Well, the way I see it, there are two possibilities:
a) There are more than 73 deaths each year caused by pulling down goalposts. If this is the case, then it's not particularly uncommon and thus doesn't qualify for a Darwin Award; after all, lots of people die from drunk driving, but since it's not unusual, they get no awards.
b) There are very, very few deaths each year caused by pulling down goalposts. If this is the case, then it's not particularly dangerous and thus doesn't qualify for a Darwin Award; after all, just because somebody dies in a freak stamp-collecting accident doesn't mean that the act of stamp collecting is inherently life-threatening. Darwin Awards are for people who die by doing things that are obviously extremely dangerous.
Now, as to the question of goalpost statistics? It's very hard to quote statistics unless someone collects them, and if something is an extremely rare freak accident, no one's collecting those numbers. If someone jumps to their death out of the hotel room I'm sitting in, I say "Wow! That was unlikely!" even though I cannot absolutely prove that people aren't jumping out of this window three times a week. The actuarial don't go down as far as "one person killed nationwide every ten years".
Basically, the fact that it's reported here as an unusual thing (along with the fact that I personally have never heard of it happening before) leads me to believe that it is, in fact, quite rare. This news article is widely circulated; if it had happened fifty times this year (or, in fact, at all over the last several years), those instances would have gotten news stories too. The lack of news stories suggests to me that it's a very uncommon event.
And the fact that I can't find hard evidence of per capita goal post deaths (in fact, I can't find any but the Minnesota-Morris student in the original story) tends to bolster my beliefs. If you believe that more than 73 deaths per year are attributable to people pulling down goal posts, that should be easy to prove; the reverse is not true. Proving a negative is nigh-impossible.
I did locate this story (http://www.momsteam.com/alpha/features/head_injury_awareness_center/dangers_posed_by_soccer_goalposts.shtml) about soccer goalposts, which apparently killed 27 people from 1979 to 2003, so that's slightly more than one per year.
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yendi![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2005-10-24 04:35 pm (UTC)a) There are more than 73 deaths each year caused by pulling down goalposts. If this is the case, then it's not particularly uncommon and thus doesn't qualify for a Darwin Award; after all, lots of people die from drunk driving, but since it's not unusual, they get no awards.
b) There are very, very few deaths each year caused by pulling down goalposts. If this is the case, then it's not particularly dangerous and thus doesn't qualify for a Darwin Award; after all, just because somebody dies in a freak stamp-collecting accident doesn't mean that the act of stamp collecting is inherently life-threatening. Darwin Awards are for people who die by doing things that are obviously extremely dangerous.
Now, as to the question of goalpost statistics? It's very hard to quote statistics unless someone collects them, and if something is an extremely rare freak accident, no one's collecting those numbers. If someone jumps to their death out of the hotel room I'm sitting in, I say "Wow! That was unlikely!" even though I cannot absolutely prove that people aren't jumping out of this window three times a week. The actuarial don't go down as far as "one person killed nationwide every ten years".
Basically, the fact that it's reported here as an unusual thing (along with the fact that I personally have never heard of it happening before) leads me to believe that it is, in fact, quite rare. This news article is widely circulated; if it had happened fifty times this year (or, in fact, at all over the last several years), those instances would have gotten news stories too. The lack of news stories suggests to me that it's a very uncommon event.
And the fact that I can't find hard evidence of per capita goal post deaths (in fact, I can't find any but the Minnesota-Morris student in the original story) tends to bolster my beliefs. If you believe that more than 73 deaths per year are attributable to people pulling down goal posts, that should be easy to prove; the reverse is not true. Proving a negative is nigh-impossible.
I did locate this story (http://www.momsteam.com/alpha/features/head_injury_awareness_center/dangers_posed_by_soccer_goalposts.shtml) about soccer goalposts, which apparently killed 27 people from 1979 to 2003, so that's slightly more than one per year.