Easy. By "our world" I meant the immediate environment that we live in, on Earth. Also, I fail to see how "most of our world is understood" is a statement that you can honestly argue with. We, as a species, understand our environment well enough to very, very effectively manipulate it. There are still things we don't understand, this is true, but that's where the huge gulf between "most of our world is understood" and "we comprehensively understand *everything*" comes in.
Well... yes and no. One way in which religion and science can co-exist is if you believe in the god of the gaps. What can adequately be explained by your empirical model of the world is the domain of science and nature. Everything else, "a wizard did it". To our earliest ancestors, everything was supernatural because their understanding of nature was incredibly limited. To cavemen, fire was understood (to a degree) but thunder and lightning were the province of the gods. Today, most of our world is understood and thus strictly natural, but there are still things (what 'happens to us' after we die, for instance) that are in the hands of the gods. Maybe tomorrow, we will understand the human soul as a measurable, analysable entity, but we will see divinity in quantum uncertainty or something equally esoteric.
I believe what you're talking about with the "I believe this based on faith, therefore I won't accept evidence to the contrary" is doctrine rather than religion as a whole. And there, I agree with you.
Sorry, I was making a joke... that the reason you don't see a lot of morbidly obese people is self-selection, due to the fact that you're walking. The implication was that all the fat people are sitting in cars, NOT walking.:P
As for the change in kids' waistlines, sure, there was no shortage of TV and junk food. But kids got to watch an hour or two a night, and 'fast food' was a treat for once or twice a week; these days kids spend a lot more time playing video games and are a lot more sedentary generally, and some families eat out every night. I'd also bank on it being something to do with a lot of households these days having two working parents, compared to the 80s when as I recall it, most families had a breadwinner and a homemaker, and the kids spent a lot of time being a lot more active.
You'll note that, because mass is proportional to height cubed, being tall naturally gives you a higher BMI than your build would suggest. By my BMI, I was borderline clinically obese back when I was at my peak fitness, but I don't think I've ever seen an obese person bench 15kg more than their body weight.:)
Spoken with the ignorance and arrogance of youth, I guess? I've seen several well-educated, smart people struggle with the concept of directories containing directories... It is a very natural, or at least easy, idea to me but it wasn't to them.
Your "ad annus numerus" doesn't address the statement at hand. The ability to deal with abstract entities and relationships between them is fundamental to abstract thought. If someone is 'smart' in any reasonable sense, and they're having trouble with the concept of nested containers, then they haven't had it explained well enough.
You're of course free to think of these people as "not capable of abstract thought" but my experience says you would be really, really wrong.
If they're not capable of understanding and mentally manipulating an abstracted representation of the real world, then they're not capable of abstract thought, by definition. It doesn't mean they're not intelligent in other ways, as I've taken some pains to point out.
I guess it's like the way that they'll explain carefully how some bipolar disorder medicines work because they're serotonin reuptake inhibitor antagonists. And we smile and nod and say "so they stop Suzy from going hyper and insisting that we eat the coffee machine with chopsticks... right, I get it".;)
They're quite capable of understanding, they just can't be bothered. That's reasonable given that it's really not important to them to perform their function. I guess that's what sets us geeks apart - we care about how EVERYTHING works, within (or sometimes not) reason.
Doctors and lawyers in particular seem to be incapable of grasping even the most rudimentary computer, while being able to perform other reasoning tasks on the highest levels.
You can't tell me doctors don't comprehend "the knee bone's connected to the thigh bone, both thigh bones are connected to the hip bone".
Any tree structure is a hierarchy. Not just nature, but every single profession I can think of, contains the concept of tree structures and hence hierarchy and inheritance.
Walk around New York City, and you'll eventually realize that the only truly obese people you see are tourists. This despite a culture highly reliant on high-calorie restaurant meals.
Therein lies the rub~! I'd be certain that if you *drive* around New York City you'll see a LOT of fat people. Of course, correlation does not imply causation...
Bah, ignore 'em. There's one kind of girl that *loves* a scholar, even (especially?) a video game lore scholar. And that's a librarian chick. And you know how hot librarian chicks are when they take off their glasses and let down their hair!:D
But they don't get hierarchies, because hierarchies don't exist in nature.
I'd have to disagree with you here. The very words we use to describe hierarchies come from nature - look at 'trunk' / 'branch' / 'leaf', 'parent' / 'child', 'master' / 'slave'. Maybe they don't instantly, intuitively get the idea when it's used as a metaphor, but that's partly vocabulary. They'll get it quickly enough if you explain to them that a 'folder' or 'directory' is a box, and a 'file' is a bit of paper that you can write on, and you can put either paper or boxes in any box.
If they don't 'get it' when it's explained that simply, then they're below the mental cutoff for that level of abstract thought. Many people (for instance) struggle to execute a sequence of simple instructions, and cannot solve even simple logic problems. They literally don't have the mental machinery required to visualise three different entities and the relationships between them, "A is next to B and B contains C". I'm not saying they're 'idiots' or that they're worthless, they just don't have abstract thought among their strengths.
The only things I really got out of reading TFA were "We have a release coming up" and "Files and folders confuse people". Oh, and "Jaunty was broken but it was Intel's fault and they fixed it." And "Kubuntu will have the same release schedule" which isn't really about Gnome.
Actually, as I said in this post's second-cousin post, I stand corrected on the anaerobic vs. aerobic weight loss front, specifically for high-intensity interval training. This is good news for me because I hate aerobic exercise with a burning passion, but I quite like anaerobic exercise.
As for my "arguments(whining) about being fat and not being able to fix (or at least improve)" myself - I'm not sure what you're talking about. I was skinny, and therefore unhappy. I worked out until I was buff, and therefore happy. I was then lazy for several years until I was fat, and therefore unhappy. Now I'm working out and am over halfway back to being buff, and therefore happy, again.:) As anyone who knew me during the lazy stage will know, I openly admitted it. "I'm being lazy at the moment, when I get fat enough to piss me off I'll start working out again." And I did.:P
I hear ya on the difference between overweight and underweight beginners. My first set of biceps curls I couldn't make 10 with a 10kg bar, and I couldn't straighten my arms the next day.:P When I stopped working out I could do 10 full reps of a 20kg dumbbell with each arm, and curl a 50kg bar.
Again, it's only in my experience, but I find that if I push myself much past my aerobic threshold, I go into oxygen debt or lactate buildup or whatever it's called these days. It then takes me a significant time to recover that I wouldn't need if I stayed around my aerobic threshold. So, for example, if I'm jogging, I can either run at ~60% of my top speed for a few hundred meters, then walk for maybe 100m, or I can just jog at ~40% for the whole distance and get there significantly sooner, and then keep going indefinitely.
That said, I'm measuring by average speed rather than measuring by amount of fat burned. I haven't done any kind of long term weight loss test but Wikipedia seems to support your statement about anaerobic exercise contributing to weight loss:
Anaerobic exercise in the form of high-intensity interval training was also found in one study to result in greater loss of subcutaneous fat, even though the subjects expended fewer than half as many calories during exercise.
Going from ~70kg to ~85k felt like I'd upgraded my body from an econobox to a sports car. I could suddenly do things like lift a heavy bag with one hand, or climb a rope just using hands. The general feeling of ease throughout the day was well worth it. Of course, once I was happy with my body I stopped putting in the effort, and after three years of drinking beer, eating pizza and playing WoW I was up to 105kg with the beginnings of a beer gut. Since then I've been making a moderate effort and I'm back down to 95kg, but I could still stand to lose 5-10kg so I'm starting to ramp up again.:) I've definitely learned something about weight loss today too (it's time to get the dumbbells out again!) so thank you for the interesting discussion.:)
True, but your sauna is providing the heat to cause you to sweat. I'd assumed a constant, comfortably cool environment without undue humidity (as you generally find in a gym). In such an environment, assuming that over the short term your metabolic efficiency stays roughly constant, your heat output is directly proportional to the amount of physical effort you exert. Hence, how much of a sweat you work up is a good indicator of how fast you're burning calories.
I guess the reason I focus on aerobic exercise is more that I'd assume an obese person already has decent-sized muscles in there, if only because they're carrying another 50+ kilos compared to me, all day every day. Also, just from personal experience, human metabolisms are really bad at recovering once you push them too far past aerobic levels of activity. I find I get a better 'duty cycle' and more overall energy burn from continuous moderate exertion than from peak exertion followed by periods of rest.
Then again, when I first started working out I just wanted to put on weight, any weight. It took me years to put on 10-15kg of muscle mass and I didn't put on a scrap of fat in that time, so I'd have to agree with your statement that muscle building burns fat in and of itself.
Yea, that's pretty much wrong. A lot of raiders care about the story and the lore, and many players absolutely love the graphics of a zone like Grizzly Hills or Nagrand. A plot about something that happen a LONG time ago is pretty interesting, as is the speculation over which new class will likely accompany such an expansion... a new healer of some sort? From the past?
There's a hell of a lot of stuff outside of the few kids that play the game just for bigger numbers. The rest of us like bigger numbers but also want context!
Agreed. It was the lore that originally got me interested in Warcraft, and a large part of what keeps me playing is the new content that they bring out at roughly the speed I can experience it.
The larger numbers are starting to worry me, though. Level cap damage numbers in the hundreds, as happened in the vanilla game, are fine. You start by hitting for 8-10 or something, so after 60 levels, hitting for a few hundred is a nice amount of progress. Vanilla -> Burning Crusade wasn't that much of a jump damage-wise, although it was a huge jump in player health. Now, in Wrath, the damage has jumped hugely. I understand the "gear reset every expansion" mentality but I think they've taken it a little too far for mid-gear-level characters. A level 70 in Kara gear could put out around 1000dps, a level 80 in 10-man Naxxramas gear can put out 3000-4000dps for some classes. If they're going to reset gear as savagely for the next expansion, we'll have players in level 90 blues doing 10k DPS. This is OK in principle, but numbers are getting too big to give the same 'gut feel' response that they did when they were three digits. Think about any of the vehicle fights where you're doing 6+ digit damage every swing - it stops being "woah, I crit for 1450, that's a new personal best" and starts being "big string of yellow numbers".
Honestly, if they're going to go for more than one expansion after the current one they're going to need to do some kind of renormalization. Maybe like they did with boss health numbers in WotLK, they'll start displaying damage numbers as "132k" or "365k (Critical)".
Starcraft Universe. So 'su' - you can't tell me that's not 'uber'.:P And I didn't think they said it would be a 'brand new IP', just that it wouldn't be based on Warcraft. Got a link to the 'new IP' blue post?
...and that some of the components of that energy burning come from water and air.
Well, the oxygen required for cellular respiration comes from the air, yes, but that's all. And since you can take in oxygen commensurate with requirements from an essentially unlimited source, your 'energy intake' is governed purely by your intake of carbohydrates, fats and to a lesser extent proteins.
Benching weights increases muscle mass which will actually raise your BMI. You need a cardiovascular workout.
Why do you assume that free weights exercises are automatically anaerobic? You can make any exercise a heavy cardiovascular workout by simply reducing the weight involved and pumping up the reps. I bet most guys who can do 10 reps of 100kg could only do 30 reps of 50kg. Give them a 30kg bar and tell them to reach 100 reps, and I guarantee they'll have worked up a huge sweat. Once they're done with that, head to the seated row and do another 100 reps on that at 30kg.
Personally, I game infrequently - but the half-dozen games I play (mostly HL2 engine games, CoH/V, and WoW) now run just fine under Wine.
Really? Part of the reason I installed the W7 RC is that I couldn't get L4D or any of the other games working above 1440x600 or so, and even then only at 600fps... when my friend's identically spec'd machine running XP can do 1920x1080 at 60+ fps.
Um, dude, I'm sure I'm being trolled here but... are you complaining about wasting 6 bytes in your hosts file? If that's your big objection to Windows 7, then they've done a bang-up job IMO.
Spoiler Alert: According to the book, the calorie balance hypothesis is wrong. Numerous studies over the years failed to link high-calorie diet with weight gain, but this fact was overlooked because it challenged nutritional and medical orthodoxy. The real culprit, as the title suggests, is the composition of the diet, not the absolute calories it contains. It's a fascinating read, well researched, and worth the trip to the library.
Uhh... I'm pretty sure if you can burn more calories than you consume, while still gaining/maintaining weight, then you could quite comfortably claim the Randi Challenge prize. And then you could sell your body to science for billions.
Slashdot Mirror
Either teneo , proinde deus or incompertus proinde deus. Or possibly incognito, ergo deus. Anyone who actually knows Latin care to correct me? :)
Easy. By "our world" I meant the immediate environment that we live in, on Earth. Also, I fail to see how "most of our world is understood" is a statement that you can honestly argue with. We, as a species, understand our environment well enough to very, very effectively manipulate it. There are still things we don't understand, this is true, but that's where the huge gulf between "most of our world is understood" and "we comprehensively understand *everything*" comes in.
Well... yes and no. One way in which religion and science can co-exist is if you believe in the god of the gaps. What can adequately be explained by your empirical model of the world is the domain of science and nature. Everything else, "a wizard did it". To our earliest ancestors, everything was supernatural because their understanding of nature was incredibly limited. To cavemen, fire was understood (to a degree) but thunder and lightning were the province of the gods. Today, most of our world is understood and thus strictly natural, but there are still things (what 'happens to us' after we die, for instance) that are in the hands of the gods. Maybe tomorrow, we will understand the human soul as a measurable, analysable entity, but we will see divinity in quantum uncertainty or something equally esoteric.
I believe what you're talking about with the "I believe this based on faith, therefore I won't accept evidence to the contrary" is doctrine rather than religion as a whole. And there, I agree with you.
Sorry, I was making a joke... that the reason you don't see a lot of morbidly obese people is self-selection, due to the fact that you're walking. The implication was that all the fat people are sitting in cars, NOT walking. :P
As for the change in kids' waistlines, sure, there was no shortage of TV and junk food. But kids got to watch an hour or two a night, and 'fast food' was a treat for once or twice a week; these days kids spend a lot more time playing video games and are a lot more sedentary generally, and some families eat out every night. I'd also bank on it being something to do with a lot of households these days having two working parents, compared to the 80s when as I recall it, most families had a breadwinner and a homemaker, and the kids spent a lot of time being a lot more active.
You'll note that, because mass is proportional to height cubed, being tall naturally gives you a higher BMI than your build would suggest. By my BMI, I was borderline clinically obese back when I was at my peak fitness, but I don't think I've ever seen an obese person bench 15kg more than their body weight. :)
Spoken with the ignorance and arrogance of youth, I guess? I've seen several well-educated, smart people struggle with the concept of directories containing directories... It is a very natural, or at least easy, idea to me but it wasn't to them.
Your "ad annus numerus" doesn't address the statement at hand. The ability to deal with abstract entities and relationships between them is fundamental to abstract thought. If someone is 'smart' in any reasonable sense, and they're having trouble with the concept of nested containers, then they haven't had it explained well enough.
You're of course free to think of these people as "not capable of abstract thought" but my experience says you would be really, really wrong.
If they're not capable of understanding and mentally manipulating an abstracted representation of the real world, then they're not capable of abstract thought, by definition. It doesn't mean they're not intelligent in other ways, as I've taken some pains to point out.
I guess it's like the way that they'll explain carefully how some bipolar disorder medicines work because they're serotonin reuptake inhibitor antagonists. And we smile and nod and say "so they stop Suzy from going hyper and insisting that we eat the coffee machine with chopsticks... right, I get it". ;)
They're quite capable of understanding, they just can't be bothered. That's reasonable given that it's really not important to them to perform their function. I guess that's what sets us geeks apart - we care about how EVERYTHING works, within (or sometimes not) reason.
Doctors and lawyers in particular seem to be incapable of grasping even the most rudimentary computer, while being able to perform other reasoning tasks on the highest levels.
You can't tell me doctors don't comprehend "the knee bone's connected to the thigh bone, both thigh bones are connected to the hip bone".
Any tree structure is a hierarchy. Not just nature, but every single profession I can think of, contains the concept of tree structures and hence hierarchy and inheritance.
Fencing? You mean, like, selling stolen jewelery or something? :P
Walk around New York City, and you'll eventually realize that the only truly obese people you see are tourists. This despite a culture highly reliant on high-calorie restaurant meals.
Therein lies the rub~! I'd be certain that if you *drive* around New York City you'll see a LOT of fat people. Of course, correlation does not imply causation...
Bah, ignore 'em. There's one kind of girl that *loves* a scholar, even (especially?) a video game lore scholar. And that's a librarian chick. And you know how hot librarian chicks are when they take off their glasses and let down their hair! :D
But they don't get hierarchies, because hierarchies don't exist in nature.
I'd have to disagree with you here. The very words we use to describe hierarchies come from nature - look at 'trunk' / 'branch' / 'leaf', 'parent' / 'child', 'master' / 'slave'. Maybe they don't instantly, intuitively get the idea when it's used as a metaphor, but that's partly vocabulary. They'll get it quickly enough if you explain to them that a 'folder' or 'directory' is a box, and a 'file' is a bit of paper that you can write on, and you can put either paper or boxes in any box.
If they don't 'get it' when it's explained that simply, then they're below the mental cutoff for that level of abstract thought. Many people (for instance) struggle to execute a sequence of simple instructions, and cannot solve even simple logic problems. They literally don't have the mental machinery required to visualise three different entities and the relationships between them, "A is next to B and B contains C". I'm not saying they're 'idiots' or that they're worthless, they just don't have abstract thought among their strengths.
The only things I really got out of reading TFA were "We have a release coming up" and "Files and folders confuse people". Oh, and "Jaunty was broken but it was Intel's fault and they fixed it." And "Kubuntu will have the same release schedule" which isn't really about Gnome.
So in the pissing contest of cryptography... the guys in TFA can 'p higher'?
Actually, as I said in this post's second-cousin post, I stand corrected on the anaerobic vs. aerobic weight loss front, specifically for high-intensity interval training. This is good news for me because I hate aerobic exercise with a burning passion, but I quite like anaerobic exercise.
:) As anyone who knew me during the lazy stage will know, I openly admitted it. "I'm being lazy at the moment, when I get fat enough to piss me off I'll start working out again." And I did. :P
As for my "arguments(whining) about being fat and not being able to fix (or at least improve)" myself - I'm not sure what you're talking about. I was skinny, and therefore unhappy. I worked out until I was buff, and therefore happy. I was then lazy for several years until I was fat, and therefore unhappy. Now I'm working out and am over halfway back to being buff, and therefore happy, again.
Again, it's only in my experience, but I find that if I push myself much past my aerobic threshold, I go into oxygen debt or lactate buildup or whatever it's called these days. It then takes me a significant time to recover that I wouldn't need if I stayed around my aerobic threshold. So, for example, if I'm jogging, I can either run at ~60% of my top speed for a few hundred meters, then walk for maybe 100m, or I can just jog at ~40% for the whole distance and get there significantly sooner, and then keep going indefinitely.
That said, I'm measuring by average speed rather than measuring by amount of fat burned. I haven't done any kind of long term weight loss test but Wikipedia seems to support your statement about anaerobic exercise contributing to weight loss:
Anaerobic exercise in the form of high-intensity interval training was also found in one study to result in greater loss of subcutaneous fat, even though the subjects expended fewer than half as many calories during exercise.
(More info here.)
:) I've definitely learned something about weight loss today too (it's time to get the dumbbells out again!) so thank you for the interesting discussion. :)
Going from ~70kg to ~85k felt like I'd upgraded my body from an econobox to a sports car. I could suddenly do things like lift a heavy bag with one hand, or climb a rope just using hands. The general feeling of ease throughout the day was well worth it. Of course, once I was happy with my body I stopped putting in the effort, and after three years of drinking beer, eating pizza and playing WoW I was up to 105kg with the beginnings of a beer gut. Since then I've been making a moderate effort and I'm back down to 95kg, but I could still stand to lose 5-10kg so I'm starting to ramp up again.
Contrariwise, traditional 'read-only' media is increasingly annoying to me. I'll hear some news snippet on the radio and want to post a comment.
True, but your sauna is providing the heat to cause you to sweat. I'd assumed a constant, comfortably cool environment without undue humidity (as you generally find in a gym). In such an environment, assuming that over the short term your metabolic efficiency stays roughly constant, your heat output is directly proportional to the amount of physical effort you exert. Hence, how much of a sweat you work up is a good indicator of how fast you're burning calories.
I guess the reason I focus on aerobic exercise is more that I'd assume an obese person already has decent-sized muscles in there, if only because they're carrying another 50+ kilos compared to me, all day every day. Also, just from personal experience, human metabolisms are really bad at recovering once you push them too far past aerobic levels of activity. I find I get a better 'duty cycle' and more overall energy burn from continuous moderate exertion than from peak exertion followed by periods of rest.
Then again, when I first started working out I just wanted to put on weight, any weight. It took me years to put on 10-15kg of muscle mass and I didn't put on a scrap of fat in that time, so I'd have to agree with your statement that muscle building burns fat in and of itself.
Yea, that's pretty much wrong. A lot of raiders care about the story and the lore, and many players absolutely love the graphics of a zone like Grizzly Hills or Nagrand. A plot about something that happen a LONG time ago is pretty interesting, as is the speculation over which new class will likely accompany such an expansion... a new healer of some sort? From the past?
There's a hell of a lot of stuff outside of the few kids that play the game just for bigger numbers. The rest of us like bigger numbers but also want context!
Agreed. It was the lore that originally got me interested in Warcraft, and a large part of what keeps me playing is the new content that they bring out at roughly the speed I can experience it.
The larger numbers are starting to worry me, though. Level cap damage numbers in the hundreds, as happened in the vanilla game, are fine. You start by hitting for 8-10 or something, so after 60 levels, hitting for a few hundred is a nice amount of progress. Vanilla -> Burning Crusade wasn't that much of a jump damage-wise, although it was a huge jump in player health. Now, in Wrath, the damage has jumped hugely. I understand the "gear reset every expansion" mentality but I think they've taken it a little too far for mid-gear-level characters. A level 70 in Kara gear could put out around 1000dps, a level 80 in 10-man Naxxramas gear can put out 3000-4000dps for some classes. If they're going to reset gear as savagely for the next expansion, we'll have players in level 90 blues doing 10k DPS. This is OK in principle, but numbers are getting too big to give the same 'gut feel' response that they did when they were three digits. Think about any of the vehicle fights where you're doing 6+ digit damage every swing - it stops being "woah, I crit for 1450, that's a new personal best" and starts being "big string of yellow numbers".
Honestly, if they're going to go for more than one expansion after the current one they're going to need to do some kind of renormalization. Maybe like they did with boss health numbers in WotLK, they'll start displaying damage numbers as "132k" or "365k (Critical)".
Starcraft Universe. So 'su' - you can't tell me that's not 'uber'. :P And I didn't think they said it would be a 'brand new IP', just that it wouldn't be based on Warcraft. Got a link to the 'new IP' blue post?
...and that some of the components of that energy burning come from water and air.
Well, the oxygen required for cellular respiration comes from the air, yes, but that's all. And since you can take in oxygen commensurate with requirements from an essentially unlimited source, your 'energy intake' is governed purely by your intake of carbohydrates, fats and to a lesser extent proteins.
Benching weights increases muscle mass which will actually raise your BMI. You need a cardiovascular workout.
Why do you assume that free weights exercises are automatically anaerobic? You can make any exercise a heavy cardiovascular workout by simply reducing the weight involved and pumping up the reps. I bet most guys who can do 10 reps of 100kg could only do 30 reps of 50kg. Give them a 30kg bar and tell them to reach 100 reps, and I guarantee they'll have worked up a huge sweat. Once they're done with that, head to the seated row and do another 100 reps on that at 30kg.
If you enjoy playing games with friends who are sitting on the same actual sofa as you, you must *definitely* be 9.
Personally, I game infrequently - but the half-dozen games I play (mostly HL2 engine games, CoH/V, and WoW) now run just fine under Wine.
Really? Part of the reason I installed the W7 RC is that I couldn't get L4D or any of the other games working above 1440x600 or so, and even then only at 600fps... when my friend's identically spec'd machine running XP can do 1920x1080 at 60+ fps.
Um, dude, I'm sure I'm being trolled here but... are you complaining about wasting 6 bytes in your hosts file? If that's your big objection to Windows 7, then they've done a bang-up job IMO.
Spoiler Alert: According to the book, the calorie balance hypothesis is wrong. Numerous studies over the years failed to link high-calorie diet with weight gain, but this fact was overlooked because it challenged nutritional and medical orthodoxy. The real culprit, as the title suggests, is the composition of the diet, not the absolute calories it contains. It's a fascinating read, well researched, and worth the trip to the library.
Uhh... I'm pretty sure if you can burn more calories than you consume, while still gaining/maintaining weight, then you could quite comfortably claim the Randi Challenge prize. And then you could sell your body to science for billions.