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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Read before attempting:

https://newyorkerbagels.com/bagel-safety-dont-be-an-er-stati...

Seriously. As any nurse about a "bagel injury" and they will know exactly what you are talking about. It is so common that it is addressed in some military first aid courses.

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I really hope this isn’t really that common. Like how bad do you have to be with a knife and do you really need someone to tell you it’s going to be a tad difficult to cut a frozen piece of bread?

Basic safety tip: Don’t pull or point pointy bits towards your meaty bits.

This reminds me of a really interesting safety tip in the woodworking world: A chisel is always a two handed tool. Either two hands on the tool itself, or one hand on the chisel and another holding a mallet. Either way, the piece needs to be in a vice or otherwise rendered immobile.

Every dumb thing I've done with a chisel has been trying to use it at an odd angle or stabilizing the piece with one hand and holding the chisel in the other.

Now I have the idea of a kitchen vice hmmmmm

That would be very useful for all the times when you use a kitchen chisel.

A significant number of my vices are indulged in the kitchen.

Seriously, the worst cut I have had has been when cutting a loaf of bread with the wrong knife. It was a fresh loaf as well. Cut half into one finger tip and a sliced a piece off the tip of another. It just takes one moment of frustrated bread-doesn't-cut-wrangling and a slip.

My lesson from it: buy a serrated bread knife instead of trying to make do with whatever is in the at the time super minimal kitchen drawer. Saw the bread instead of trying to cut it.

To be honest, I would have laughed at the thought of cutting myself whilst cutting bread of all things as well before it happened.

My worst kitchen accident happened cutting bread too. I was trying to cut through a stale loaf using a (brand new!) serrated knife, got lost in thought for one second, and the knife slipped of the bread and into the tip of my finger. Seriously debated going to the urgent care, and took months for feeling to return in the tip.

My takeaway was to be vigilant at being 100% focused whenever using knives.

My sister in law cut off a finger cutting a bagel (it was sewed back on). Seriously. I thought she was just careless (and has way too sharp of knives), but maybe it’s more common than I thought?

Sharp knives are far better than dull knives. They don't slip. Don't require too much force. With the added benefit of when you cut your finger off they can sew it back on from a clean cut :D

For problem number 1 listed in your link, the YouTube video I posted elsewhere in this thread is a solution.

Moreover, my wife, who is a nurse, has never heard of "bagel injury."

> Moreover, my wife, who is a nurse, has never heard of "bagel injury."

Well, if we go by the numbers in the article...

> Americans ate an estimated 3 billion bagels at home in 2011, an average of about 11 per person (this doesn’t include bagels eaten at work). And in the course of slicing up all those bagels, almost 2,000 people cut their fingers so badly that they ended up in an emergency room.

You have roughly (very roughly) a 0.24% chance of being one of those people injured, each day, across the entirety of the nation. I'd say the chances are low enough that some nurses will have heard of it, and some won't have, depending on distribution of bagel eaters.

> 0.24% chance of being one of those people injured, each day

2,000 / 330,000,000 / 365 = 0.00000166% chance of daily bagel injury. Not sure what calculation you did, but as far as I can tell it is off by 5 orders of magnitude.

(2000 / (300000000 / 365)) * 100

You seem to have forgotten to move the decimal place to get a percentage.

It seems the original source for all the TIL sites is a WSJ article which wrote that in 2008 there were 1979 people who went to the ER due to bagel related injuries. So it's not 2000 per day, it's per year.

Keep in mind that when a HN user writes things like "seriously", "ask any x", "it's so common". It means they probably don't know what they're talking about.

Oh, you have the 365 in the numerator instead of the denominator. That would do it. :-)

I know someone who recently got a bad cut trying to remove a pice of pre-sliced bread from a frozen loaf. So I can believe "knife vs. frozen bread" is a common cause of injury.

The link claims there are 2 thousand bagel injuries per year. (Out of 3 billion bagels eaten per year.)

People should be careful with knives, but this is not the most serious risk modern people face. Living near cars is like 3+ orders of magnitude more dangerous.

2000 that result in an ER visit. No doubt the vast majority do not require such attention. Few injuries involving cars go unreported.

Then there are the bagel injuries so serious they go straight to the morgue. The bagel and news industries conspire to hide these from public view.

What a weird article.

> Use the right kind of knife for slicing bagels. This would be a knife with a deeply serrated edge, NOT a knife with a smooth, sharp edge. The serration helps “rip” into the bagel with a crosscut saw type effect, gripping and cutting into the bagel instead of slipping across the crust and cutting your hand.

So, a bread knife? Who'd've thought?

Right behind avocado-pitting injuries.

Bagel topology experiments preferred over human topology ones.

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