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Arm Wrestling Machine Recalled for Breaking Arms
Lucas123 writes "After three players broke their arms while wrestling with a Japanese arcade machine, the manufacturer promised to remove all 150 of the mechanized appendages. Said game maker Atlus' spokeswoman: "The machine isn't that strong, much less so than a muscular man. Even women should be able to beat it.""
I personally have met some real Amazons who could kick most guys' butts!
Oh my. Even considering the obvious advantage that men typically have over women in regards to physical strength, that's a pretty stupid thing to say in this day and age. Hell, and I'm not even a PC-nut.
"Even women should be able to beat it"
/.ers.
I dunno, I think an artificial arm would work better for helping guys to beat it...
Besides, having a woman beat it would just be so out of place for most
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
...welcome our woman-beatable, arm-breaking mechanical overlords...
My boss bought one and it was stored at one of our stores. We'd have customers who thought they were all tough use the machine and do some damage to their arms. I tried it a couple of times and had some seriously sore shoulder for a week. If you are out of shape or drunk you will hurt yourself on the machine if you try too hard or if you up the strength level of the machine.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
I don't understand why this is categorized as humor when it deals with someone's pain and anguish.
Also the company claims that the arm isn't that strong. Yet the physics behind the arm and the leverage is sure to make engaging the machine in a friendly game of arm wrestling into something which is needlessly dangerous.
>>> wrestling with a Japanese arcade machine, the manufacturer promised to remove all 150 of the mechanized appendages
I think you probably would get hurt tangling with an arcade machine that has 150 mechanized appendages...
With a reply of "the machine is not that strong" it sounds like the engineering was done on paper. It doesn't take that much force to break an arm -- it's a question of torque more than force, and I'd bet the machine has plenty of leverage.
Methinks Japanese video game players need more calcium in their diet.
In that case, should cars be recalled?
"We think people have been driving in unnatural ways."
Companies shouldn't be punished for people's stupidity.
The Japanese sure know how to build a video game. This one came with a prize feature depending on how far you advanced. They had some crazy prizes for winning on the hardest level. The one that is most over the top was winning you own Mack truck.
Veramocor
Oh no! I just bought a mechanical bull from the same company.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those... sounds painful!
It's really the players that are defective. The game is fine.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
In TFA there's a link to actual article on gizmodo which contains link to original article on msnbc which is entitled as coming from AP. Bra-vo.
actually.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
This is just the latest example of the increasing trend of wrist violence...support wrist violence awareness now with your WristStrong Bracelet! In addition to getting in on some geeky humor, you are also contributing to a good cause.
I once shot a man in Reno 'cause they cancelled Firefly.
An arcade game that's *definitely* harmful to children. No philosophical and ethical debate necessary!
I, for one, welcome our new arm-breaking overlords.
Sharper than the edge of Ockham's Razor.
Contestants arms strapped to the machine? Is letting go not an option? There must be fair amount of pressure before one breaks their arm in such a fashion - it isn't some high impulse force.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
All soldiers who've been injured can be put back into the field with these arms. You can combine them with heat seeking eyes. When an opponent is hiding behind a door; the soldier can punch through and capture them easy. Or a soldier can carry a large aircraft machine gun that can obliterate all targets in the effected area. Perhaps these japanese superarms can even lift a tank or smash it to pieces like the Hulk! Stuff like this conjures up images of Mortal Combat's Jax or Tekken's Bryan Fury, Jack-2, Robo-cop, and Ice Pirates! Oh, the imagination.
I remembered we had a boxing video game in a local gameshop. Players' punched on a padding sensor and the strength would be measured, and the screen will respond accordingly.
m mand=printArticleBasic&articleId=9032180
The game was just fine until one day accident occurred. As a matter of fact, this was not the fault of the game design itself. A smartass attempted to hit the padding with a jump-side-back-kick with spinning, and missed, and broke his non-kicking leg as it was landed on the wrong place (well, as a witness myself I must say I'm not so sure whether he had planned any landing afterall).
Needless to say, the game was recalled for 'causing violent accident'.
Violent video game is OK as long as the players don't attempt to hurt themselves in most embarrass ways.
BTW, below is the no-full-page-ad of the headline story:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?co
I think its great the company spokesperson has the cojones to say that "even a girl can beat it." Their machine has broken people's arms and now they make fun of the people who have sustained injuries. Do they want a lawsuit?
You can break your own bones. People think of conditioning in terms of muscle only but bones also respond to exercise, or the lack of it. The best example is astronauts. They lose a lot of bone mass. They can become quite fragile. It's not all that hard to get yourself to the condition where your muscles are too strong for your bones.
My favorite arm wrestling story: I used to vacation with a bunch of farmers. One night in the lounge they had a bit of an arm wrestling tournament. The security guy came in. He was buff. He obviously exercised at least an hour a day. He was also no fool. He chose the easiest looking guy for his first match; the farm kid. He looked like he never exercised and was slightly pudgy. He was a bit bigger than the security guy but not a lot. I would have bet on the security guy to win.
Not only could the security guy not budge the farm kid, he broke a small blood vessel in his temple. Blood actually spurted from the side of his head. I was very impressed but the farmers weren't. In any event, the kid couldn't beat any of the older guys even if they were getting pretty lubed.
Arm wrestling is all about leverage (duh). My buddy, who always whoops my ass (I work out enough to be strong), always gets his elbow off the table. When we were in highschool, he even beat the biggest dude on the hockey team as a freshman, and the dude was a senior.
Are there any pro arm wrestlers (hah)/phyicists/smart-dudes that can comment about a good arm-wrestling strategy?
perhaps they were referring to... http://youtube.com/watch?v=FJug16NlqPk
In Soviet Russia, game breaks YOU!
Now if the damn Russians would just invent an arm-breaking machine, the joke would work...
every good
Worse still, if a player is shocked by something (the sudden force of the game or your friend decides to drop an ice cube down your shirt), since the mechanical hand "grips" your hand with its thumb (assuming you held it properly), you can seriously mess your arm up if you try to pull away suddenly.
"You have 20 seconds to comply."
Personally, I'm glad the kid didn't beat any of the lubed older guys!
And yet no one will recall the real doll for breaking hearts *sob*
Wow... a guy gets his arm broken by an arm wrestling machine and a spokesman says "even women should be able to beat it." Talk about kicking a man when he's down. Ouch!
...to training meks, à la Chirox.
Japan has to many girly men. They need to be pumped up.
I for one welcome our arm breaking overlords
Best laugh all day. Kudos!
Are you seriously implying that in general men are not stronger than women? Dude you need to get out more. Anyone who has a problem with this IS IGNORING REALITY.
Creative Demolition
On a mostly unrelated note, when I was in Japan in 2001 they still had good arcades. Arcades have mostly died in the USA due to home consoles; the only arcades left are full of big machines that have controls that cannot be duplicated on a home system (things like recreations of rafts with paddles, skiing slopes, horses, flight cockpits, race car cockpits, etc) that cost $2.00 to play, last 30 seconds, and basically suck. The only good American arcade I have been to in this decade is the one in Chinatown (Manhattan).
Anyhoo, Japan in 2001 still had really cool arcades, I have no idea if they still do today. My proudest moment was playing Last Blade 2 versus a couple of Japanese teenagers and whooping their asses. I had practiced that game for hours on MAME at home with a Hot Rod Pro arcade joystick setup, but had never played another human. It was really satisfying to beat Japanese teenagers at the game (I don't know why, maybe because I think of Japanese teenagers as being more into video games or something, and also maybe because the game was from Japan). I still look for Last Blade 2 every time I go into an arcade but I *never* see it (except I did see it at that Chinatown arcade but it was right before I moved away from NYC and only got to play it once).
The machines are being sent back to the factory for some new safety stickers.
They will be returning to the arcades in a couple of months, but it will be relabeled "Arm-Breaking Machine."
The price has been dropped from $1 to 50 cents. Enjoy!
Thanks, the Management.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Yes, most men are stronger than most women but it would be stupid to make that assumption for all women: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJug16NlqPk
Help Me! I'm trapped in the tubes! Oh noes! Here comes a internet!
Just upgrade to Rocket-Powered Bionic Arm.
I have never understood the fascination that so many Americans have with Japan, but when I see something like this I have to admit, they have some unbelievable shit over there. On the left is an arcade game called Boong Ga Boong Ga in which you, the player, try to cram a plastic finger up a virtual woman's ass. The harder you shove, the more reaction you get from the computerized face on the screen. I really have nothing to add to this.
And on the right, we have mascots for the game - one with a giant hand for a head and one who appears to be dressed with a fecal motif. Amazing stuff. I want this game.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
BMW drivers next. Cars after that.
Quack, quack.
"Droids don't pull people's arms outta their sockets when they lose..."
Sure there's not a wookie hiding in there somewhere?
--RIAmAses! Let my MP3ople go!
http://www.bioxd.com/imagenes/arm_wrestler.jpg
Heh, in Swedish it's actually called "arm breaking". Maybe that machine was manufactured here? o_O
Blog -
This could have been a lot worse. It could have been some weird masturbation machine that was having problems! Ouch!
Horns are really just a broken halo.
The average person is going to continue saying that average things happen 'on average', including that the average woman is weaker than the average man.
Methinks you're going to have to act like the average and just accept it.
It's well known Japan is still a male-run society. Women are completely 2nd class citizens with no rights whatsoever.
I played with sometimes when I was a kid in the 70s? I remember a very similar machine in some amusement parks then, but never heard of anything dangerous coming from it, other than of course losing all matches since I was 10 or so at that time. One thing I recall is that the one I played had a metallic colored arm.
Life is not a Joss Whedon TV show.
Gorrammit, it should be!
I'm a male, but I can see her point too.
The only problem is that, as the saying goes, "there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics." Where there is a hideously large variability in the sample, _only_ comparing averages is at best misleading. There's a reason why, for example, in science and engineering you don't just calculate the average of the data you measured, but also the error bar.
Plus, most people who bring up an argument along the lines of "on the average X are better at Y than Z", will proceed to use it along the lines of "therefore all and each X are better than all Z". Or some equivalent redefining from average to one member, like:
1. therefore I'm better than you
2. therefore we should only hire X
3. therefore it's ok to pay Z less for doing the same job and meeting the same goals/quotas/deadlines/etc
4. therefore some ridiculously non-challenging task is (or should be) an X-only job
Etc.
E.g., as an extreme example of 4, there's a whole horde of machos arguing that a woman shouldn't ever be allowed to join the army and carry a 6 pound assault rifle, because women are on the average weaker. Never mind that even a couch-potato of either sex can jolly well use one, and that the whole point of the army is to drill you and train you into the shape they want you, even if you hadn't moved more than from the couch to the fridge in your whole life before.
So I can't honestly blame anyone who's weary of having such averages shoved in their face.
Averages have at best a trivia value most of the time. In any given situation you're dealing with individuals (e.g., if you actually need to hire someone strong) or with the whole gauss curve (e.g., if you want to make such an arcade machine which doesn't break the arm of someone on the far left end of the scale.) Trying to reduce it all to an average is, at best, bad science, even if you don't have some supremacist agenda.
Even taking your skin colour example, just the average is useless in just about any conceivable practical situation. Even if you were judging the potential market for sunblock or tanning beds there, you have such variables and market niches as:
- white western-origin people living in Africa or viceversa. Unless you mean actual racial profiling, someone could "hail from West Africa" only because their white portuguese ancestors settled in a trading post there in the 1600's.
- native populations such as the Khoisan, which have quite a range of skin tones, some fairly light
Etc.
Yes, I know what an average is, but you don't actually deal with only the average for any practical purposes.
So I too would be weary of people pointing out such misleading averages left and right and then retreating into "I'm just pointing facts." A "fact" taken out of context, or used in the wrong context, can be as mis-leading as an outright lie. Unless you've found some problem where the average alone is relevant, that is.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
nuff said.
They're using their grammar skills there.
(except I did see it at that Chinatown arcade but it was right before I moved away from NYC and only got to play it once)
Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.
Adding 'supposing there are weak females who bring the average down below the male average, removing them from the survey would result in females being stronger than males on average' is true but irrelevant. After that you've basically listed a bunch of reasons that women may be considered more physically fit than men, and then, in a non sequitur, conclude that the original statement doesn't stand. That's as nonsensical as your assertion that average is a "subtle concept" and that "typical" is better. If you think mode is a better measure of central tendency than mean, then by all means find some data about modal properties of humans and post that, but please don't try to redefine mean as mode just because you like it better. To be honest, your post sounds like you're trying to impress a feminist friend of yours who doesn't understand statistics.
If you want actual facts, try this. According to this research, on average:
None of this has any bearing on whether an individual will be suitable, successful or competent in any scenario. It's just useful information when dealing with, or predicting future observations about, populations similar to the sampled one. Trying to state otherwise is ingenuous.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Nothing to see here...
Is it possible to make it do, erm, other kind of things?
jesus christ, look at this inflated diction.
The average woman is dramatically weaker than the average man.
We're not talking about extremes. You are just out of touch with reality, which judging by your ridiculously overwritten response, is because reality threatens you.
Go check out any source where men and women are graded on physycal fitness. The Army is a terrific example. They test hundreds of thousands of men and women each year on physical fitness. Though most soldiers are in pretty good shape, a huge swath of society is represented. Pregnant women, fat women, 40 year old women, and men of various capabilities are tested. The minimum standards set by the Army are easily attainable, and represent below average performance.
Look at the pushup standards that would indicate an average female soldier as opposed to an average male. In running and sit-ups, there isn't a huge difference in performance, but in push-ups, where testosterone is linked to performance, average women are far less than half as strong as average men.
to join the Army... just to get through the door, men have to do 14 push-ups. Women: 1 push-up.
This isn't anecdotal, this is pretty conclusive stuff. Women aren't anywhere near as strong as men, as a general rule.
Article from BBC News site about this includes a picture of the Arm Spirit in case you are wondering what it looks like...
t m
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6957339.s
That is irrelevant because it does follow a normal distribution. To suggest that a scientific study like this would only use an average is absurd--the backround for science in general is statistics laden. Biological data of this kind usually follows a normal distribution anyway, so its a safe assumption. So many medical sources testing this on different populations wouldn use averages if they weren meaningful in this type of measure. This misses the main point that this pc nonsense is bs. Plus an average always accounts for all data even if not meaningfully. The prof was wrong to suggest that this data is invalid.
I wonder how the machine knows its a man or woman at the other end
Again, I say:
In real life, it might just be the case that due to economic factors, some women work a lot harder than others and are thus stronger than those who hardly do any work. There would be a dip in the distribution, and the average might not be representative of the distribution.
There is no a priori reason to expect the distribution to be normal. Especially since economic and social factors come into play. Weight, for instance, is not normally distributed in the United States. And strength is negatively correlated with obesity.
I should hope the scientists have done their statistics. But merely presenting the mean is not informative.
I wouldn't dare fighting with a machine ...
with todays mechanizem ... my arms worth much more ..
New York's Leading locksmith!
...can we set them up to arm-wrestle each other? Then we could gamble on which one goes up in a cloud of smoke.
Two machines enter - one machine leaves!
About three years ago a friend and I were arm wrestling at the office and I broke my arm. Made a sound like cracking a yardstick over your knee. Had to get surgery and a metal plate installed. Still have a pretty crazy scar from that. It's cool though because he's bought me enough beers to more than make up for it.
:)
We were guys in good shape, but neither he nor I were strangely strong people. Turns out it's not that hard to break the humerus if you twist it the wrong way. Generally if you're arm wrestling you should be positioned so that you're doing a curl, and putting the stress along the length of the bone. If you are using a twisting motion you're doing it wrong: if you're reasonably strong and you push as hard as you can, you very well might snap your arm.
I think I may have had a hairline fracture beforehand from some aggressive rock climbing a few weeks earlier, during which I experienced some pain in that arm. But even in that case, the cause was still my own muscle strength against my own bone strength, and the bone lost. That worried me so I had a bone density scan after the break. And I came up completely normal.
The scar always gets questions. I've tried telling tall tales and such (a knife fight! no, alligator wrestling! no, a cybernetic bicep implant!), but nothing gets as much of a reaction as the truth. Only problem is people seem to then assume that it means I'm defective for fragile or something. But here's my take: if you've ever arm wrestled and lost without breaking your arm, you're a pussy. Because you just gave up.
Makes me feel a little better, anyways
Boobs are a lot of weight.
Yes, on average woman have bigger boobs than men. Except from Robert Paulson of course.
Are we allowed to point out that fact? I'm watching for the black helicopters and PC swat team ropes dangling past the window...
Maybe it's because I just woke up, but I couldn't determine if the machine was breaking the people's arms, or the people were breaking the machines' arms. It took me a while to understand that the people's arms were breaking. Poor choice of wording. Am I the only one?
Because given half an opportunity a bunch of idiots will cripple themselves on anything they can get a hold of.
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28331
No text
More music, fewer hits
Again you are missing the point and are repeating yourself instead of addressing what was said. No one is operating a priori here. I will take this as a concession that the professor was wrong and seriously misunderstood stats. Sorry, but with even half competent scientists we can assume they gave an average because its meaningful. Combine this with the consensus within the community , inc. Hard science, and mountaims of evidence from related studies, the pc position becomes absurdly pseudoscientific. This can be inferred without looking at the studies-such a bad misconception would not be allowed to persist in the comm. Excuse errors, i an on a cell phone.
In that case, should cars be recalled?
If the intended use of the car results in 3 broken bones per 150 cars, I'm pretty sure you'd see a recall.
Sounds like they need to be drinking more milk over there. Heh heh.
Mark
They should rename it "Arm Breaker" and put it back on the market. At least the players would be warned before playing!
A man 10x richer doesn't do shiiite to the median wealth. Median is the middle value. It doesn't take into account anything else.
I think you forgot to s/lubed/plastered/g in your story. At least you didn't forget s/bathhouse/lounge/g, that would have been embarassing.
What this game really needs is a $10,000 payout for beating it, so that some down-on-his-luck father can get enough money to gain custody of his child...
"Now I'm seriously serious!" - Serious Sam
That recall is gonna cost them an arm and a....oh, uh nevermind.
A good example for all politically correct lesbian feminists. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedor_Emelianenko. For every women you can find a men who is more powerful than her.
I had to pull my product off the market too. I created an "Ass-Kicking" device. I was breaking too many asses though. In a small sample grouping, 10 out of 10 people had a crack in their butts.
Now if they only made a machine that scratches my butt, world would be perfect.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
Didn't these people know that they have to turn their hat around so that they don't break their arms? Sheesh...
Neither Lincoln Hawk nor Bob 'Bull' Hurley could be reached for comment.
> You can break your own bones. People think of conditioning in terms of muscle only but bones also respond to exercise, or the lack of it. ... It's not all that hard to get yourself to the condition where your muscles are too strong for your bones
As a kid it used to bug me that superheros would get super strength from the radiation-du-jour and catch falling cars etc, but never break their bones doing it. I don't care how strong your muscles are... a car is made of stronger stuff than your bones.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Neither AC, I think, was attempting to say that their scenario is true, or even that it is false that "[If] you pick a random woman and a random man, odds are that the man is physically stronger than the woman." They were saying that the statement "if it's been shown that on average men are stronger than women, and you pick a random woman and a random man, odds are that the man is physically stronger than the woman." is not true -- in other words, that the part about the odds does not necessarily follow from the part about the averages.
To give another example, let's imagine that Chuck Norris has a daughter, and then later ascends to another plane of existence during one of his roundhouse kicks. This daughter, like her father, is strong enough to knock the earth out of orbit, should she decide to roundhouse kick solid ground. Her incredible strength (paired with the loss of Chuck Norris) could result in a situation where the average strength of women is higher than the average strength of men. However, it could still be true that if you pick a random woman and a random man, you are more likely to get a man who is stronger than the women -- in this case, because the chances of selecting Chuck Norris's daughter in a random sample is abysmally small, similar to AC's previous comment about removing outliers from the average (a point you seem to have misunderstood).
Note again that I am not speaking to the reality of the situation (as should be clear by the Chuck Norris references); I am making a point that the information about averages does not mean what you think it means.
The reason this happens is that in measuring whether a random man is stronger than a random woman, you ignore how much the man is stronger or weaker -- you merely measure whether he was stronger. So, Chuck Norris (or Chuck Norris's daughter) would be reduced to a single, evenly-weighted binary data point; no single data point can move the result more than any other data point. This is not true for averages, where a single outlier can drastically change the result.
Well, kinda. It is useful information, but not as useful as you seem to think; in fact, given just the averages without any distribution information, there is virtually nothing you can extrapolate or predict about the population. Now, if you also knew that the distributions were normal distributions (which they probably are in reality, but should not be assumed to be), then the quoted statement would be true. If you further had information about the standard deviations of the distributions, as well as what the averages are (in actual value, not just knowing which is higher), then you could probably calculate the odds that a random man is stronger than a random woman. Information which includes distribution data along with average data is far more meaningful than unadorned averages.
The fact that western diets have way too much calcium, and we are given absolutely rediculous RDAs for calcium hasn't done anything to make our bones stronger. We have higher rates of osteoporosis and serious bone fractures, including elderly people DYING from slipping and falling on the floor, breaking hips, femurs, ribs and backs.
Your bones WILL NOT GET STRONGER UNLESS YOU EXERCISE THEM. Just like eating lots of protein won't make your muscles stronger, eating lots of calcium won't make your bones stronger. You need to stress them so your body will actually build them back stronger, and then just eat protein and calcium equal to or greater than what is required.
Milk contains proteins that when broken down into amino acids also produce waste acids that our bodies can't use. Your bone's osteoclasts then have to pull extra bone tissue apart to release calcium to neutralize those acids. The compounds formed from that neutralization are then filtered out of the blood stream by your kidneys and they are pissed away. That's calcium removed from your body that your bones osteoblasts can't use to repair your bones. The more protein you consume, the more calcium you need to consume (and magnesium and vitamin D as well).
The typical north american diet contains far too much calcium, and not enough vitamin D and magnesium, which makes the problem worse since magnesium and calcium compete for absorption through the same mechanism, and we require a correct ratio of calcium to magnesium. Our excess calcium consumption actually blocks out absorption of what little magnesium we get, making all that calcium very much useless.
Good sources of calcium include almonds, legumes, spinaches, seaweeds, fish and shellfish, all of which contain good amounts of both calcium and magnesium. The japanese diet already includes plenty of these foods, and is far better for human bone density than our meat and potatoes diet.
I had a dream like that once. creepy
This signature has Super Cow Powers
You must have had an exciting childhood
That's what they get for picking "The Fly" as their opponent.
In high school, I could bench 320, clean about 315, and squat about 550. Because I wasn't big or strong enough for D-I ball, I wound up playing D-III.
And this was in the early 80s.
On my D-III football team, I was nowhere near the strongest. Hell, we had guys doing steroids - in D-III, 25 years ago.
That chart is bullshit.
Y'know, I just did a quick google image search for professional arm wrestlers, and it seems to me that the elbow pad on that arcade game is on the wrong side of the mechanical arm. Maybe that is why people are breaking their arms...
Suppose that 90% of red cars have a top speed of 80 mph, and the other 10% have a top speed of 120 mph. Suppose 90% of white cars have a top speed of 85 mph, and the other 10% have a top speed of 60 mph. The Average speed of the red cars is higher- but if I pick two random cars, one red and one white, there's an 81% chance that the white car is faster.
This is because the median white car is faster than the median red car, even though the mean (average) red car is faster than the mean white car. Now, for men vs. women, men have higher mean AND median strength, but in general your example fails.
To sum up: Average is a confusing term, but it usually refers to the mean, and not the median. Unless you're going to argue that you really meant that 'Average' means 'Median' you're wrong. Being modded to +5 just mean that lots of other clueless people agree with you. My advice to you: spend less time watching pr0n and more time understanding mathematics.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
> You must have had an exciting childhood
Did I mention I would be wondering about this while rappelling down the inside of an active volcano on my way to rescuing a nun and a group of orphans trapped below? Just another day in my life...
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
. . .but I keep tellin' ya, Jeff Goldblum is NOT a machine!
Sounds like you need to stop being so dumb.c id=20330233c id=20330509
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=277221&
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=277221&
I don't understand. What's stupid about the statement? Women are generally physically weaker than men.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Now I'm an AA brigade guy, so admittedly our training wasn't up to USMC standards. We did do the basic infantry training, though, so, yes, I do have _some_ first hand idea what it's like to charge uphill several hundreds metres, sprinting and dropping every 3n. You're right, it's physical stress. I'll point out though, that:
1. It's more of a matter of _endurance_ than physical strength. _Everyone_ has the physical strength to lift 60 pounds of junk on their back, or can be trained and drilled into it. Whether you still have breath after 100m if that, though, has zero to do with strength and everything to do with endurance.
Given that such flaunted averages are along the line of "but men on the average are stronger", I'd say they make a piss-poor argument to keep women out. I've seen plenty of other statistics saying, basically, "but women on the average have better endurance", so that would make them on the average better soldiers then. But, as I was saying, I know better than to extrapolate from averages to individuals, so I'm not going to propose kicking the males out of the army.
2. An even bigger factor is mental stability and resistance to mental stress. You can dig out examples from ancient Egypt and Greece wars, to Charles Martel's phalanx against the moor heavy cavalry, to Waterloo, to WW2 and the Gulf Wars where the unit that broke down and lost cohesion first got simply rolled up. And the one that stayed cohesive just a bit longer won.
Entire concepts like suppression, shock, etc, are more based on mental discipline than on anything even remotely physical. The reason you have that SAW you mention, or a Designated Marksman, is more for suppression value than for kills. (A designated marksman ranks up there with heavy machineguns for psychological effect.)
So judging war or military fitness by an average strength benefit, is at best misleading.
Now I don't know if women score better or worse in that aspect on the average, but at least a (flawed) case could be made that I'd rather _not_ bet a war on a bunch of people trying to act macho and testosterone-driven. And in fact most of the military training is to make you act like a trained pro, not like a macho poser.
3. As I was saying, the army already knows how to drill and train you into having as much strength and endurance as they need. Even if you've been a sedentary nerd all your life (I certainly had been), after a few months of drills and exercises, I was surprised myself at what I could do. Not only endurance- and strength-wise, but mobility too.
Does it mean you'll ever be in shape to be 100% guaranteed survival or to enjoy that kind of sprint-and-drop-and-sprint routines? No, by far. But you'll be in shape enough to do it within the parameters expected from you.
Briefly, we don't draft only the fittest athletes anyway.
4. There are a bunch of jobs and roles in the army where you're not mainly supposed to do that. As I was saying, as an AA guy my _main_ role wouldn't be to run across the field. I'd still be expected to fight it off if the enemy charges our position, but my primary role would be to see that anything overhead comes down in flames before shooting at you guys sprinting across the field.
More such roles in a jiffy.
5. Historically, the USSR successfully used a _lot_ of women in the army in WW2, in such roles as:
- pilots. And we're not talking fly-by-wire jets, but old WW2 airplanes where you might need 45 lbs pull just to turn the damn thing. (I don't know the exact number for soviet airplanes, that number's what I remember offhand for the German BF-109). They had whole squadrons of women.
- snipers. They actually found them to be better than men at venting someone's brains from half a mile away.
- tank crews
- artillery or mortar crews. And let's remember that the Soviets were the first to go 120mm on their mortars. Quite a beast to haul across the field, even more so than the SAW you mention.
- yes, some as infantry
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
What I meant was that averages over whole populations are useless as the only value, rather than an individual's averages. Obviously, I should have made that clearer.
To give an example paraphrasing your question, let's say the following was true: "on the average, Russians are better at chess." Would that give you any usable info on whether you should play against my coleague Igor?
Basically, I claim that extrapolating from whole population averages to individuals is counter-productive.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Ironically I have met Chuck Norris in person. While he may be stronger than average, he's definitely on the short side--5'6" or 5'7" tops. This was something I didn't expect. In his movies you assume that he is at least 5'10". One hell of a handshake though. I can honestly say he has a real life Kung Fu Grip.
Badges!?! We don't need no stinking badges!
The sad example there is the Soviet army in WW2. Whenever they liberated some of their female prisoners from the Germans, they proceeded to rape them. That's "hardwired to protect women" to you, eh? I mean, that's not even picking on the fact that they raped all German (or Romanian, Hungarian, Czech, etc, whatever was along their way, really) female between 8 and 80 years old, because, abominable at it still is, it can be (piss-poorly) justified as doing it to "the enemy". But here they raped their own russian female volunteer soldiers. It's as sad as it gets.
From what I gather, the US Army isn't always above raping a female recruit either. Not saying it's necessarily often, but it's been known to happen before.
Anyway, to get back to the Soviet army in WW2, they actually had quite a few women serving in mostly-male regiments too. Or such cases as a husband and wife serving as tank crew on the same tank, in an otherwise male tank brigade. I'm not aware of any data saying that those units did dumber things than the male-only regiments.
In fact, if there were any crazy things being done, the all-female units ranked even higher. Mind you, not "crazy" as in "insubordination", but "crazy" as in "suicidally fanatical." If you thought men did suicidal stuff to show they're all macho fearless, those gals could teach you a thing or two about it.
E.g., all-female bomber squadrons actually chose to fly without parachutes or sometimes even radio, so they can fit an extra bomb on the plane. Mind boggles. E.g., they actually pulled some stunts as cutting off the engines and gliding without any lights at treetop level at pitch-black night to release the bombs with complete surprise on the Germans. I'm a guy and I get goosebumps at just the thought of trying something like that.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This story should have been posted under 'hardware'. :)
He wants his idea back.
Perhaps the royalties he makes off of you will give him enough for a pack of smokes in the slammer. Wishful thinking, I suppose.
The above comment is anti-dairy bullshit propaganda propagated by nutjobs like PETA and PCRE. Milk is a good source of calcium. That is all.
Right, us PETA nut jobs telling you to eat fish and shellfish, nice thinking there dumbass. There has never been ANY evidence EVER of dairy products being an effective means of providing usable calcium. All the studies the dairy farmers association mentions in their ads about calcium being good for you are studies where people took calcium+magnesium suppliments, not milk. They then pretend that those results have anything to do with dairy products, in an effort to sell their product. I think I will believe every scientific test and stufy ever conducted over the people who profit from selling dairy products. Maybe you should think about why you dismiss facts as "anti-dairy bullshit" propagated by "nutjobs" while believing myths with no evidence to support them, like that milk is good for your bones. "Good source of calcium" is an easy to misrepresent term, which can really just mean "has alot of calcium". Having alot of calcium doesn't make something good for your bones. You need magnesium and vitamin D too.
I benched 225. Squated about 350. I was 5'10", 175. I ran a 4.4 40. I played HB, CB, WR, KR, PR, and a bit of safety during my collegiate career. I also tossed a TD pass.
sounds like I'm smaller and weaker than you. I played D-1 ball. That was 10 years ago.
your post lacks perspective. sounds like you weren't athletic enough for the skilled positions and simply not big enough for the brute positions. you played DIII because you just weren't good enough.
Re: steroids - yes they are everywhere.
Collector's Edition
I just can't resist posting a link to the Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny. IIRC, Chuck Norris, Xena and Buffy all make an appearance.
... is that it is not saying "even the average woman should be able to beat it", it is just saying "women", thus implying it would be amazing that any woman could beat something like it. It is the language used more than the general idea, IMHO. I am definitely willing to concede that the average man is stronger than the average woman, but implying (as I believe this quote was) that all women are weak is a tad offensive.
On average, men have larger penises than women.
coincidently, a friend emailed me about this game this morning. from wikipedia, i found this part much more interesting.
"The game also dispenses cards that rates players on their "sexual behavior", and for players who preform exceptionaly well the machine will dispence a small plastic trophy in the shape of pile of feces."
oh marmalade.
Mendelson says that when he's pressing 1,000, "I can feel my bones flexing."
I always thought that bones would snap before they'd flex very far, even under a constant load.
"Follow me" the wise man said, but he walked behind.
Did you know that weight is not normally distributed in the United States? Did you know that obesity correlates negatively with obesity? There's no reason to assume that men or women's strength distributions are normally distributed. In fact, they probably aren't, though we'd have to look up this study to confirm it.
And look at the GGGGGGP's argument. He said his sociology professor objected to the use of the mean as a basis for comparison. Who knows in what context the comparison was used. Most likely, the study was cited in a paper (that is, reported by a secondary resource), and didn't report relevant statistical measures. His mental retort to his professor's objection was, paraphrasing, "DO YOU KNOW WHAT AN AVERAGE IS?" without a clear understanding of what an average is, or how it can fail to be a good approximation, or that the social scientist writing the citing paper can have an agenda (just as he accused his professor). See: "How to Lie with Statistics".
I will admit I don't know if the professor was right or wrong to object, because the particular circumstances were not described completely or objectively enough. On the other hand, the student's arrogance doesn't bode well for his side of the story.
I'll readily concede that in the popular sense of "strength", men are far stronger than women. There are men in prison who could literally rip me to pieces. These men rarely hang out with the kind of people who seriously suggest male and female strength are equal, so I suppose the egalitarians can be forgiven for their bias.
I'll go further than conceding it. I'll vigorously defend the obviousness of this inequality. These factual matters are not a part of the mathematical point I'm making, and that several others also made in response to your post.
"It seems like you care more about the fact that you can add conditions to a true statement to make a new, false statement than you do about reading what I wrote."
If you haven't specified that those conditions are off-limits, then what I'm doing is called "Finding a Counter-Example." It indicates you've made an overstatement. Not a problem in daily life but certainly a problem in math.
I'm not sure why you want the word "average" to mean "predictable center of similarity". Why not just stick to statements that are more easily defended? "Stronger on average" is just specific enough to cause problems.
You might try "In the absence of deliberate exercise or martial training, a healthy adult male can just about always beat the crap out of a healthy adult female. That's why we have women's shelters and rape laws." This has a nice sting to it. It also doesn't require taking everything you obviously should know about statistics and shoving it up your ass.
In a sane world, the physical standards would be split into two groups, fitness and job requirements.
The first would be different for men and women (and in many cases, by height, I suppose).
The second would be hard and fast requirements, and if they meant that there were no female firemen (or whatever), that's just too bad.
The speed at which a fireman runs a mile is about his health; the amount he can carry, and probably the speed at which he can sprint, are about saving lives.
hawk
Milk sales reach record lows...
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
I haven't played this particular game, but back in 1993 or 1994 I played a punching game at an arcade where you would put on a big padded glove and then punch a target with your hand. The harder you hit, the higher your score. For each level you had 3 punches and you needed to get a score over a certain level in order to beat that guy. I recall that the first level was a punk, then there was a truck then a crab then a moon.
Does anyone remember the name of the game? I can't find anything anywhere, but I know that there is a mame rom for it.
Anyway, I played it one time and enjoyed it, but the next time I came back a year later I had learned just enough karate to be able to hurt myself. I knew how to put more force into my punches, so I put this knowledge into practice with the machine. I set up my stance, rotated my body and threw all my weight into the punch. The result was that my wrist hurt really bad after the first punch.
After a minute it was just a dull ache, so I figured I was fine. So, I went and played an arm wrestling game that was nearby. That hurt a lot, so I stopped doing anything with my hand for the rest of the night. It swelled up pretty bad and I ended up cradling my arm while I walked around the mall.
The next day I got an x-ray and found that I had a hairline fracture in my wrist. Later that year that game was taken off the market because of a class action lawsuit brought on by I think 79 people (or somewhere around that number) who had broken their wrists playing that game. I wasn't one of them. I liked that game. *smile*
Cow Cube
This Arm Wrestling Machine was recalled for breaking arms. which is just natural. There are machines that are recalled for poisoning people. You gotta respect coherent and honest machines.
Read radical news here
http://www.atlus.us/tcso/
The context was given that the statistic was "on average..." Therefore, any objection in that regard is inherently wrong regardless of distribution, because it was a reference to the average itself. The instructor's bias was also given, so I'm tending to believe the people who conduct the study, especially considering how widely average is used for statistics on strength by experts.
It's harder to get away with bias in a peer reviewed study and as I said, this is the consensus as per the various studies in highly respected peer reviewed journals. Fine, you want to argue against consensus? OK. Even the NIH quoted statistics use averages (pasted by someone else)
That's not the same as someone teaching a low level class. An average inherently takes into account ALL data as I said--whether or not it's meaningful is a different claim. In order for her to prove the average meaningless, she'd have to say something more than "but some women are stronger than some men"--her argument is inherently fallacious by _your own standards_. For emphasis: she was not consulting the distribution of the study as a basis for her argument either, she just assumed it was a certain way and without good cause for assumption at that.
That said, the distribution would have to be incredibly skewed for it to be a meaningless measure. A normal distribution is not required for an average to be meaningful. Look at weight distribution. Perhaps not normally distributed, but it's close enough that it's still a meaningful measure.
You see--even in things greatly affected by social factors, biological factors are usually still too strong to really render an average meaningless or otherwise make assumptions regarding comparisons of people randomly picked from the population. Ultimately, it IS safe to assume that if not normally distributed, a biological distribution for humans will still probably be enough such that you can see "a random person from group X is likely greater in measure than a random person from group Y."