Summary notes that he lose weight at 2400 kcal/day, which is relatively high. This is not surprising: fat storage or burning is controlled by insulin, which is controlled in healthy subjects by blood glucose level. If the food does not rise blood glucose level (either because it is low carb, or because it contains carbs that take time to digest), insulin remains low, and fat is burnt.
If the food doesn't raise blood glucose levels that means the calories get come from places other than simple carbohydrates, and those calories get broken down into what the body needs, and if there's extra it gets stored as fat.
On what evidence do you base your claim that the same number of calories per day will make you thinner if they come from a source that doesn't raise blood glucose?
Diabetic patients are told to eat low carb diets. Even people who have been fat all their life start following a strict low carb diet, they become thin.
There was a discussion regarding some experiments on this. One doctor had diabetic patients that were getting too thin, "wasting away" as they said and wanted to put some meat on the bones. The doctors prescribed drinking olive oil shots. The patients didn't gain any weight. So, he doubled the amount of olive oil to be drunk like medicine. Still no weight gain. He doubled it again. Nothing again. At the end, patients were consuming over 2000 calories in olive oil shots and not gaining any weight (this in addition to their strict low carb diet for diabetes).
The whole "insulin" as the fat hormone I think was popularized by the book "Good calories, bad calories" by Taubes. There is no scientific consensus about insulin though. Taubes does cite a lot of work on his book and one of the most dramatic is the topical fat bulbs at the site of insulin injections.
Low-carb seems to be the best of all the weight loss diets when examined experimentally. There are a plethora of theories regarding why low-carb seems to be the best. Since low-carb diets were popularized by the diabetes doctor Atkins, there has been a strong suspicion that it is through insulin.
While this isn't a huge deal for Amazon right now, the Chinese products have now been getting better and better and there are some products that are so unique and useful than anything available in the US. The Chinese are able to offer super-low price, uniquely designed and useful products especially for the specialized needs - like specialty tools and electronics.
Any examples of these unique products?
One area from the top of my head: bicycling. Multi-thousand lumen LED headlamps with LiIon battery packs, countless LED and laser lights for bikes, bike computers and gadgets, clothing for riding bikes including reflector straps and wearable LED lights and so on.
Amazon is terrified of Alibaba's possible expansion into the US market. Alibaba is so much larger and can get better deals from the factories in China which Amazon doesn't have much hope of competing with. Online purchases are very price competitive with ppl shopping around for best deals, and Alibaba has a huge market advantage over their US-based rival, not to mention just sheer size.
In the end it's a win for consumers to have more competition in the online retail segment.
I agree that Amazon's biggest drawback is the lack of direct China sellers. Since Amazon's ratings system is so broken and products have to be strictly described, the Chinese sellers on Amazon are not useful to buy from.
The Ebay Chinese sellers are much better and some have warehouses in the US.
While this isn't a huge deal for Amazon right now, the Chinese products have now been getting better and better and there are some products that are so unique and useful than anything available in the US. The Chinese are able to offer super-low price, uniquely designed and useful products especially for the specialized needs - like specialty tools and electronics.
Do you still think Google is trying to stop the NSA from spying on you, when they are gathering the exact same information, and unlike the NSA, don't have any rules restricting their use.
When will we stop saying who can and cannot spy on us and steal our personal information, and start saying that the answer is nobody. Whether you're the NSA, or you're Google, you are evil. The end.
Or you can not use any Google products. Gmail, google maps, search etc are free so that they can advertise to you and collect data on you.
Small amounts of transfats can cause a large amount of health risk. Current rules allow food makers to say there is 0.0 grams of transfat per serving if there is less than.5 g transfat preserving. Unfortunately, a diet of 1 or 2 grams transfat daily is associated with all sorts of bad things, and you can easily rack it up by eating a couple servings of foods labeled 0.0 grams transfat. Transfat should be labeled in mg, not g, and reported with at least a precision of 0.1 g.
This is what I've found in candy bars. One of the ingredients is partially hydrogenated palm kernel oil. They all have 0g trans fat.
The US labeling has to be updated. Make it so that it is accurate to two significant degrees. Also, require composition percentages of the ingredients.
If you look at candy nutrition information, each has different serving sizes. Makes it very hard to compare different items.
I agree in general but still sending a probe to Mars is a political stunt to show India is also coming up, not just China. There are million things India could be investing money into that would bring a better return in areas that you mention than this.
Actually, India has been developing its satellite industry and is looking to be the cheap way of getting communication satellites in orbit. From some articles I've read, their costs are 1/10th of what other countries are asking and so India can be major player in satellite technology. They have communication, weather and military satellites in orbit already.
The mars mission is just a natural extension of what they have been doing for years. Besides they do have scientific objectives as well. One article said studying methane on Mars.
It doesn't sound like a vanity project. It sounds like a natural progression of a maturing industry they have been cultivating for decades.
The first study you cite isn't related to lower speeds but lower speed variances and, in the first page abstract, says, "...accident rates do not necessarily increase with an increase in average speed but do increase with an increase in speed variance."
The third study really speaks about speed limits on urban roads, where the majority of accidents occur, rather than interstates.
The Solomon Curve speaks more directly to the real issue of speed and accidents and relates to speed differentials. Solomon's results have been duplicated many times and the issue is that there is a higher likelihood of being in an accident as an individual's speed varies from the average speed. Interestingly, going much slower than the average speed seems to indicate a higher likelihood of being involved in an accident.
I spend a lot of time driving across country and the worst places in my experience are the interstates in urban areas. Those areas tend to have artificially lower speed limits to deal with maximum traffic capacity for rush hour. When driving through these areas during non-rush hour times I would feel that I would be run over if I drove anywhere near the speed limit. The first study you cite specifically talks about finding the ideal speed limit related to the highway speed design point and that artificially setting the speed limit too low related to the design point increases the probability of accidents.
Simply having a lower speed limit does not, in itself, result in lower accident rates.
Lower speed limits do not result in lesser accidents but does result in less fatalities and injuries when the accidents do occur.
And, that's what the original poster said!
Driving fast is safe as long as you don't get into accidents as the OP said. Since you said that the rate of accidents don't decrease with higher speed limits and the chance of accidents stays the same as you claim, then driving faster doesn't decrease your chance of getting into an accident but increases your chances of serious injury when you do get into an accident.
So, overall it is safer to have lower speed limits.
In the last paragraph, you are arguing that lower speed limits increases the chances of accidents (in urban areas).
'Although Toyota had performed a stack analysis, Barr concluded the automaker had completely botched it. Toyota missed some of the calls made via pointer, missed stack usage by library and assembly functions (about 350 in total), and missed RTOS use during task switching. They also failed to perform run-time stack monitoring.'
Huh? I'm a software engineer and don't understand the relevance of this statement, how can a jury? How does it confirm that there was a defect?
Hate to say this but I think any foreign company on trial in the US is going to get reamed. Americans are very anti-foreign companies. If the company was Chinese, probably guilty on all accounts.
Improper stack analysis does not prove a defect. However, it gives a jury enough rope to hang.
Given the myriad other hazards, and billions of other reasons that stereoscopic vision in hunter-animals evolved, the answer is pretty much No.
This is why it's controversial. It's "true" while also being absolute bollocks. It's like saying that without lead-acid batteries, cars wouldn't have evolved as they have. Well, no. But it doesn't mean that without lead-acid batteries cars couldn't have existed or anything like that.
P.S. The "wading in water made man stand upright" is just as controversial because, although it may be a FACTOR, the impact of that factor is the crucial question. It may well be zero. It may well be quite a lot. But chances are that it's such a minuscule factor that it's not worth spouting off about compared to thousands of other factors.
Evolution is not a case of "jumping off this cliff made birds suddenly grow wings". There are billions of factors over millions of years and hundreds of thousands of generations that all nudge towards small changes which impact upon the previous and next changes.
As such, this suggestion is almost complete bollocks, while being - on the surface - based on truthful data. But "snake-like predators might possibly have contributed a tiny bit to millions of years of our evolution along with million of other factors" isn't a headline that sells papers to journals.
Have you heard of the pareto principle? Even if there are millions of factors, one factor will have a much higher influence than others.
In the economy, 1% control 90% of the wealth. In the movie industry, the top 1% of the movies rake in 90% of the movie revenue. On earth, 1% of the species occupy 90% of the ecosystems. You get the idea.
If there were a thousand reasons that influenced equally, it would be a rare natural system. Most often, natural systems are unstable dynamical systems and have positive feedback systems where one factor gets amplified much more than others that additionally feedbacks on itself where 90% of the influence is due to one factor.
The initial reason why one factor is amplified over others could be down to just random fluctuations. A small random fluctuation could be amplified over and over again to create a dominating effect. So, there is no way someone can sit here and argue that this reason sounds better than that because the influencing factor can be random among the possible set of factors and only by doing field studies can the influencing factor be verified.
Jeez, enough of the bikes don't stop at stop signs bullshit!
They don't. They also straddle and salmon.
The most dangerous time that you in a bike is when you are still.
Get on the sidewalk with the other pedestrians if you can't follow vehicle traffic laws or if you feel unsafe. But when you do, follow pedestrian traffic laws exclusively. Don't pick and choose.
I will as soon as cars don't break the speed limit by 5-10mph and use their blinkers every time they change lanes or make a turn.
It is hypocritical for drivers to criticize cyclists for not for not following the rules of the road when they are breaking traffic rules themselves by going over the speed limit and making turns without signalling.
The cycle is not a motorized vehicle has a different characteristics. Cyclists should use the road in a manner that is safest for them because an accident leads to a death of the cyclist while just a dent on the car. Drivers don't think anything of breaking the speed limit, then they should understand why cyclists do what they do.
So why doesn't this apply to pedestrians. They're on the sidewalk, moving slowly, and suddenly a car comes off the road towards them? Yes, it's very unlikely. Similarly, if you're in the bike lane and stopped at a light, then it is very rare something is suddenly going to ram into that lane from an angle. If you are moving you also have inertia and can not rapidly change direction (a little rain or a bit of oil on the road will mess up your well laid plans).
Yes, it can happen sometimes but it is rare compared to the number of bikes that don't bother stopping at all and rely on their elite cycling skills to let them break the law and still dodge objects with high inertia. Running that stop sign makes you vastly more likely to be hit by a car, splitting lanes makes you much more likely to be hit by a car, cutting in front of a car make you much more likely to be hit by a car. Stopping in the bike lane at the stop sign is the safest thing to do there.
And remember that you are a bicycle. I learned this lesson on a small motorcycle: you are invisible! Make sure you can be seen, don't wear a black jacket (night or day), have reflectors (believe me, the lycra makes you look dorky, the reflecting tape does not), have lights on even in the daylight, and use your damn arm signals when turning (moving arm is visible). If it is raining be even more paranoid as cars are going to be skidding and so will you, and you will be even more invisible than normal. Watch where the other cars are and be aware of where they're moving and where they're turning, and if you're moving too fast to determine this then slow down. If you're near an SUV or large car then remember that no one on the other side of that vehicle can see you. Don't be in a hurry to get to where you're going, this is not a race.
And take a safety class! Don't just rely on intuition or common sense. Every automobile driver has to take a test, the least you can do as a cyclist is take a class.
Riding is a motorized vehicle is vastly different than riding a bicycle. With a bicycle, you can use your sense of hearing as well. The motor drowns out all that. I really feel it when someone is mowing the lawn in a street. You completely lose one sense.
Anyways, stopping and waiting for a light has gotten me in "trouble" a lot of times. I think it is the safest to try and keep moving as much as possible. I know there are plenty of arguments against that but it is just from my experience. Of course, it depends on the roads you ride on and maybe it is a good strategy here but not somewhere else. I don't know.
But, people who demonize cyclists for not stopping at lights and signs are not considering that maybe it is the safest way to go for the bicycle. Besides, cars going 5-10mph higher than the speed limit and not using blinkers are given a complete free pass which are as dangerous and illegal as well.
LOL. I guessed you were some sort of actuarial guy from the way you were writing.
But, without actual numbers from statistics and experiments, we are both guessing.
There are many things you can say to say that my theory is incorrect but yeah, without numbers who knows how influential they are in the final numbers.
From my experience, the time you are still is dangerous in a bicycle. You can argue otherwise but without legwork to get the actual numbers, it is just opinions.
No, you have the fewest risk contingencies when you are still. That doesn't mean you have the lowest risk; it means you don't have any answers for "what if...".
Think of it this way: Running through a stop sign into a blind intersection puts you at risk of being run over by a car. 1 in 10 times, you are at risk for being run over by a car. You can swerve out of the way 99 out of 100 times. That means 1 in 1000 times, you will get hit by a car running stop signs. (Numbers made up)
Now, standing at stop signs, cars will collide with you 1 in 2,600 times. You can only evade this 1 out of 10 times. That means you have a 9 in 26,000 chance of getting hit, or 1 in 2889 chance.
In the first situation, you run a higher probability risk but you have a good risk-reducing contingency (ability to take action). In the second, you run a lower probability risk but have very poor risk-reducing contingency. The numbers I gave shows that the lower probability is actually a lower risk than the higher probability with contingency in this imaginary case.
My numbers are made up. You however simply stated a lack of contingency without any sort of consideration for risk probability: you predicate that having a contingency always equates to lower risk. I have shown that in principle this is wrong, and thus that you have shown nothing except that there are different risks and some have better contingencies; you have not shown whether one overall risk is bigger than the other.
Those numbers you made up is dependent on the bike rider, the road structure, route, weather and pretty much everything you can think of.
You also do realize that people are stopped at a light or intersection far shorter than they are moving. That small period where you in a road still with moving cars could have higher probability and I'm making a reasonable argument about that.
I bicycled to work for a year. I bicycled everywhere for a year. I also drive, and ride light rail. I've been on both ends of this. In a year's time with 70% of my transportation being by bicycle (I actually tallied up my total gasoline MPG at 288mpg combined when factoring in my bike with my car), I've been threatened by cars while stationary 0 times. In that same time, I nearly smashed a black guy who ran a red light on his bicycle at night while wearing dark clothes on an unlit street; I nearly turned a white kid into a speed bump when he came the wrong way down a street and just appeared from behind a building and straight in front of my car (this is a no-lawn situation: the sidewalk is against the building and the street); I've observed other cyclists nearly getting creamed on half a dozen occasions while I was waiting at a signal for busy traffic; and so on.
Your anecdotal experience does not match my anecdotal experience. I was never in any danger narrowly averted by a heroic application of fast brakes and fast steering; I have been suddenly placed in situations where my heroic application of fast brakes and fast steering have saved others from becoming speed tables, and I've observed other drivers doing the same.
If you are still, you can't do any heroic application of steering. When cars are still and bike hits them, nothing happens. When bike is still and car hits them, death. Bikers should always give themselves the option to steer away rather than hope the cars will not hit them. When you are still, you are at the mercy of the car driver to not hit you. You cannot attempt to steer out of the path.
You only stop for a few seconds but at that time you are vulnerable. The human eye is super sensitive to moving objects and if you are still, drivers can sometimes be blind of your presence.
In the US at least, cyclists (and pedestrians) killed by motor vehicle operators are generally treated as freebies. To the degree that drivers avoid running over them, they're probably motivated more by an innate sense of decency and/or the annoyance value of having to stop for an hour or two until the police sweep up the bodies and then tell you not to do it again and send you on your way.
Until this changes, cycling will not be a particularly safe activity here.
Motorists also don't realize that if you hit a pedestrian or cyclist at speeds above 25mph, it will very like result in death. What seems like a minor "fender bender" ends up taking a life.
Most motorists have no idea how to deal with cyclists. Some speed up overtaking a bicycle, some slow down and everything in between. There is no standard guidance of what to do and so everyone does their own thing. Some drivers will go all the way to the left when passing while others will pass just inches off you even when the road is empty. People simply don't know how to deal with bicycles on the road.
Could cycles be made safer, both to reduce risk and to reduce the coordination required to operate one. As I posted elsewhere, cycling currently excludes the elderly (for whom one fall could be catastrophic), the frail, and the otherwise uncoordinated (young or old, one encounter with a car can be catastrophic).
Some ideas:
1) Certainly they could be made more visible to cars, especially at night. For drivers, the tiny lights are hard to pickup visually against the background of the city, and things happen very fast at automobile speeds. Plus, one tiny light doesn't give any clue to the dimensions of the rest of the bike (in contrast, think of the yellow lights that outline trucks).
2) Separate bikes from cars. The different rates of speed seem to make combining them inherently dangerous. Some places already do this, with dedicated, and physically separate bike lanes. Look up Amsterdam to see examples.
3) Better stability? Why not tricycles, which don't fall over when stopping or turning too sharply? I suspect there must be some drawback, but it's transportation, not a race.
I think separation is the answer.
The first step is to make one road in a grid of cars off limits to cars during certain hours in the day. Then all bikers would use it to "commute" to the city.
The city policymakers instead want to build new infrastructure and spend money for bike only this and that. If they just dedicated one of the smaller roads to bike only traffic for about 4-6 hours a day, it would be much more useful than spending millions widening roads and drawing bike lanes only for half a mile of road.
Nighttime visibility is not a problem for bikers. With LEDs, you can ride like a Christmas tree and have headlights with thousands of lumens to blind everything around you.
Falling over is not a problem. The elderly ride bicycles in many countries without falling over.
1. Dark is the safest time to ride. You can actually see the car's headlights and hear the cars more easily than during daytime.
2. Yeah ride at the side of the road where car doors or cars shooting out of the driveway or the parking spot can cream you. Ride in the middle of the street and when a car comes let them pass.
3. You realize that full speed in a bike is probably less than 20mph
4. Agree. Though bike helmet laws deter bike riding.
5. Intersections are death traps (if you use pedestrian crosswalks). Cars turn left and right without looking at the crosswalks. When turning left, they only look once they are in the incoming lane. Most of the times they are cutting it so tight that they would rather hit you than be hit by an incoming car.
People who don't bike will probably end up making biking laws and designing biking paths. Most of the bike paths are just a joke because it is so obvious that it wasn't designed by someone who was considering the safety of bikers. There are bike paths which merge into single lane roads where cars go 40mph.
Motorcycle helmets actually offer good protection, while bicycle helmets don't. For any impact over about 10 mph, they are not going to signifcantly reduce the peak accelerations your brain experiences (it's your brain sloshing that does the damage). I guess they can prevent lacerations, but that's about it. Helmet advocates always quote a study from the 1980s (funded by helmet manufacturers) that showed an 84% reduction in brain injuries, but other work has not borne this out. (example)
Wearing a helmet is applying a different standard to risk than we do in many other situations. Cycling is actually slightly safer per mile than walking, yet we don't make peds wear helmets. Just the same, we could make drivers wear helmets just like race car drivers do. That would actually prevent a huge number of deaths. But we don't. So why are cyclists singled out to wear the safety yarmulkes?
As an additional point, helment laws are actually terrible for cycling safety. After Australia made helmets mandatory, cycling went down 1/3 overnight. Fewer cyclists means drivers are less likely to expect them. In addition, there is evidence that cyclists wearing helments engage in riskier behavior as a form of risk-compensation.
Bike helmets are not for surviving getting hit by a car. If you get hit by a car over 25mph, you'll probably die. There is no getting around that. Fact of biking.
Bike helmets are when a dog runs and crashes into your bike. Or, when you hit a pot-hole and fall. That is when bike helmets save lives.
I was biking in Ann Arbor where the stupid bike lane goes into the sidewalk and road and back to the sidewalk. When the bike lane goes into the sidewalk, it makes a sharp turn and that is mostly obscured by parked cars. Somebody had dropped a huge box right where the bike lane came from the road to the sidewalk. I hit the box and was flying superman into concrete. The helmet saved me from a skull fracture.
Think about how dangerous cars would be if we didn't train people to drive them and didn't issue tickets to lawbreakers. You run traffic signals, drive down the wrong side of the road, and generally behave unsafely on a bicycle? The police don't do shit. Legally they're empowered to fine you and even take away your fucking driver's license--they don't have direct recourse for a bicycle, but they can eventually argue that the bicycle is an enabler and legally take possession of it. Some of these people could be fined out of existence or outright arrested for their dangerous behavior--you think running through a traffic signal and swerving through dense moving traffic isn't arrest-worthy? Someone could have panicked and swerved his car straight into the other oncoming traffic to try to evade the cyclist, or slammed their brakes on and caused a lot of (probably harmless, but expensive) rear-end collisions. I would fully support the cop who arrests your fucking ass for that.
Jeez, enough of the bikes don't stop at stop signs bullshit!
The most dangerous time that you in a bike is when you are still. When you are still waiting for a light or at a stop, when something awful is about to happen, you can't get out of the way. When you are moving, you can swerve out of the way or do something. When you're still, you can just watch and pray.
I was waiting at a stop sign and the driver turned left right into me. I couldn't do anything to get out of the way. I was lucky that the SUV just brushed the mirror in my bike. SUVs have high hoods and if it had it, it would have been like hitting a wall. If I had been moving a little bit, I could have easily swerved.
Bikes not stopping should be compared to cars driving over the limit or not signalling on the turn lights. At a 25mph zone, 90% of the cars are going at 30+mph but nobody cries about it and bemoans the dangers of that. Or, cars turning without signalling.
So, please enough of the bullshit about bikes from people who drive cars and don't ride bikes. Bikes aren't small cars and can't be compared like that.
Well, no; lottery numbers are known to be random. With human behaviour you at least have the underlying assumption that there are habits being picked up on. If all big data studies were as fruitless as your friend, the investments into the necessary infrastructure and algorithms wouldn't have made it nearly as far as they have. They do, however, find a lot of stupid correlations.
But much more importantly, the desire to find these correlations is potentially profound in its ability to damage society. The whole scheme is an effort to cheat the normal boundary of personal space in order to optimize business and surveillance efficiency. If this erosion spreads into everyday interactions between people, it'll be the end of trust. To fix it, we'd need who-knows-how-many Hollywood blockbusters about noble savages re-teaching the West how to act like decent human beings.
Perhaps if these businesses and government agencies were more willing to act like your friend and actually accept that life involves risk, we wouldn't be heading down this slippery slope so quickly.
This is the problem. People think there is a pattern in everything when there are things that are random. Finding surprising correlations here and there is completely different from being all-predictive.
It's not really the same. Human behaviour is not inherently random. The lottery is.
If I've bought a coffee every day for the last year, it's quite likely I'll buy one tomorrow.
I thought everyone knew about Bayes?
It is not fully predictive though.
One day, for whatever reason, you will stop buying coffee. That approximate day that will happen is not predictable because it is random.
So, you buying coffee tomorrow is quite predictable. You buying coffee 5 years from now is not.
Reminds me of Google's data collection on its hard disk failures and hiring good programmers.
They couldn't find any sort of predictive factor. GPA, brain teasers etc had zero correlation. There was no hiring person that had statistically better performance at hiring good programmers.
There are some things that are just random.
Perhaps being able to predict accurately is the flying car of our generation. Or, perhaps some will say the answer is more data.
The fifth estate is a mediocre movie. The fact that the talented Cumberbach plays Assange means that Assange becomes human rather than a political figure. When Cumberbach is not on screen, it has the feel of a PBS UK import.
The movie is through the perspective of Assange's friend and so, Assange comes off as a mystery rather than a liar.
As for the movie, it is just middling. People who dislike Assange will find more reasons to confirm their dislike and those who like Assange will find more reasons to do so.
Maybe I missed it during the movie but the speech where Assange/Cumberbach says "they are afraid of you" that is in the trailers is not in the movie.
It just seems that no-one in the government is at odds with the NSA spying program. The idea was always to have checks and balances in the system so that if things spiraled out of control, there would always be counter-forces that would set it right.
However, the white house, senate, supreme courts etc doesn't seem to care. They're all acting like it is no big deal and we should forget about it (or maybe that is how the media is portraying it).
Though on the other hand, this kind of social interaction data is a goldmine for sociologists and social psychologists to industrial psychologists. It could really be the killer technology that drives the next generation of marketing and advertising. Social networking is the fusion of sociology and computer science.
This is especially a goldmine if election candidates can understand and measure how people are deciding to vote. Before it was just spend billions of dollars on a blanket advertising scheme. But, what if they can really get feedback and data on how people are deciding to cast their votes.
Why doesn't the NSF find ways to anonymize the data and use it for scientific research and make everything open.
After social networking, this could be next big thing. Non-survey based measurement and quantification of what people are doing and thinking and how ideas are spreading and problems they are facing.
Slashdot Mirror
Summary notes that he lose weight at 2400 kcal/day, which is relatively high. This is not surprising: fat storage or burning is controlled by insulin, which is controlled in healthy subjects by blood glucose level. If the food does not rise blood glucose level (either because it is low carb, or because it contains carbs that take time to digest), insulin remains low, and fat is burnt.
If the food doesn't raise blood glucose levels that means the calories get come from places other than simple carbohydrates, and those calories get broken down into what the body needs, and if there's extra it gets stored as fat.
On what evidence do you base your claim that the same number of calories per day will make you thinner if they come from a source that doesn't raise blood glucose?
Diabetic patients are told to eat low carb diets. Even people who have been fat all their life start following a strict low carb diet, they become thin.
There was a discussion regarding some experiments on this. One doctor had diabetic patients that were getting too thin, "wasting away" as they said and wanted to put some meat on the bones. The doctors prescribed drinking olive oil shots. The patients didn't gain any weight. So, he doubled the amount of olive oil to be drunk like medicine. Still no weight gain. He doubled it again. Nothing again. At the end, patients were consuming over 2000 calories in olive oil shots and not gaining any weight (this in addition to their strict low carb diet for diabetes).
The whole "insulin" as the fat hormone I think was popularized by the book "Good calories, bad calories" by Taubes. There is no scientific consensus about insulin though. Taubes does cite a lot of work on his book and one of the most dramatic is the topical fat bulbs at the site of insulin injections.
Low-carb seems to be the best of all the weight loss diets when examined experimentally. There are a plethora of theories regarding why low-carb seems to be the best. Since low-carb diets were popularized by the diabetes doctor Atkins, there has been a strong suspicion that it is through insulin.
While this isn't a huge deal for Amazon right now, the Chinese products have now been getting better and better and there are some products that are so unique and useful than anything available in the US. The Chinese are able to offer super-low price, uniquely designed and useful products especially for the specialized needs - like specialty tools and electronics.
Any examples of these unique products?
One area from the top of my head: bicycling. Multi-thousand lumen LED headlamps with LiIon battery packs, countless LED and laser lights for bikes, bike computers and gadgets, clothing for riding bikes including reflector straps and wearable LED lights and so on.
Amazon is terrified of Alibaba's possible expansion into the US market. Alibaba is so much larger and can get better deals from the factories in China which Amazon doesn't have much hope of competing with. Online purchases are very price competitive with ppl shopping around for best deals, and Alibaba has a huge market advantage over their US-based rival, not to mention just sheer size.
In the end it's a win for consumers to have more competition in the online retail segment.
I agree that Amazon's biggest drawback is the lack of direct China sellers. Since Amazon's ratings system is so broken and products have to be strictly described, the Chinese sellers on Amazon are not useful to buy from.
The Ebay Chinese sellers are much better and some have warehouses in the US.
While this isn't a huge deal for Amazon right now, the Chinese products have now been getting better and better and there are some products that are so unique and useful than anything available in the US. The Chinese are able to offer super-low price, uniquely designed and useful products especially for the specialized needs - like specialty tools and electronics.
Do you still think Google is trying to stop the NSA from spying on you, when they are gathering the exact same information, and unlike the NSA, don't have any rules restricting their use.
When will we stop saying who can and cannot spy on us and steal our personal information, and start saying that the answer is nobody. Whether you're the NSA, or you're Google, you are evil. The end.
Or you can not use any Google products. Gmail, google maps, search etc are free so that they can advertise to you and collect data on you.
Small amounts of transfats can cause a large amount of health risk. Current rules allow food makers to say there is 0.0 grams of transfat per serving if there is less than .5 g transfat preserving. Unfortunately, a diet of 1 or 2 grams transfat daily is associated with all sorts of bad things, and you can easily rack it up by eating a couple servings of foods labeled 0.0 grams transfat. Transfat should be labeled in mg, not g, and reported with at least a precision of 0.1 g.
This is what I've found in candy bars. One of the ingredients is partially hydrogenated palm kernel oil. They all have 0g trans fat.
The US labeling has to be updated. Make it so that it is accurate to two significant degrees. Also, require composition percentages of the ingredients.
If you look at candy nutrition information, each has different serving sizes. Makes it very hard to compare different items.
I agree in general but still sending a probe to Mars is a political stunt to show India is also coming up, not just China. There are million things India could be investing money into that would bring a better return in areas that you mention than this.
Actually, India has been developing its satellite industry and is looking to be the cheap way of getting communication satellites in orbit. From some articles I've read, their costs are 1/10th of what other countries are asking and so India can be major player in satellite technology. They have communication, weather and military satellites in orbit already.
The mars mission is just a natural extension of what they have been doing for years. Besides they do have scientific objectives as well. One article said studying methane on Mars.
It doesn't sound like a vanity project. It sounds like a natural progression of a maturing industry they have been cultivating for decades.
The first study you cite isn't related to lower speeds but lower speed variances and, in the first page abstract, says, "...accident rates do not necessarily increase with an increase in average speed but do increase with an increase in speed variance."
The third study really speaks about speed limits on urban roads, where the majority of accidents occur, rather than interstates.
The Solomon Curve speaks more directly to the real issue of speed and accidents and relates to speed differentials. Solomon's results have been duplicated many times and the issue is that there is a higher likelihood of being in an accident as an individual's speed varies from the average speed. Interestingly, going much slower than the average speed seems to indicate a higher likelihood of being involved in an accident.
I spend a lot of time driving across country and the worst places in my experience are the interstates in urban areas. Those areas tend to have artificially lower speed limits to deal with maximum traffic capacity for rush hour. When driving through these areas during non-rush hour times I would feel that I would be run over if I drove anywhere near the speed limit. The first study you cite specifically talks about finding the ideal speed limit related to the highway speed design point and that artificially setting the speed limit too low related to the design point increases the probability of accidents.
Simply having a lower speed limit does not, in itself, result in lower accident rates.
Lower speed limits do not result in lesser accidents but does result in less fatalities and injuries when the accidents do occur.
And, that's what the original poster said!
Driving fast is safe as long as you don't get into accidents as the OP said. Since you said that the rate of accidents don't decrease with higher speed limits and the chance of accidents stays the same as you claim, then driving faster doesn't decrease your chance of getting into an accident but increases your chances of serious injury when you do get into an accident.
So, overall it is safer to have lower speed limits.
In the last paragraph, you are arguing that lower speed limits increases the chances of accidents (in urban areas).
'Although Toyota had performed a stack analysis, Barr concluded the automaker had completely botched it. Toyota missed some of the calls made via pointer, missed stack usage by library and assembly functions (about 350 in total), and missed RTOS use during task switching. They also failed to perform run-time stack monitoring.'
Huh? I'm a software engineer and don't understand the relevance of this statement, how can a jury? How does it confirm that there was a defect?
Hate to say this but I think any foreign company on trial in the US is going to get reamed. Americans are very anti-foreign companies. If the company was Chinese, probably guilty on all accounts.
Improper stack analysis does not prove a defect. However, it gives a jury enough rope to hang.
The question is: Is it enough to be relevant?
Given the myriad other hazards, and billions of other reasons that stereoscopic vision in hunter-animals evolved, the answer is pretty much No.
This is why it's controversial. It's "true" while also being absolute bollocks. It's like saying that without lead-acid batteries, cars wouldn't have evolved as they have. Well, no. But it doesn't mean that without lead-acid batteries cars couldn't have existed or anything like that.
P.S. The "wading in water made man stand upright" is just as controversial because, although it may be a FACTOR, the impact of that factor is the crucial question. It may well be zero. It may well be quite a lot. But chances are that it's such a minuscule factor that it's not worth spouting off about compared to thousands of other factors.
Evolution is not a case of "jumping off this cliff made birds suddenly grow wings". There are billions of factors over millions of years and hundreds of thousands of generations that all nudge towards small changes which impact upon the previous and next changes.
As such, this suggestion is almost complete bollocks, while being - on the surface - based on truthful data. But "snake-like predators might possibly have contributed a tiny bit to millions of years of our evolution along with million of other factors" isn't a headline that sells papers to journals.
Have you heard of the pareto principle? Even if there are millions of factors, one factor will have a much higher influence than others.
In the economy, 1% control 90% of the wealth. In the movie industry, the top 1% of the movies rake in 90% of the movie revenue. On earth, 1% of the species occupy 90% of the ecosystems. You get the idea.
If there were a thousand reasons that influenced equally, it would be a rare natural system. Most often, natural systems are unstable dynamical systems and have positive feedback systems where one factor gets amplified much more than others that additionally feedbacks on itself where 90% of the influence is due to one factor.
The initial reason why one factor is amplified over others could be down to just random fluctuations. A small random fluctuation could be amplified over and over again to create a dominating effect. So, there is no way someone can sit here and argue that this reason sounds better than that because the influencing factor can be random among the possible set of factors and only by doing field studies can the influencing factor be verified.
Jeez, enough of the bikes don't stop at stop signs bullshit!
They don't. They also straddle and salmon.
The most dangerous time that you in a bike is when you are still.
Get on the sidewalk with the other pedestrians if you can't follow vehicle traffic laws or if you feel unsafe. But when you do, follow pedestrian traffic laws exclusively. Don't pick and choose.
I will as soon as cars don't break the speed limit by 5-10mph and use their blinkers every time they change lanes or make a turn.
It is hypocritical for drivers to criticize cyclists for not for not following the rules of the road when they are breaking traffic rules themselves by going over the speed limit and making turns without signalling.
The cycle is not a motorized vehicle has a different characteristics. Cyclists should use the road in a manner that is safest for them because an accident leads to a death of the cyclist while just a dent on the car. Drivers don't think anything of breaking the speed limit, then they should understand why cyclists do what they do.
5. Intersections are death traps (if you use pedestrian crosswalks).
If you cycle on pedestrian crosswalks, you deserve whatever happens to you. You are a vehicle, use the road, it's safer for everyone.
Yeah it is very safe to ride your bike at 15mph in a road whose speed limit is 40mph and cars are normally going 50mph.
So why doesn't this apply to pedestrians. They're on the sidewalk, moving slowly, and suddenly a car comes off the road towards them? Yes, it's very unlikely. Similarly, if you're in the bike lane and stopped at a light, then it is very rare something is suddenly going to ram into that lane from an angle. If you are moving you also have inertia and can not rapidly change direction (a little rain or a bit of oil on the road will mess up your well laid plans).
Yes, it can happen sometimes but it is rare compared to the number of bikes that don't bother stopping at all and rely on their elite cycling skills to let them break the law and still dodge objects with high inertia. Running that stop sign makes you vastly more likely to be hit by a car, splitting lanes makes you much more likely to be hit by a car, cutting in front of a car make you much more likely to be hit by a car. Stopping in the bike lane at the stop sign is the safest thing to do there.
And remember that you are a bicycle. I learned this lesson on a small motorcycle: you are invisible! Make sure you can be seen, don't wear a black jacket (night or day), have reflectors (believe me, the lycra makes you look dorky, the reflecting tape does not), have lights on even in the daylight, and use your damn arm signals when turning (moving arm is visible). If it is raining be even more paranoid as cars are going to be skidding and so will you, and you will be even more invisible than normal. Watch where the other cars are and be aware of where they're moving and where they're turning, and if you're moving too fast to determine this then slow down. If you're near an SUV or large car then remember that no one on the other side of that vehicle can see you. Don't be in a hurry to get to where you're going, this is not a race.
And take a safety class! Don't just rely on intuition or common sense. Every automobile driver has to take a test, the least you can do as a cyclist is take a class.
Riding is a motorized vehicle is vastly different than riding a bicycle. With a bicycle, you can use your sense of hearing as well. The motor drowns out all that. I really feel it when someone is mowing the lawn in a street. You completely lose one sense.
Anyways, stopping and waiting for a light has gotten me in "trouble" a lot of times. I think it is the safest to try and keep moving as much as possible. I know there are plenty of arguments against that but it is just from my experience. Of course, it depends on the roads you ride on and maybe it is a good strategy here but not somewhere else. I don't know.
But, people who demonize cyclists for not stopping at lights and signs are not considering that maybe it is the safest way to go for the bicycle. Besides, cars going 5-10mph higher than the speed limit and not using blinkers are given a complete free pass which are as dangerous and illegal as well.
LOL. I guessed you were some sort of actuarial guy from the way you were writing.
But, without actual numbers from statistics and experiments, we are both guessing.
There are many things you can say to say that my theory is incorrect but yeah, without numbers who knows how influential they are in the final numbers.
From my experience, the time you are still is dangerous in a bicycle. You can argue otherwise but without legwork to get the actual numbers, it is just opinions.
No, you have the fewest risk contingencies when you are still. That doesn't mean you have the lowest risk; it means you don't have any answers for "what if...".
Think of it this way: Running through a stop sign into a blind intersection puts you at risk of being run over by a car. 1 in 10 times, you are at risk for being run over by a car. You can swerve out of the way 99 out of 100 times. That means 1 in 1000 times, you will get hit by a car running stop signs. (Numbers made up)
Now, standing at stop signs, cars will collide with you 1 in 2,600 times. You can only evade this 1 out of 10 times. That means you have a 9 in 26,000 chance of getting hit, or 1 in 2889 chance.
In the first situation, you run a higher probability risk but you have a good risk-reducing contingency (ability to take action). In the second, you run a lower probability risk but have very poor risk-reducing contingency. The numbers I gave shows that the lower probability is actually a lower risk than the higher probability with contingency in this imaginary case.
My numbers are made up. You however simply stated a lack of contingency without any sort of consideration for risk probability: you predicate that having a contingency always equates to lower risk. I have shown that in principle this is wrong, and thus that you have shown nothing except that there are different risks and some have better contingencies; you have not shown whether one overall risk is bigger than the other.
Those numbers you made up is dependent on the bike rider, the road structure, route, weather and pretty much everything you can think of.
You also do realize that people are stopped at a light or intersection far shorter than they are moving. That small period where you in a road still with moving cars could have higher probability and I'm making a reasonable argument about that.
I bicycled to work for a year. I bicycled everywhere for a year. I also drive, and ride light rail. I've been on both ends of this. In a year's time with 70% of my transportation being by bicycle (I actually tallied up my total gasoline MPG at 288mpg combined when factoring in my bike with my car), I've been threatened by cars while stationary 0 times. In that same time, I nearly smashed a black guy who ran a red light on his bicycle at night while wearing dark clothes on an unlit street; I nearly turned a white kid into a speed bump when he came the wrong way down a street and just appeared from behind a building and straight in front of my car (this is a no-lawn situation: the sidewalk is against the building and the street); I've observed other cyclists nearly getting creamed on half a dozen occasions while I was waiting at a signal for busy traffic; and so on.
Your anecdotal experience does not match my anecdotal experience. I was never in any danger narrowly averted by a heroic application of fast brakes and fast steering; I have been suddenly placed in situations where my heroic application of fast brakes and fast steering have saved others from becoming speed tables, and I've observed other drivers doing the same.
If you are still, you can't do any heroic application of steering. When cars are still and bike hits them, nothing happens. When bike is still and car hits them, death. Bikers should always give themselves the option to steer away rather than hope the cars will not hit them. When you are still, you are at the mercy of the car driver to not hit you. You cannot attempt to steer out of the path.
You only stop for a few seconds but at that time you are vulnerable. The human eye is super sensitive to moving objects and if you are still, drivers can sometimes be blind of your presence.
In the US at least, cyclists (and pedestrians) killed by motor vehicle operators are generally treated as freebies. To the degree that drivers avoid running over them, they're probably motivated more by an innate sense of decency and/or the annoyance value of having to stop for an hour or two until the police sweep up the bodies and then tell you not to do it again and send you on your way. Until this changes, cycling will not be a particularly safe activity here.
Motorists also don't realize that if you hit a pedestrian or cyclist at speeds above 25mph, it will very like result in death. What seems like a minor "fender bender" ends up taking a life.
Most motorists have no idea how to deal with cyclists. Some speed up overtaking a bicycle, some slow down and everything in between. There is no standard guidance of what to do and so everyone does their own thing. Some drivers will go all the way to the left when passing while others will pass just inches off you even when the road is empty. People simply don't know how to deal with bicycles on the road.
Could cycles be made safer, both to reduce risk and to reduce the coordination required to operate one. As I posted elsewhere, cycling currently excludes the elderly (for whom one fall could be catastrophic), the frail, and the otherwise uncoordinated (young or old, one encounter with a car can be catastrophic).
Some ideas:
1) Certainly they could be made more visible to cars, especially at night. For drivers, the tiny lights are hard to pickup visually against the background of the city, and things happen very fast at automobile speeds. Plus, one tiny light doesn't give any clue to the dimensions of the rest of the bike (in contrast, think of the yellow lights that outline trucks).
2) Separate bikes from cars. The different rates of speed seem to make combining them inherently dangerous. Some places already do this, with dedicated, and physically separate bike lanes. Look up Amsterdam to see examples.
3) Better stability? Why not tricycles, which don't fall over when stopping or turning too sharply? I suspect there must be some drawback, but it's transportation, not a race.
I think separation is the answer.
The first step is to make one road in a grid of cars off limits to cars during certain hours in the day. Then all bikers would use it to "commute" to the city.
The city policymakers instead want to build new infrastructure and spend money for bike only this and that. If they just dedicated one of the smaller roads to bike only traffic for about 4-6 hours a day, it would be much more useful than spending millions widening roads and drawing bike lanes only for half a mile of road.
Nighttime visibility is not a problem for bikers. With LEDs, you can ride like a Christmas tree and have headlights with thousands of lumens to blind everything around you.
Falling over is not a problem. The elderly ride bicycles in many countries without falling over.
1. Dark is the safest time to ride. You can actually see the car's headlights and hear the cars more easily than during daytime.
2. Yeah ride at the side of the road where car doors or cars shooting out of the driveway or the parking spot can cream you. Ride in the middle of the street and when a car comes let them pass.
3. You realize that full speed in a bike is probably less than 20mph
4. Agree. Though bike helmet laws deter bike riding.
5. Intersections are death traps (if you use pedestrian crosswalks). Cars turn left and right without looking at the crosswalks. When turning left, they only look once they are in the incoming lane. Most of the times they are cutting it so tight that they would rather hit you than be hit by an incoming car.
People who don't bike will probably end up making biking laws and designing biking paths. Most of the bike paths are just a joke because it is so obvious that it wasn't designed by someone who was considering the safety of bikers. There are bike paths which merge into single lane roads where cars go 40mph.
Motorcycle helmets actually offer good protection, while bicycle helmets don't. For any impact over about 10 mph, they are not going to signifcantly reduce the peak accelerations your brain experiences (it's your brain sloshing that does the damage). I guess they can prevent lacerations, but that's about it. Helmet advocates always quote a study from the 1980s (funded by helmet manufacturers) that showed an 84% reduction in brain injuries, but other work has not borne this out. (example)
Wearing a helmet is applying a different standard to risk than we do in many other situations. Cycling is actually slightly safer per mile than walking, yet we don't make peds wear helmets. Just the same, we could make drivers wear helmets just like race car drivers do. That would actually prevent a huge number of deaths. But we don't. So why are cyclists singled out to wear the safety yarmulkes?
As an additional point, helment laws are actually terrible for cycling safety. After Australia made helmets mandatory, cycling went down 1/3 overnight. Fewer cyclists means drivers are less likely to expect them. In addition, there is evidence that cyclists wearing helments engage in riskier behavior as a form of risk-compensation.
Bike helmets are not for surviving getting hit by a car. If you get hit by a car over 25mph, you'll probably die. There is no getting around that. Fact of biking.
Bike helmets are when a dog runs and crashes into your bike. Or, when you hit a pot-hole and fall. That is when bike helmets save lives.
I was biking in Ann Arbor where the stupid bike lane goes into the sidewalk and road and back to the sidewalk. When the bike lane goes into the sidewalk, it makes a sharp turn and that is mostly obscured by parked cars. Somebody had dropped a huge box right where the bike lane came from the road to the sidewalk. I hit the box and was flying superman into concrete. The helmet saved me from a skull fracture.
Think about how dangerous cars would be if we didn't train people to drive them and didn't issue tickets to lawbreakers. You run traffic signals, drive down the wrong side of the road, and generally behave unsafely on a bicycle? The police don't do shit. Legally they're empowered to fine you and even take away your fucking driver's license--they don't have direct recourse for a bicycle, but they can eventually argue that the bicycle is an enabler and legally take possession of it. Some of these people could be fined out of existence or outright arrested for their dangerous behavior--you think running through a traffic signal and swerving through dense moving traffic isn't arrest-worthy? Someone could have panicked and swerved his car straight into the other oncoming traffic to try to evade the cyclist, or slammed their brakes on and caused a lot of (probably harmless, but expensive) rear-end collisions. I would fully support the cop who arrests your fucking ass for that.
Jeez, enough of the bikes don't stop at stop signs bullshit!
The most dangerous time that you in a bike is when you are still. When you are still waiting for a light or at a stop, when something awful is about to happen, you can't get out of the way. When you are moving, you can swerve out of the way or do something. When you're still, you can just watch and pray.
I was waiting at a stop sign and the driver turned left right into me. I couldn't do anything to get out of the way. I was lucky that the SUV just brushed the mirror in my bike. SUVs have high hoods and if it had it, it would have been like hitting a wall. If I had been moving a little bit, I could have easily swerved.
Bikes not stopping should be compared to cars driving over the limit or not signalling on the turn lights. At a 25mph zone, 90% of the cars are going at 30+mph but nobody cries about it and bemoans the dangers of that. Or, cars turning without signalling.
So, please enough of the bullshit about bikes from people who drive cars and don't ride bikes. Bikes aren't small cars and can't be compared like that.
Whenever a new movie is about to come out, there is an stupid amount of press related to the movie.
The 100 million dollar promotion budget seems to also make a little bit of its way to slashdot.
Well, no; lottery numbers are known to be random. With human behaviour you at least have the underlying assumption that there are habits being picked up on. If all big data studies were as fruitless as your friend, the investments into the necessary infrastructure and algorithms wouldn't have made it nearly as far as they have. They do, however, find a lot of stupid correlations.
But much more importantly, the desire to find these correlations is potentially profound in its ability to damage society. The whole scheme is an effort to cheat the normal boundary of personal space in order to optimize business and surveillance efficiency. If this erosion spreads into everyday interactions between people, it'll be the end of trust. To fix it, we'd need who-knows-how-many Hollywood blockbusters about noble savages re-teaching the West how to act like decent human beings.
Perhaps if these businesses and government agencies were more willing to act like your friend and actually accept that life involves risk, we wouldn't be heading down this slippery slope so quickly.
This is the problem. People think there is a pattern in everything when there are things that are random. Finding surprising correlations here and there is completely different from being all-predictive.
It's not really the same. Human behaviour is not inherently random. The lottery is. If I've bought a coffee every day for the last year, it's quite likely I'll buy one tomorrow. I thought everyone knew about Bayes?
It is not fully predictive though.
One day, for whatever reason, you will stop buying coffee. That approximate day that will happen is not predictable because it is random.
So, you buying coffee tomorrow is quite predictable. You buying coffee 5 years from now is not.
Reminds me of Google's data collection on its hard disk failures and hiring good programmers.
They couldn't find any sort of predictive factor. GPA, brain teasers etc had zero correlation. There was no hiring person that had statistically better performance at hiring good programmers.
There are some things that are just random.
Perhaps being able to predict accurately is the flying car of our generation. Or, perhaps some will say the answer is more data.
The fifth estate is a mediocre movie. The fact that the talented Cumberbach plays Assange means that Assange becomes human rather than a political figure. When Cumberbach is not on screen, it has the feel of a PBS UK import.
The movie is through the perspective of Assange's friend and so, Assange comes off as a mystery rather than a liar.
As for the movie, it is just middling. People who dislike Assange will find more reasons to confirm their dislike and those who like Assange will find more reasons to do so.
Maybe I missed it during the movie but the speech where Assange/Cumberbach says "they are afraid of you" that is in the trailers is not in the movie.
It just seems that no-one in the government is at odds with the NSA spying program. The idea was always to have checks and balances in the system so that if things spiraled out of control, there would always be counter-forces that would set it right.
However, the white house, senate, supreme courts etc doesn't seem to care. They're all acting like it is no big deal and we should forget about it (or maybe that is how the media is portraying it).
Though on the other hand, this kind of social interaction data is a goldmine for sociologists and social psychologists to industrial psychologists. It could really be the killer technology that drives the next generation of marketing and advertising. Social networking is the fusion of sociology and computer science.
This is especially a goldmine if election candidates can understand and measure how people are deciding to vote. Before it was just spend billions of dollars on a blanket advertising scheme. But, what if they can really get feedback and data on how people are deciding to cast their votes.
Why doesn't the NSF find ways to anonymize the data and use it for scientific research and make everything open.
After social networking, this could be next big thing. Non-survey based measurement and quantification of what people are doing and thinking and how ideas are spreading and problems they are facing.