Beer.

Perhaps beer is like an uranium platemail. It protects the wearer from damages caused by minor conventional arms, but on the other hand, it's made of fucking uranium.

 

There is also the small matter of a majority of drunk people in accidents being young and healthy.

 

I would rather say that it's mostly the fact that when one is drunk, his mind is fogged and he doesn't expect to be hit by a car/land on concrete and even if, he doesn't make much of it. He's chillin' and his muscles are relaxed and therefore bouncy. If he would expect the danger, his muscles would be tensed and that would be the end of him. He would be a wooden plank instead of a rubber doll. Conclusion: when an impact is unavoidable, spend every remaining fraction of a second getting drunk.

 

Once, while playing Zombie tag after five or six shots of Captain Morgan's, I slid all the way across my neighbour's driveway (top to bottom), tearing up my leg, and still got up and ran back to my house.

 

Well, zombies are a special case aren't they?

 

I'm fairly bloody certain that it was shown recently that drinking doesn't kill brain cells and instead just the connections between them, which are repairable anyway.

Muro, I would have thought it'd hurt more if your muscles are relaxed. Here's something to try when sober: punch a brick wall without tensing. Switch to unbroken hand. Punch brick wall and tense before impact. Okay, so they both hurt a lot, but I was always taught in kick boxing and so on, to tense just before you got hit or hit something yourself. Their logic being if you didn't, the muscles wouldn't absorb any impact and leave it to your bones/organs. Which, well, hurts more I'd say.

 

It's a different story when it's your whole body weight impacting your steering wheel at 10 g's.

 

It's been proven by Aussie drunks that alchy-hol in fact causes no damage what so ever, but instead increases neural transmissions.

 

It's not about pain but about resistance to fractures. You won't be able to have fully relaxed muscles when hitting a brick wall on purpose while being sober, because you're conscious and know what's waiting for you, and the tense would be a reflex (not to mention how you have to tense you muscles to initiate that very action). This is why this advantage of relaxed muscles works mostly for drunk people and sleepwalkers, since they are both more or less unaware of what's happening.

A tense muscle doesn't really absorb damage, it transfers it further, right to the bone. A relaxed muscle is simply more elastic, which is why it absorbs the impact's energy, preventing the bone's fracture.

Quick example - those karate martial artists often prove how enormous their penises are by breaking piles of several stacked bricks in one blow. Let's say our exemplary karate kid wants to break a stack of 10 bricks in half. He hits the upper brick and the power of the impact is transfered down, breaking all of them - including the 10th one - if only the impact is strong enough. Now imagine what would happen if we replaced the first 9 bricks with a pillar made of rubber of the same height and waited for him to hit it with the same power. He would do so, but the rubber wouldn't transfer enough energy to break the single brick beneath since the whole energy would disperse before it would even reach it.

 

I believe it. My brother was extremely shitfaced walking home from a christmas party in 2007, got hit by a car and the doctors said the only way he survived was because of the amount of alcohol in his system. Did loose half the right side of his brain though.

 

Thinking back, I can't remember ever feeling any pain whilst on the piss.

 

My short stint behind the bar a few years back demonstrated this to me a fair few times. The really drunk people could fall down the stairs and not feel a goddamn thing, get right back up and stumble off singing 'Danny Boy', while sober people who did the same usually sprained something at the least and swore like wounded pirates while someone carried them to the hospital just across the road.

 

And thus slapstick comedy came to be.

 

Oh I never said drunk people don't feel pain, just that muscles "bouncing back" wasn't the reason. Trust me, it will hurt like hell when you sober up the next day.

Muro, can you explain why a tense muscle "goes right to the bone"? Not saying you can't be right, just unsure how so. If a relaxed muscle is more elastic it has the potential to store more energy by flexing, i.e it'll move further inwards which could lead it hitting an organ/bone and so on. Of course it depends on how rigid the muscle is when it's tense along with the force. With 10 G's on the steering wheel it's not going to make a goddamn difference what you do.

The brick wall was just a (shitty) example, if you didn't already know.

And what the hell were sober people doing falling down stairs?!

 

They were shitty old stone stairs which had worn away quite nicely. People are dumb.

 

I said that what goes right to the bone is the damage, not the muscle (pretty much the same thing but the first one can appear to be strange if we decided to imagine it).

I'm no physicist, but the way I see it, I think you could have very well partly answered yourself. A relaxed muscle, because of being more elastic than a tensed one, has indeed the potential of storing more anergy, be it by flexing or by absorbing pressure comming from the outside. When a muscle is tensed it already stores quite some energy comming from the said tense and when it's hit, it's more likely to fill up the maximum energy storage and transfer the remaining energy instead of absorbing/dispersing the whole impact's power. A little amateurish logic, but it seems to work.

Well, I like to post (shitty) replies to (shitty) examples.

Science! How would we compare the two cases if they didn't sacrifice themselves for it?

 

Would it have anything to do with the fact that alcohol removes inhibition, and therefore the brain simply goes, "I'll deal with it later" when the body hurts? Maybe the brain is too busy trying to keep the person alive (heart pumping, diaphragm breathing, tongue out of the oesophagus) and diverts its attention away from less critical stuff?

Similar things have happened when children are high on sugar and severely distracted. A friend of mine sliced off a toe while playing on rocks on the beach and didn't notice it until she got back to the car and attempted to put on her shoes. She was six at the time.