Death by Coconut | Hacker News Reader

Death by Coconut

en.wikipedia.org

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In one of his books, Jared Diamond recounted how, on a research trip to New Guinea's rain-forests, he found that his native guides would not, under any circumstances, make camp under a tree. They were afraid of being crushed by falling trees in the night.

Diamond reasoned that the odds of a tree falling on you in any given night are virtually nil. The odds of a tree falling on Diamond during the few weeks he was in the field were also pretty small. However, the odds of a tree falling on somebody who camped under trees every night all their life was rather significant.

Death by coconut is similar. If you walk near coconut trees occasionally, you have nothing to worry about. You might not want to hang a hammock under a coconut tree in your backyard though.

Regarding the tree/camp thing, I was taught to always look up for dead branches before setting up a tent. While trees don't often fall, dead limbs do.

I did a quick google and on this paper where falling branches is about 10% of outdoor education deaths.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/268415459_Preventin...

Widowmakers they are called in forestry.

There are conifers which produce heavy cones. You can find some in Fort Mason. Some guy was bonked on the head and sued the gov't when one fell on his head and cracked his skull[1]. There have been cases elsewhere of people getting hurt by them.

[1]https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Man-hit-by-16-pound-p...

A single cone of the Australian bunya tree can weigh up to 18 kg:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Araucaria_bidwillii

This is a problem with how people understand risk in general. The actual risk of something needs to take into account how many times you take the risk.

Something that only has a 1 in 1000 chance of death might seem like a small risk, but if you take that risk every day you will have a 30% chance of dying within a year

I don't think so. I think the issue is that people don't multiply correctly. A 1 in 1000 chance of death is actually very high, it just doesn't seem high because 1/1000 seems like a small number. But a small number (1/1000) times a very big number (how bad death is) can still be a big number.

As an example, if you would pay $100 to extend your healthy life by one day (I know I would), that means each healthy day of your life you have ahead of you should be worth at least $100 to you. Assuming you have 10 years left of healthy life, your life ought to be worth at least 10×360×100=$360,000 to you. So a 1/1000 chance of death costs you 1/1000 * $360,000 = $360.

This reminds me of an observation I once had at a time when I was doing contract work at an hourly rate. During a trip to Vegas, I found myself at a blackjack table making bets that happened to match my hourly rate. It occurred to me then that I was essentially gambling hours of my life, each turn in a sense increasing or decreasing my effective lifespan.

Of course "time == money" is a well known axiom, but it was still odd to consider in that context.

I read a book long ago on blackjack card counting. It's possible to take the winning edge, the maximum bet size, and the number of bets per hour, and figure out what your hourly wage is doing this.

Also figure in this being hard work, as it requires your full attention.

The pay just wasn't that good, and besides, the casinos will ban you when they figure out you're counting.

So that wasn't for me. Instead, I invest in the stock market, where "buy and forget" is not much work, and the odds are much better.

This applies to poker, too - a game where you really can get a consistent advantage over other players with sufficient study and make a living. Once you strip everything else away about the game, you're sitting in a casino for many hours a day, spending as much time as you can with mentally ill idiots... to make less money than you would applying that exact same effort to get good at an in-demand job skill and building things that people need.

Most people who are in a position to make a career out of poker decide that it's not worth it and remain (very good) recreational players. Casinos can be fun places to visit, and tournaments can be a lot of fun, but I wouldn't want to make them a fixture of my life.

Lots of people with in-demand skills still not really employable, so that's one advantage of poker.

I seem to remember to have seen a documentary (many years ago) giving advice about camping near/under coconut trees on islands in the Indian Ocean being not a smart idea because of the coconut crabs (no risk of death, but possibly very painful pinches):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut_crab

but really cannot say if it is just a myth.

Some with durian trees. My hometown has a lot of durian trees in addition to coconut trees, and the kids are thought from early ages to never ever rest under a durian and coconut tree. Coconut is worse because it's always has fruits, unlike durian which only bear fruits on specific months.

For those curious about how to code this in ICD-10:

    W20.8XXA Morbidity from strike by thrown, projected or falling
             inanimate object, initial encounter.

And probably associated with this place of encounter:

    Y92.832  Beach as the place of occurrence of the external cause.

I had a colleague who was a deep expert in ICD codes, and he used to regale us with funny ones. If I remember correctly, there's one about being wounded by shrapnel from a space ship.

https://www.icd10data.com/ICD10CM/Codes/V00-Y99/V95-V97/V95-...

This was the closest I found.

"Spacecraft explosion injuring occupant, initial encounter"

ICD10 codes are all based on real Things that have happened

This reminds me of import duty tariff codes: back in 2014 I was planning to purchase a recumbent tricycle, take it to America for a holiday, then return with it to Australia; and I investigated the duty tariffs, to seek to reassure myself that I wouldn’t be required to pay duty in either direction, and to see if I could get it GST-free via the Tourist Refund Scheme if I brought it back into the country a month later (don’t remember what I concluded on that point). (As written, I came away with the distinct impression that things like laptops, cameras, bicycles and phones, totalling anything over something like a thousand dollars are supposed to be taxed, with surprisingly limited exceptions; in practice, it’s definitely not so.)

Well, somewhere along the way I came across an item in the tables of things that hadn’t quite fit into their existing neat tariff categories: “bicycle with seven wheels and ten seats” (or perhaps it was ten wheels and seven seats); added in 1993, I think. The really funny thing with that is that the bike shop owner I subsequently bought the trike from was fairly confident he knew the vehicle in question. A slow vehicle, he opined, not very well-made.

>“bicycle with seven wheels and ten seats

Kind of almost sounds like a conference bike but the numbers are bit off.

Found the Flann O’Brien fan.

I live in an Asian country extremely high numbers of coconut trees.

I thought this was obvious. Surprised to see people talking about it here, although in retrospect it makes sense that people here find it curious. (When I saw snow for the first time at the age of 20 when I travelled to America, I was mesmerized and stared at it like an idiot).

Coconuts are heavy, and if it falls on your head you'll probably die, or atleast have heavy injuries. As kids it was drilled down to us never to stand underneath coconut trees.

Also sometimes they fall in clusters, like 3 or 4 coconuts would fall down simultaneously.

Don't park your car under coconut or jackfruit trees. I personally know plenty of cases where windshields have been smashed by falling coconuts or jackfruits.

Same here. Tropical town in Australia with a lot of coconuts. Council removes most of them from beaches but you can still find a few around if you want a feed.

Bigger concern is in cyclone season when they become a potential projectile :)

Reminds me of the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus, who was purportedly killed by having a turtle shell dropped on his head by a vulture who mistook his bald head for a rock.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeschylus

well, if you gonna die in a stupid way, it might as well be in a way that have people thinking how the hell that happened.

I wonder if that is what inspired Terry Prattchet, in Small Gods the inquisitor Vorbis is killed when a tortoise falls on his head having being dropped by a eagle. that tortoise is also his god turned into a tortoise due to lack of belief.

Pratchett would probably have corrected the APF if this were untrue.

https://www.lspace.org/books/apf/small-gods.html

> Concern about the risk of fatality due to falling coconuts led local officials in Queensland, Australia, to remove coconut trees from beaches in 2002

This kind of policy making is like the complete opposite of going for the low hanging fruit (figuratively and literally)...

My uncle once told me the story of how he learned not to ignore these signs. He survived a coconut hitting his head while he was relaxing in the half shade provided by the palm.

The locals referred to him as the man with the head stronger than a coconut. But he was really lucky, that the coconut had not hung higher up.

When retelling the story he really always emphasized how damn lucky he was to have survived this.

Wow apparently you only need to drink 2.5L of coconut water to get hospitalized or die (if you aren’t hospitalized). I love the beverage and could easily drink that, especially during exercise (which is also the worst time to drink it).

The subject in the reference got hyperkalemic while playing tennis during very hot weather after drinking eight 11 oz coconut water beverages. OTOH, the hyperkalemia article says even children quickly urinate excess potassium, so healthy people should not worry about it.

I guess the lesson is: don't use coconut water like gatorade.

> I guess the lesson is: don't use coconut water like gatorade.

I do 5 days a week in Bali. 2.5hrs of training and 2-3 coconuts (another one later in the day). I monitor heart rate, get blood tested each week. Never an issue in my case.

Coconuts were removed in certain areas around Mumbai before Obama visited

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-south-asia-11684382

In Brazil you have to be carefull with coconuts and Jackfruit.

I grew up with a Jackfruit tree in my backyard. Damn thuig almost killed my mom's Chihuahua.

For those unaware, jackfruits are huge. They're usually sold in quarters or eighths in US supermarkets. That's already plenty of jackfruit. Then you have to pick out the egg-sized seeds, which has the feeling of performing a C-section. Afterwards, the meat is mild and tasty.

A jackfruit can weight somethin beetween 15kg to 40kg. So, they hit you like a anvil on the way down.

In the Indian subcontinent, the equivalent statement to “Don’t count your chickens before the eggs have hatched” is “The jackfruit’s still in the tree, don’t oil your lips just yet” since the jackfruit exterior is obviously sticky when you cut it

Also the eponymous Brazil nut tree [0], which can be 60% taller than a coconut tree at 160 feet and has fruit about the same size. I heard that they are sometimes referred to as "the widowmaker". They cannot be cut down by law, so areas that have been cleared for farming often have lone Brazil nut trees still standing [1].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_nut

[1] https://images.app.goo.gl/rRW7vnW92hsQZFoV9

They grew more in the north in tropical forests. I think I never saw one in a city.

I've had a few close calls with coconuts, that very well could have killed or seriously injured me. Sitting on a beach reading under a tree, a bowling-ball sized coconut missed my head by about a foot. Another time I was lying on the sidewalk in front of my house and one missed by a couple feet; that almost certainly would have crushed my skull. My car had a few dents from coconuts blown off the tree and about four feet laterally, so you don't even have to be right underneath. Those things are no joke.

Yep, I was out for a run in my local park once and one hit the ground a couple of inches in front of me. Had I been a fraction of a second faster I’d have ended up in hospital.

I recently read Cryptonomicon, and there's a moment in the book where a Japanese (IIRC) soldier is instantly able to tell that someone is new to the south Pacific because they're standing under a coconut tree.

I grew up in an actual coconut orchard in Southern India.

The coconuts that fall are usually mature and mostly dried out and don't nearly weigh as much as a fresh coconut. You'd still get injured not not likely to kill you.

I was also less worried about a coconut falling on my head because they would get harvested (by climbing the tree and felling them) before they turned mature enough to fall on their own.

Someone said they fall in a bunch. They might, but it's very rare. I've never seen coconuts falling in bunches unless they're being fell.

I would be more worried about the coconut leaf falling on my head. Those things are damn heavy and do tend to fall randomly and frequently, albeit with a large enough noise that you can run away to save your head. They made excellent fuel for cooking though.

Do you happen to know what variety the orchard was growing? There are a dozen different varieties, and nut size does vary considerably.

Is it windy there? Coconut trees on a beach or other windy area sway a lot, and thus drop younger (and harder) fruits more often.

Murder by Coconut. Who would have thought? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalaikoothal

> In December 1923, in New Castle, Pennsylvania, a man was killed while trying to crack open a coconut with the butt end of a loaded revolver. The gun discharged and the man was shot in the abdomen.

Wow ... is that really death by coconut? or death by stupidity?

I like the idea of having different degrees of "death by coconut."

1st degree: you were struck and killed by a falling coconut. 2nd degree: you shot and killed yourself trying to open a coconut with a gun. 3rd degree: someone else got hit in the head with a coconut but lived, albeit with severe brain trauma. Years later, they suffer from intense CTE and go on a murder/suicide rampage and kill you... but the coconut kinda started it.

One time I was watching a ceremony on a stage in Mali, sitting outdoors among coconut trees and every now and then one came crashing down hitting the floor with an almighty crunch. Foreigners laughed nervously. No doubt if that hits on the head you're dead. Couldn't wait to get the hell out of there.

This reads like something straight from hitchhiker's guide. I had to check the citations to make sure this is not a great troll page. It even includes a whale death by coconut! I'm at a loss of words that this wiki page exist in such detail.

This one should be called revenge of the ape

> In March 2009, 48-year-old Luelit Janchoom, in Nakhon Si Thammarat Province of Thailand, was killed when a monkey used to harvest coconuts furiously kicked them down to his master, hitting his head.

> This one should be called revenge of the ape

Looks more like an unhappy employee.

I love the warning sign - the tree looks positively malicious. Look how it's hurling coconuts at fleeing humans!

The area where I live in Singapore has sidewalks lined with large coconut palms. During Covid lockdown in 2020, all of the palm trees in my area were loaded with coconuts as a result of the workers not being allowed to leave their dormitories. Normally the coconuts are trimmed from the trees before they start dropping en masse.

While on the topic of falling objects, there’s a local/regional saying that durian trees have eyes as apparently durians only drop at night.

I lived in Singapore for many years. The trees there have a tenancy to drop limbs, perhaps a result of the large number of parasite plants which grow on them. On the occasions I missed being hit by large falling branches, and this was in a week kept university compound. It seems that Every country offers unique ways to die.

In Louisiana, the state legislature (SB188 in 1988) indemnified injury by coconut to protect the Zulu krewe tradition of throwing coconuts at parade goers on Mardi Gras. Surprised that isn’t mentioned in the legal section.

I did not know one could die by drinking too much coconut water. I feel like this may save my life as I could see myself as the kind of person who would probably drink large bottles of coconut water all day.

Coconuts fall at different stages of their life. We have 4 trees surrounding our home and we have a net around the trees which catches the fall of the coconuts. Also parking under a coconut tree is always risky, I have had my parked car along a road dented and windshield broken because of a falling coconut from the tree above. If I had noticed the tree that day (they curve a lot), I wouldn't have parked below.

I met a coconut picker in Cuba who had survived a coconut falling onto his head. It landed rounded-part down, rather than pointed-part down: doctors thought that was probably why he survived.

He told me his vision temporarily went completely red after the impact. Probably from hyphema, or blood in the eyes.

One of Roald Dahl's adult stories featured this, surprised it's not mentioned on the wiki.

Once my dad threw a coconut at my face thinking I was paying attention and would catch it but I was looking away and it hit me. It hurts. I can definitely see how one would die from a falling coconut

Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_deaths

Speaking of unusual deaths, I nearly got death by cardboard box as a kid.

My parents had bought one of those huge TVs, and I could fit comfortably in the discarded box, so they let me play with it. I was so fascinated by this box, I lived in it the whole day, and in the afternoon, took a nap inside.

Not being the brightest kid, I turned it upside down so the opening was on the floor, neatly locked the tabs so it was completely closed, and slept in the dark. The first signs of asphyxiation woke me up, and in panic, I tore through the top of the box. Fortunately it had staples instead of packing tape. That would have been the dumbest death in my family AFAIK.

Now I always leave holes in boxes kids or pets might play inside of.

Per capita, Sri Lanka is a dangerous place for Death-by-Coconut.

And to think my beloved jar of coconut oil comes from a long line of killers... I stand intrigued & yet terrified as rub some on my hands.

Well, that's one image I'm gunna be printing and putting in a frame..

I was taught to always look up when you are under coconut trees

Here's an original home (1958) in a typical old South Florida neighborhood where it was basically a wild coconut grove that had been subdivided into lots and as the homes were built, most of the time they left as many of the very tall coconut trees in place and only removed the ones necessary to build the foundation and driveway.

https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/1431-S-Oce...

These were the trees over 100 feet tall, but they were almost completely wiped out by lethal yellowing in the early 1970's.

Every home had the 2 inch thick white roofing tiles to resist falling coconuts and nobody would have bought the homes without custom-fitted galvanized storm shutters to protect from flying coconuts which could be expected when hurricanes came too close. When it got risky, they boarded up with steel.

For landscaping purposes after the 1970's the dying trees could be replaced by a Malayan Dwarf variety that was resistant to the yellowing disease.

Taking a look at pics 5 & 6 this is the sad result.

Where once there was a wild verdant coconut canopy about 5 times thicker than what you see now, to this day it still looks like one of the much newer neighborhoods out in the Everglades where all their greenery was originally placed by landscapers.

The royal palms have grown up nicely and they're the tallest palms by far. Not a lot of the dwarf coconuts bear fruit much higher than people's roofs. A couple of the large trees could be the local avocados, which if female have fruits about a kilo each. If male, the homeowner may not know they have an avocado tree :/ But if they cut it down, the owner of the female tree may wonder WTF happened.

Anyway for survival purposes the husk fibers of a fairly dried out unhusked coconut (one that's too old to be very good to eat) can be one of the most likely kindlings to actually burst into flame rather than just char when concentrating the sun's rays with a magnifying glass.

Emoji art of an exploding coconut you can copy for fun.

:coconut:

:boom::coconut::sweat_drops:

:droplet:

It seems a lot of these death by coconut stories are stories of animal abuse and subsequent revenge. Don't f#ck with a monkey.

> monkey used to harvest coconuts from trees

there is no limit to human depravity.

I’ve no objection to this in principle, any more that training hunting dogs, shepherd dogs, huskies, riding animals or work elephants. The important thing is that the animals are well treated, which I accept may not be the case.

Sorta like fan deaths in South Korea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death

Doesn't seem similar at all as there is no reliable evidence of fan death being real.

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