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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.""
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*
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.
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
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.
Easy. Lifting your elbow up provides an advantage through leverage. AKA cheating. Next time your buddy gets his elbow off the table while arm wrestling, kick him in the nuts.
The player's arm isn't strapped to the machine, but its not like you can simply let go. The mechanical arm is pushing down your hand and assuming you were in the proper position (elbow down on the "table", hand gripping the opponent's hand) theres no straight-forward motion of letting go.
Just fucking Google it
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
I think if they said "even most women" or "even a typical woman" it might have been a lot more PC. "even women" implies that all women are physically inferior to all men. It's BS I know, but you can't guard your sell from the PC nuts without sounding like a total dipshit. And if you do it subtly you might trip up some PC moron and can point out how they failed to pay attention.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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.
Maybe you are thinking of this one? You stick your finger up someones backside!
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.
I think your bench press numbers are a bit unrealistically high. The guideline I've always heard was you should be able to bench your own weight (that should be fairly easy if you are fit).
Your 700 lbs comment is too high. Keep in mind that the *world* record for benching 700 lbs was only broken in 1985, so to expect that 700 lbs is now some sort of minimum standard for the average guy is a bit unrealistic.
Take a look at this chart: http://www.criticalbench.com/sportstraining.htm . The highest bench presses for American football players is only in the 300 lb range.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
You sir/madam are a moron. The average is a useful indicator of an overall distribution (even including extremes) when you take into account the likely distribution of strength in a population (binomial which, with a large enough sample size, is very closely approximated by your friendly normal curve). You can even compare two normal curves (eg. strength in women vs strength in men) and test hypotheses concerning how they're related (that means you can tell if the hypothesis that men are stronger then women is fallacious or not).
Now, if you can prove to me that this study should really follow a torus distribution instead of a normal distribution, my hat is off to you. Until then, however, learn some statistics and learn which distributions are actually practical for a given population.
"Is not a sentence" is not a sentence. Well damn.
On average, men have larger penises than women.