And why would you refuse to see something based on that reason? Jealousy? Envy?

None of the above - because the details above indicates that the movie is in fact a family enterprise and their foremost goal is not to entertain me but promote their careers.

I will, on the other hand, buy Iron Sky. I loved G.O.R.A. They were both ridiculously low-budget compared to the what After Earth will cost but very entertaining movies, but they could not even get proper distribution in the US. I prefer giving my money to these guys, that's all.

Son promoting worked well for Kirk Douglas . . .

After checking around on Wikipedia and IMDB: Michael Douglas started acting after the age of twenty and started in "also run" titles. Will Smith Jr has co-starred in two big movies with "stars" by the age of 12 : his father and Jackie Chan. Not to mention that the "Karate Kid (2010)" was just a typical Holywood-type rip-off of a movie to make big money.

I don't intend to contribute to a Movie Star promoting his son into Movie Star II, I'll rather go and see Elysium or Ender's Game.

A head is not independent of the rest of the body, center of gravity is rather at ~4 feet max than 6.

Also, if you want to get "technical", falling plays an important role in children learning balance...

and I guess also learning what is painful and to avoid, and what's not.

My main problem with proponents of helmet - not you - is that they basically say, "if you bike, you'll fall from time to time". This is simply not true : you take it easy, pay attention and you won't fall, that is not normal. If you fall on a regular basis while riding your bicycle you are doing something wrong. "you" : in a general sense ;)

I didn't claim that it saved my life.

I just assumed - apparently wrongly - that the "worked for me" is the way you say what people often claim : "the helmet saved my life"

I don't know how you can ignore the benefits of a helmet with a straight face.

I don't say that helmets don't reduce the risk of head injury, but IMO, this benefit is so small (under normal conditions of operating a bicycle with no competition involved) that it does not make it worth the hassle of wearing a helmet - similarly to playing the lottery with 1 in 50 000 000 chance to win.

Taking hits to the head with a bat : I don't think this is a good model for representing biking accidents so there is no point. You can go ahead alone, though, at your pleasure ...:)

Funny, I have the exact opposite experience.

I commute by bike all year round in the northern suburbs of Washington DC, without a helmet.

My impression is that apart myself, most people - everybody wears a helmet where I commute - don't respect stopsigns, redlights and often do not have adequate lightning in the evening.

As for wearing it because why not : then why not put helmets on all babies once they start sitting up and then learn to walk? They keep falling all the time...

People have been biking for over a century, and except for racing, it is remarkably safe unless someone hits you with a car.

Then there's a bunch of guys who (Cochrane Collab) I doubt ever got on a bike since they were kids and start working hard to prove that riding a bicycle is a high-risk activity even though we know from past experience that it is not.

Instead of getting your data from the poisoned well of BSHI, why don't you go over to Bicycle Helmet Research Foundation for a change, to widen you perspective?

As I wrote somewhere above, I had a similar accident - fork broke above the crown.
Two teeth gone, passed out, face bruised over an area comparable to an average palm.

I did not wear a helmet. Your statement that the "helmet saved your life" is simply not verifiable - you should ride the same speed, same bike at the same spot and have the bike fail the same way dozens of times, while wearing a helmet or not, and look at the statistics of survival in order to be able to state that.

I still ride without a helmet; have been working in the US for the last few years and I can tell you, the most dangerous thing in biking here is the morons driving cars you have to share the road with.

Sorry to hear what happened.

I have to point out one thing, though : the same guys who started this "helmets save lives" craze with their New England Journal Of Medicine paper, failed to find a quantifiable protection by helmets for lacerations on the face, including the orbits : paper in pdf here

FYI, I fell once with a bike - the fork broke just above the crown. I passed out and lost half of two incisors. A helmet would not have changed anything and I have ridden 30000+ miles since, without a helmet. But I always make sure my bike is in excellent mechanical condition...

Maybe you should take more attention not to fall...

If the dents and gouges come from mountain or off-road biking : the story is about urban cycling.

50 days paid annual leave? Florida is not France...

I find the swedish system correct, this is the way it should be everywhere.

In many countries though, your period of working in research while a graduate student counts as "studying" and you receive a "stipend/fellowship", this is their excuse to make you work for peanuts while you are in fact an M. Sc. level employee. This also means that in most countries those years don't count towards the number of years employed, etc...

I believe a number of other European countries have similar PhD salaries

Not really. I was paid by a government contract in France 2002-2005 and had ~$1300 / month.
Holland might be paying better, and Germany somewhere in between, the only way to make remotely decent money during the years of graduate studies is to do it working for a company.

Monsanto did not invent GMO : scientists in the 60's, 70's started inserting pieces of genes into E. coli, a basic step in manipulating DNA. At the same time, there were intense debates how to handle this and what the consequences might be. Monsato, a private company took this much further and personally I don't agree with their approach.

Funny is, there is a big difference between a plant that has a resistance gene to a herbicide and the golden rice project that could prevent hundreds of thousands of kids from going blind every year.

In the first case, if the inserted gene escapes, it will make other, regular plants resistant to the herbicide - clearly bad.
In the second case, the only problem that could arise is that some weeds would start producing beta-carotene.

So there is difference between GMO and GMO.

There is no point of educating scientists if the private sector does not need them.

Here you suggest there is no need for publicly funded research but let's just consider the following :

Watson and Crick were publicly funded scientist when they discovered the structure of DNA. This started the era of molecular biology and enabled, among others, the production of human insulin, instead of extracting it from pigs, 20 years later (1956 --> 1977).

The company Genentech was started with recombinant insulin as their first product and became extremely successful but: it was not the industry and scientist working in the private sector who made the discoveries necessary to start producing the product - they were working in academia / government.

Of course this will not convince you based on your beliefs in invisible hands and such.