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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.""
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.
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.
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
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.
An arcade game that's *definitely* harmful to children. No philosophical and ethical debate necessary!
/. reader's wrists are already strong enough, thank you very much.
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
Japan has to many girly men. They need to be pumped up.
To be sure there are exceptions, but in general, men are larger and stronger that women. Life is not a Joss Whedon TV show.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
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.
What about Xena the Warrior Princess? She's a woman and she could kick most mens asses. In fact the only people who came close to defeating her were women.
Or Starbuck in Battlestar Galactica - she beat the snot out some dude in the boxing episode. Or that chick in Serenity who's like 50kgs and a deadly weapon. Or Buffy the vampire slayer, another petite girl who kicks ass. Or any of the other heroines in future Joss Whedon stories.
I think you're the one who's ignoring reality.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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
If by reality you mean "cheezy TV shows", then yes.
To continue your unrelated note: yes, Japan still has hella awesome arcades. Google "Senjou no Kizuna" for an example why. (in brief: the basic game mechanic is something like mechwarrior 2 + multiplayer - nothing new, nothing fancy. but you're in a Gundam cockpit, and your view is a dome screen bigger than you, unless you are very big. generally 4 machines per arcade, 4 vs 4 and 8 vs 8 game inter-arcade game play is the norm, with skill matching. the pilot roster interface is a separate system in the arcade. essentially - you can't replicate this experience at home without a lot of yen.)
aside from game experiences that are separate from console experiences, there is a... sociological aspect to this. i won't dilute the discussion further - but if you are interested let me know, and look into the movie Avalon.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
"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!
Heh, in Swedish it's actually called "arm breaking". Maybe that machine was manufactured here? o_O
Blog -
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.
I agree - I've simply met bodybuilding/athletic women who are inordinately strong (probably due to steroid use); likewise, most guys can't bench press 400#'s (& some of these women do - geh I feel threatened!).
HELLO?? Chuck Norris is a man and he could easily defeat Xena and Buffy on steroids simultaneously. Unfortunately, the single Chuck Norris datapoint catapults the average strength of men far off the charts, making a male-female strength comparison very tricky indeed...
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.
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.
Yet, women have the uncanny ability to totally screw a guy over without straining a muscle or leaving a mark.
He wouldn't hit his son's future mother, and they would all fall pregnant just looking at Chuck. Your argument fails.
The difference in strenght between men and women generally seems to be overestimated. I'm a pretty big guy (80 kg, 1.87 m), but even I know a few normal, non-bodybuilding women who could easily kick my ass. Which reminds me of the boxing match between Regina Halmich and Stefan Raab (on german TV or youtube). Now granted, Halmich used to box professionally, but Raab must be easily twice her weight, and she beat him to a pulp.
Sure, on average, men are stronger than women, but Joss Whedon isn't too far off.
...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!
One thing you forget is he is Chuck Norris. He can't be defined in human terms. You are comparing Apples with Chuck Norris and his roundhouse judgement day kick. Please, sir, let's be more careful in our examples...
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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
I wanna see Uwe Boll vs. Regina Halmich.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
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...
What about Xena the Warrior Princess? She's a woman and she could kick most mens asses.
But now we know the truth: She's a fracking Cylon!!
But boxing isn't a strength contest. Nor is fighting in general.
It is demonstrable that at a given body weight the average male will have more upper body muscle mass than the average female. Women also have a higher minimum safe body fat percentage. Among those who specifically train for strength, the difference is magnified. To use the overemphasized metric of flat barbell bench press, 400 lbs is a rarity among women and anything over 300 likely involves genetic freakiness or steroids.
With men, if you aren't benching 700 pounds you really don't stand out from the crowd. And there are multiple guys who are just trying to stay in shape pressing 300 lbs in every gym in the world.
This is why most jobs that require some demonstration of strength (police, firefighters and such) have different standards for men and women. That ultimately makes no sense to me but it must be necessary to meet gender related employment requirements.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
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
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.
*whoosh*
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.
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...
> 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
No, you both averaged 500,000 dollars 50 cents.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
According to Wikipedia, the current honest bench press is "only" 715 lbs.
Why in god's name they consider these shirts (extremely tight shirts that tighten up like a boner as you lower the weight) as valid, I'll never know. It's basically using hydraulics to create resistence to lowering the weight.
Might as well be using a crane for assistance.
And, yes, bench pressing 700 lbs. or more, honestly, is still one hell of an achievement.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
On average, men have larger penises than women.