In the interest of boring the crap out of most readers, I present to you: Slipping.<\/p>\n
One of the problems of smooth concrete floors is that when they get wet, they become slippery. Think slightly melted ice over a lake of WD-40.<\/p>\n
My 15-month-old daughter has a knack for finding the little spills and puddles (that she has created earlier in the day). She finds them like this:<\/p>\n
La la la—SMACK! Aaaaaaah!<\/p>\n
But what’s weird is that she’s actually a pretty good little faller when she’s not slipping. I mean both that she falls a lot and that she protects herself well.<\/p>\n
When she trips over something, or just loses her balance, she finds a way to fall sort of slowly, or at least safely.<\/p>\n
But when she slips… KaBAM.<\/p>\n
So I started wondering. Why does slipping seem to happen so much faster than tripping? Why does it usually end up damaging us so much more?<\/p>\n
Maybe this is obvious to everyone. Here’s what I decided:<\/p>\n
We trip with the foot we’re lifting, while we’re still standing on the non-tripping foot. We expect the tripping foot to get where it’s going, and when it doesn’t, whoopee. But we usually have a little notice that it’s not gonna make it. And our bodies are heading up or across when we feel the foot betraying us.<\/p>\n
But when we slip, it’s on the foot that’s already supposed to be supporting us. There’s no time to know it’s not going to help us before it’s gone and we’re horizontal.<\/p>\n
Also, it’s often the case (but not always) that the motion of the body is downward just before we slip, as we bring the soon-to-be-gone foot down. Gravity doesn’t mind whether it joins the ground with your foot or your face, but it’s often already on the way when you slip.<\/p>\n
Anyway, that’s what I figure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the interest of boring the crap out of most readers, I present to you: Slipping. One of the problems of smooth concrete floors is that when they get wet, they become slippery. Think slightly melted ice over a lake of WD-40. My 15-month-old daughter has a knack for finding the little spills and puddles […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-and-such"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=391"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}