Date: Tue, 05 Nov 1996 21:23:06 GMT Server: NCSA/1.5 Content-type: text/html Last-modified: Tue, 30 Jan 1996 16:59:06 GMT Content-length: 3826
I once heard that Madison is a city with more bicycles than cars. I don't know if that's still true, or was ever true, but for an urban population around 200,000 this statement paints a pretty accurate picture: except in the very coldest Wisconsin weather, when only a few folks (like myself) are crazy enough to venture out on two wheels, Madison teems with bicycles and bicyclists.
Madison is also the home to the primary campus of the University of Wisconsin, which is home to roughly 30,000 undergraduates, and 12,000 graduate students. That's a lot of students; that's a lot of bicylists. You might think they would be difficult to tell apart ...
Admittedly, this theory is mostly untested, really little more than an observation. It is probably not that remarkable, considering kids today :-)
A useful application of the helmet theory is that, if you are curious to know if a cyclist is a graduate or an undergraduate, see whether they've got a plastic-and-styrofoam brain-protector.
On one level, this seems a bit odd. Surely, the graduate students (some, admittedly, longer ago than others) were all undergraduates at one time. We can thereby conclude, given the correctness of the Helmet Theory, that none of them attended Wisconsin.
On another level, this is positively crazy. In a town with so many bicycles (and in the winter, so many ice-covered roads), so few of the people riding bicycles (and I include the mopeds, Sprees, etc.) take the most elementary precaution to saving their respective lives.
My guess about why so few undergrads wear helmets is because they are perceived as being, on whatever level, uncool. Perhaps it is not possible to get a date if you wear a bicycle helmet? But surely massive brain trauma is uncool, too!!!
One of my students, when I brought this up in class, postulated that perhaps the dichotomy between grads and undergrads vis-a-vis the helmet phenomenon arises because "they [the grads] have more to lose." The rest of the class seemed to agree. Yiii!!
This seems to me to be yet another manifestation of natural selection at work in modern society. The graduate students have already progressed past those pleasantly distracting and carefree undergraduate years, and have hopefully learned important and useful things that the race would like to pass along to future generations. But if this is true, then the gene for wearing a helmet must not be inherited, or must not assert itself until the individual has grown up.
The inability of Wisconsin undergraduates to wear helmets is reminiscent of something that I noticed in high school. I grew up in Madison, and learned about cold weather the hard way; I think even the most 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 a pretty good academic reputation), almost no one wore a hat to school; and many people would walk to school with their hair still wet! You see, in high school it was pretty important to have unmussed hair. Golly.