This ties in with the recent “has natural selection stopped” thread.
We should remove all guard rails & warning signs, and close hospitals 3 days a week.
People who have survived horrific injuries have said that it lasts just a few seconds.
If it’s only a few seconds of pain, then how exactly does torture work? I figured I’d ask because this thread isn’t macabre enough.
My mother discovered late in life that she is an adrenaline junkie. She and her husband travel all over the West via motorcycle, speeding through hairpin turns and doing all manner of terrible things at dangerous heights. When I visited they took me to the tamest places they could think of, I agree there was some cool stuff but NO guardrails and apparently her husband likes to stand while driving cars and veer closer to the edge so he can check out the view. And he’d always climb beyond guardrails, get as close as possible and just stare down. Hanging out with them was like one endless heart attack. They don’t care if they die. Some people just don’t care.
But if you think about it, this makes perfect sense. Humans (males at least) have a firmware bug: in our teens and early 20’s we do crazy and dangerous stuff, when we have so much life to lose. The biggest risk factor for dying in the wilderness is being a solo male under 30. As we age, we perversely become more and more conservative.
Surely the rational thing is to be really cautious when we are young and we have 50 or more years of life to lose, and to save the crazy dangerous adrenaline-junkie stuff for our dotage?
I’m planning to do progressively more dangerous off-trail routes in the Grand Canyon as I get older (health permitting), and if I make it to 90 I’m going to take up this:
ETA: I'm not defending risking taking your daughter with you as your car goes over the edge, of course!Okay, that’s been explained above but what about this: I was visiting Madeira and one afternoon we decided to go for a “levada walk”. Levadas were the irrigation system for the island and they are narrow channels with maybe a 12" strip of cement on one or both sides. So, a nice walk in the countryside. Well we got to one place and it was along the side of a hill. There was a stone face, the levada with the cement border and then a steep drop. The levada itself was barely a foot wide. I had no problem walking along the border strip with the drop on my left but we rounded a bend and realised that the levada went into a low tunnel so we could not go further.
We turned around to go back. The steep drop was now on my right side and omg, I could not move. I had to lean over the water in the channel and walk, hand over hand touching the stone face and sliding my feet along. I’m not sure why it was so easy to walk out but so scary walking back. I am right-handed, I figure that had something to do with it.
According to this article, the brother and sister were trying to find a place to soak in the hot pool. He fell in when he reached down to test the temperature of the water.
Stupid and sad.
Torture is the technique of producing pain without injury. Or with minimal injury. Said another way, it’s stimulus (perhaps to the level of injury) chosen to create disproportionate pain.
Nature designed your pain system to signal the result of an injury. But there are other ways to provoke the same signaling.
Very true. If you look at the Officer Down Memorial Page you’ll see about 35 listings for NPS Rangers killed at work. But only about a third of those of those are what we normally think of when we hear about an LEO being KIA—being gunned down by a criminal. The rest are almost all vehicular accidents. Not only car accidents, but numerous small aircraft failures as well. What amazes me is how infrequently it happens. Despite the fact that working in a commissioned capacity for the NPS is now considered the most dangerous federal LEO job, in the entire history of the NPS only about nine or ten Rangers have been gunned down or in some other way killed by a criminal during a confrontational experience. If you’re interested, there was good documentary on PBS about 30 years ago titled The Law of Nature: Park Rangers in Yosemite Valley. It was re-released a few years ago, so fortunately the video is DVD-quality instead of a low-resolution VHS rip. The information presented in the documentary is now to some extent dated, but the fact that it is dated partially contributes to its interest, as it’s amazing to see how much has changed in just the past 30 years.
I’d like to clarify something. While it is true that vehicle accidents is the largest contributor to NPS LE deaths, there is still a danger presented by criminals. Many people think that when they go to the mountains that they are leaving the crime of the city behind. With 3-4 million visitors a year (and most of them coming in summer) there are days when Yosemite Valley represents a city in itself. People who go on vacation don’t always leave their problems at home, and those domestic dispute calls then fall into the hands of the rangers. Criminals will also think sometimes that the mountains are a good place to lay low sometimes. Thus, being an NPS LE ranger’s job isn’t that of an interpretive ranger who carries a gun. LE rangers face the same dangers & risks that many county & municipal peace officers face every day.
I was talking to a ranger at the Grand Canyon a number of years ago and she told us that they hate the “back up a little more” joke. She said that they lose 3-4 people a year to that joke. I assume she was exaggerating, but I also assume that it has happened at least occasionally.
It certainly has. “Over The Edge: Death in Grand Canyon” is a bestseller, a most entertaining read - and the book has probably saved lives. Everyone who plans to hike there should read it.
Yeah, looking at the various discussions about that book I am guessing that she meant they lose that many a year to falls into the canyon in general (I think the book says 2-3 per year) - and so they just find that joke not funny at all…