bicycles (but most of the graduates) wearhelmets.</H4><P>A useful application of the helmet theory is that, if you are curiousto know if a cyclist is a graduate or an undergraduate, see whetherthey've got a plastic-and-styrofoam brain-protector.<H2>But Why?!!!</H2><P>On one level, this seems a bit odd. Surely, the graduate students(some, admittedly, longer ago than others) were all undergraduates at onetime. We can thereby conclude, given the correctness of the HelmetTheory, that none of them attended Wisconsin.<P>On another level, this is positively crazy. In a town with so manybicycles (and in the winter, so many ice-covered roads), so few of thepeople riding bicycles (and I include the mopeds, Sprees, etc.) take themost elementary precaution to saving their respective lives.<P>My guess about why so few undergrads wear helmets is because they areperceived as being, on whatever level, <em>uncool</em>. Perhaps it is notpossible to get a date if you wear a bicycle helmet? But surely massivebrain trauma is uncool, too!!!<P>One of my students, when I brought this up in class, postulated thatperhaps the dichotomy between grads and undergrads vis-a-vis the helmetphenomenon arises because "they [the grads] have more to lose." The rest of the class seemed to agree. Yiii!!<P>This seems to me to be yet another manifestation of natural selectionat work in modern society. The graduate students have already progressedpast those pleasantly distracting and carefree undergraduate years, andhave hopefully learned important and useful things that the race wouldlike to pass along to future generations. But if this is true, then thegene for wearing a helmet must not be inherited, or must not assertitself until the individual has grown up.<H2>Postscript</H2><P>The inability of Wisconsin undergraduates to wear helmets isreminiscent of something that I noticed in high school. I grew up inMadison, and learned about cold weather the hard way; I think even themost stoic among us would conceed that the winters here get pretty cold.Yet at my high school (remarkably, it was Madison West, a place with apretty good academic reputation), almost no one wore a hat to school; andmany people would walk to school with their hair <em>still wet</em>! Yousee, in high school it was pretty important to have unmussed hair. Golly.<P><HR>Last modified: Tue Jan 30 10:59:06 1996 by Martin Reames<ADDRESS> <!WA0><!WA0><!WA0><!WA0><!WA0><A HREF="http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~mreames/mreames.html">mreames</A>@<!WA1><!WA1><!WA1><!WA1><!WA1><A HREF="http://www.cs.wisc.edu/">cs</A>.<!WA2><!WA2><!WA2><!WA2><!WA2><A HREF="http://www.wisc.edu">wisc</A>.<!WA3><!WA3><!WA3><!WA3><!WA3><A HREF="http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~mreames/postfixes.html">edu</A></ADDRESS><HR></BODY></HTML>⌨️ 快捷键说明
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