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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.""
"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.
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.
It's really the players that are defective. The game is fine.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Well said. You expressed your point so clearly, even a woman could understand it!
/. reader's wrists are already strong enough, thank you very much.
Guess they'll have to recall that tentacle rape simulator too...
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
So easy, even a caveman could do it!
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.
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.
Which is any amount.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Shoot, I'm more liberal than most and I think the PC bullshit goes too far.
So the average man is stronger than the average woman... but it's still not OK to acknowledge that?
I took a sociology class with a crazy liberal lesbian instructor (she was nice and earnest, just not a good teacher). Anyhow, we were shown some statistic about women vs. men along the lines of "Men are stronger [taller, something like this] on average". In refuting the (larger) argument, the instructor pointed to this particular statistic and said "It doesn't take into account that some women are stronger [taller, whatever] than some men!"
I just wanted to scream out "YES IT DOES!! DO YOU KNOW WHAT AVERAGE MEANS??" but it was a lost cause; most students were just as gung-ho about being "equal" and "correct", etc. I didn't have the energy to refute every problem in that class.
Really, pointing out facts should not be frowned upon. If, on average, men are stronger than women, why shouldn't one say that? Using said facts to oppress would be a problem, but facts are facts, no matter what happen to be our beliefs or prejudices.
I mean, if I say "People hailing from Western Africa have darker skin than those from Western Europe", is there anything wrong with it? Of course not. It just becomes a problem when I add, "and so we can subjugate them." I leave it up to you to decide who "we" are and who "they" are.
And yet no one will recall the real doll for breaking hearts *sob*
I'm an insensitive clod, you insensitive clod!
Spend less time failing to understand mathematics and more time in the gym, and maybe you'll be stronger than the average woman. "On average, men are stronger than women" is a fact, if on average, men are indeed (as has been measured) stronger than women. Whether it's a good metric or a relevant argument is an entirely different matter.
Since this is Slashdot, I'll put it in terms you may be able to understand: I have a white sports car. It's decently fast. If someone were to research statistics of cars' top speeds, and find that on average, red cars are faster than white cars, it's irrelevant whether my white car or any other white car is faster than most red cars, because my car isn't an average white car. The statistic says that if you pick a random white car and a random red car, chances are the red car is faster.
Likewise, 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. That's not discrimination, it's statistics. Anyone telling you different is wrong.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
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;
Life is not a Joss Whedon TV show.
Gorrammit, it should be!
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.
I just like the tagging ambiguity ... "evenwomencanbeatit" ... I knew women had them, but I didn't know they were them.
I think therefore I am... a Linux geek.
I'm sorry, but I'm a US Marine(in the infantry) and I just have to say that you have no idea what you are talking about. You don't go into combat carrying just a 6-pound rifle(actually, its about 3 pounds), generally a combat load includes your flak(armor), your kevlar(helmet), no less than 6 full mags, your day pack which can weigh up to 40 or 50 pounds, plus any other random bullshit they make you drag along. In addition to that, in a 4 person fire team one person has a 203 grenade launcher, one has a SAW(which is a true bitch to carry all day with 1000 rounds of ammo), one has a extra barrel for that SAW, and the point man is the only one actually carrying just a combat load. The physical demands of combat are far beyond what you can even imagine, but just to get an idea, go wrap yourself in 60 pounds of junk then try to run 100 meters dropping to a prone every 10 feet. Sprint like hell when you get up, and hit the dirt in the time it takes you to say "I'm up, he sees me, I'm down", and see how you feel at the end of it. Are you starting to see the picture? Nobody is actually in shape for the kind of physical stress that combat puts on a person, you simply put out all you have and hope its enough.
Yet, women have the uncanny ability to totally screw a guy over without straining a muscle or leaving a mark.
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