I’m slightly shellshocked, having read the story of Isaiah Otieno (via The Macalope and Adrian Kingsley-Hughes) who was walking to get his mail, listening to his iPod in his headphones as many of us do, when he was struck by a helicopter. Yes, you read that right, a helicopter. One of those crazy aircraft with rotating spikes on the top that you often see getting blown up in movies (One of Dr Mark Kermode’s Ten Commandments of Moviemaking is “Thou shalt cut out 20 minutes and thou shalt make thine helicopter to explodeth”). Apparently, though, despite the astonishing unlikeliness of a helicopter simply dropping out of the sky, the blame for the incident lays solely on the fact that poor Isaiah had his headphones on. Stupid boy.

Now, I’ve done quite a bit of study in the area of Noise Induced Hearing Loss (NIHL, if you’re an acoustics nerd) and the effects of prolonged exposure to high levels of noise. Amongst the many issues that can be caused by listening to loud music are tinnitus, temporary threshold shift (where everything gets quieter for a few hours and you have to shout – leading of course to permanent threshold shift in the end) and loss of your hearing response around the 4kHz frequencies, which are vitally important for understanding speech.

We now know that we can add that list – prolonged exposure to high noise levels, it seems, will eventually, inevitably, lead to death by falling helicopter.

That, or American journalists are just as crazy as their British counterparts.