It won't, actually. Apple's prices don't drop in the middle of a cycle. It'll cost exactly the same in July of next year. In August, you may see carriers cut the prices to entice people to clear their existing stock.
How have people voted this up? I'm not a political scholar, but the goals of communism are generally diametrically opposed to rule by a dictator.
Communism works on small scales. Family scales, generally. I'd give my sister money if she needed it. She'd give me something that I needed. We don't have an economic transaction--we do things based on our mutual benefit. We share because we know that in the future, it'll probably come out even.
It seems to me that real communism wouldn't require anyone to dictate anything because people would be acting communally. They would willingly pool their resources, share and take care of one another. Tribal societies are and were like this.
Scaling up communism has always been the problem. It's easy to come up with scenarios where it works on small scales. It's the scaling up that lets the tyrants in. There's always an opportunist that wants to be the top of the heap. Those people aren't communists at all, I reckon.
Capitalism, so far, has scaled better than communism. There are a lot of problems with it (and most of them seem to be a matter of governments being too hands off, rather than too hands on, if you ask me), but it seems to have done a better job distributing resources than communism has. But if millions of people ever decide, en masse, to give up their possessions and work communally and REFUSE to allow a dictator or a leader, maybe it would work.
For all intents and purposes, it does replace a camcorder because most people only want a few minutes worth of video.
As with most Apple announcements, Apple is happy to ignore the existence of everything else in the same product category. The 5s also replaces a camcorder by the standards that he's talking about, and so do Android smartphones.
He's right that as a broad group, smartphones have destroyed the camera and camcorder industry. You only buy one of those devices if you want something fairly upscale, or that has features that are cumbersome or impossible to include in a smartphone (macro shots, extreme ruggedness and portability a la go pro, etc.)
They're not launching until 2015, so I think basically they're hedging their bets that they might be able to get a slightly better battery in 6 months than they can right now. It's very much like Apple to play their cards close to their chest in instances like this. They won't be able to say how long it lasts for a few months because they literally don't know, and they won't make up numbers that haven't been validated in some way.
However long it lasts, though, it's not long enough. I'd want 5 days, minimum.
It's a pretty piece of jewellery, though. On that front, they're at the front of the class again.
A lot of other people have gone over what's wrong with your argument, so I'll try not to rehash that too much.
I'll admit that my 13 years as a professional programmer (after my degree) are years that I would say are more fundamental to my general programming skill than my CS degree, but I learned a lot of things in University that are hard to come by elsewhere. I learned a lot of things that aren't about computers, and that's been really helpful.
Being good at programming isn't the only thing that makes a good programmer, it turns out. I'd way rather have 5 programmers on my team that rank as 7-8 out of 10 than 5 10/10 programmers. In my experience, those guys are too interested in being good at programming and not interested enough in making something that's going to work for everyone. I'm in the games industry, and our programmers need to be able to talk to artists and designers. You need a few of those really exemplary programmers here and there, but being broadly interested in things is way more useful than being able to pick apart a C++ compiler.
But also, I have a lot of options available to me now. I won't always work on games. I could probably jump ship to an environmental science firm without too much effort because my minor was in Earth and Atmospheric science. I speak geologist and meteorologist and even some palaeontologist. So much programming is undertaken by scientists that have no other choice but to program their own tools because the programmers of the world don't understand the problem space and it would be harder for them to learn the problem space than for the scientist to learn how to code a bit.
Lastly, I think you misunderstand computing science as a discipline. The fact that I finished my degree 13 years ago doesn't mean that much of it is out of date. The optimal rasterization of a line is still the same, algorithmically. All the graph theory that I learned is permanently correct--and permanently useful. Compiler implementations change, but compiler theory is largely the same. The stuff that you learn in computing science is actually really fundamental, which is what prevents it from going out of date. I can't stop learning without being left behind--the same as you--but I learned things up front that will always be mathematically, provably true. I'm not saying all of it is immediately useful (I think a lot of it isn't, in my field) but just because it's old doesn't mean that it's useless.
I wouldn't discount hiring a programmer without a degree. I've worked with several excellent--really, truly excellent--programmers that came to the industry without anything other than motivation. But don't tell me that just because out of my 18 years of being academically involved with computers, 4 of those were spent mostly in the classroom that I don't know how to fucking code.
This is how the games industry works. This was particularly necessary in the previous generation when writing 'optimised' code wasn't guaranteed to really be that much faster depending on the platform. The PS3 is fast, but making things run well on it involves jumping through a lot of hoops and understanding what data needs to be in what bit of memory at what time. As long as the general developers were writing code that wasn't obnoxiously slow, it was fine.
It's almost always a surprise when you run instrumentation tools and find out what the real bottlenecks are. There are a lot of interactions between various agents in large-scale games, so doing anything other than writing obvious, clean code is just making trouble for everyone else.
Some of the devices are powered by Samsung's Exynos chips, so Samsung probably stepped on the patents there. That's what I got out of it. Remember that Samsung doesn't just use other people's stuff--they do a lot of their own manufacturing when it suits them.
Seriously. You've got complaints, and Apple has solutions. If you think that this sort of service is essential enough to legislate, you should just buy from the company that does this thing you want. Does it outweigh the advantages of your Android phone? You've got an LG Optimus that you've complained about before, so the thing you seem to be concerned about is how much this phone costs.
I don't understand why you don't seem to get that your user experience is correlated with what you're willing to pay. You can get a NICE Android phone that avoids the problems you talked about in your other article, or you could get an iPhone. If having a quick turnover on a replacement phone is ALSO important to you, you're pretty much looking at Apple to fulfil your needs.
You can get the things you want by putting a little more money on the table. You don't seem to object to the notion that some of these things are costs to the store and you even say that you may have been willing to pay the $50 restocking fee in retrospect. Just gather up your pennies, pay the fees up front, and stop complaining about service that's lacking when a viable alternative exists.
But if price really is your main consideration, just buy a Moto E or G, phones that don't cost much that review really well (if I recall, you can get a G for less than your insurance claim + restocking fee that you were talking about--off contract) and be done with it. Honestly.
I took standard analysis. I wasn't in honours. It was a requirement for my computing science degree. Abstract Algebra *wasn't* a requirement for my computing science degree, but I took it anyway. For some reason, it was packed with education students, but it was what you'd expect--rings, fields, groups, etc.
I'm not saying that arts students are somehow also scientific powerhouses, merely that they've got science requirements to meet, and not all of them are fluff. Logic 101 was popular because it could fulfil either a science or an art requirement. Geology 101 was popular despite having a lab component because as these things go, it wasn't actually that difficult. Either way, those kinds of classes could help explain why science literacy is so high in this country. Even decent exposure to one or two classes could make a big difference.
Oh! I just remembered that you could actually Major in Mathematics at the U of A and get a BA. You'd do all the same Math courses as someone in the Science faculty, but your other requirements would be more arts focused.
I'm tired of hearing how a calorie isn't a calorie. The problem isn't with calories. The problem is that people don't understand how to measure them when they're eating, or worse, that they don't measure them at all. You will starve eating junk food if you don't eat enough calories a day. You will get fat eating 6000 calories of apples a day. Calories are a measure of ENERGY, not QUALITY. They are neutral in determining how good a food is for you.
My metabolism and microbiome are essentially guaranteed to be different than yours, but we can still both be a healthy weight. It still is about the simple balance between calories in and calories out.
Claiming that calories are different from food to food is a different sort of quick fix problem. It encourages people to find the 'right' calories, and those don't exist. A variety of different food should be eaten to provide the best nutrition, and you should understand that different foods have different numbers of calories. Eat lots of fruits and vegetables. ALSO eat fat and protein. The body needs a lot of stuff.
If you don't mean to contradict the tautology that a calorie is a calorie, *don't say that*. Say something meaningful instead.
I read the article but not the study. It sounds like they simply didn't restrict the calories, not that calories were equivalent. It also sounds like there's a natural calorie restriction going on by virtue of higher satiety when eating a low carb diet with more fat.
These results don't surprise me. I'm athletic, but I've moved away from carbs for various reasons. I don't keep bread in the house and rarely eat pasta. My weight and body fat have definitely been more controllable this year than previously. My exercise volume is up slightly, but not enough to explain the body composition difference.
Small meals also beget small meals, I've found. For instance, the mornings that I'm hungriest are the mornings after my biggest dinners. If I eat so much I feel a bit overfed one evening, the next morning I'm STARVING. You just feel like you need to fill that space. If you work to limit your meals, you come to balance at a new normal.
I just watched that video I linked you over again, and it seems to give conflicting info. It implies 5k for a resting day but then says 5k for an active day.
I do know from my own cycling that a 3-4 hour road race is by itself somewhere in the vicinity of 3k calories. I can easily believe Phelps' training routine took him up to the higher thousands of calories. Anyway.
Phelps was burning a lot more calories than that on an active day, actually. His BASAL metabolic rate was probably 4-5k. (I think I read that his peak was something like 12k kcals a day?)
There's a great little video about Shane Perkins on vimeo--he was a velodrome sprinter. He was at about 5k resting. On really active days, he literally couldn't digest enough food to fulfil his nutritional requirements. http://vimeo.com/26494905
Look, a calorie is a calorie. If you get a calorie from an apple and a calorie from fat, they are the same amount of energy. By definition.
The thing is that an apple is less calorie dense than an equivalent amount of butter. And you're right, how well your body extracts calories is a factor, too. But we're dealing with thermodynamics here. There's an upper bound to the number of calories in an apple, and an upper bound on how many are in that chunk of butter. (It's about 4kcal per gram of carbs, if I'm remembering right, and 9kcal per gram of fat.) You can't extract more energy than is there. If you and I both eat an apple, we're confined by the UPPER boundary of calories.
Even more simplistically, you can't gain more mass than is in your food. You don't extract energy from the air. Your gut microbiome can't be more than 100% efficient. (It can't even be 100% efficient.)
I'm not denying there are knock-on effects from eating certain foods. Satiety and insulin and all that stuff plays a part, certainly. But if you're having trouble measuring the number of calories in your food and it seems like there are more calories than there should be, it's because your measurements are off, not because the value of a calorie has changed from food to food. Stop underestimating your intake and overestimating your output.
I had a lot of arts students in my science classes. There was a Geology class with no lab requirement, and it picked up the name 'rocks for jocks', since PhysEd and Arts students could fit it in as an 'easy' option. At my University (the University of Alberta), you were generally forced to take a certain number of credits from other departments unless you were in Honours. I was doing a CS degree, but I took a lot of Geology. In the Arts realm, I chose Comparative Literature and took some Latin.
I'm not sure where your stats are from or if they're even Canadian. Maybe the UofA was weird--do you have a citation?
51% of the Canadian population has attended post-secondary education. That means most Canadians had to perform fairly well in their science classes, and in University, were probably forced to take at least a few science courses even if they were in an unrelated field.
Bilingual conversations are really common here. I'm from Alberta originally, and my spoken French isn't great (I can get by, but I don't like speaking it). That said, I have plenty of friends that speak to me in French. I answer in English. We just go with whatever's easiest. Montreallers are really easy going that way.
Usually it's just faster for them to switch to English, though. Quebec French has its own peculiarities, so I found that on the few times where I started a conversation in French, it would usually switch to English just to hurry things along.
If you watched her latest video all the way to the end, she does cover this. It's not enough to merely show suffering if there's no path to rectify the suffering. It's not really doing its job of drawing attention to the problem so much as making it a prop so that we have a reason to shoot someone. The violence that we commit becomes justified through the superficial application of the abuse of a woman in the game.
Besides, games DON'T accurately reflect what's going on. First of all, most rape and sexual assault is perpetrated by a relative or a friend or someone close to the victim. It's rarely a bad guy lurking in an alley. So that type of violence is over-represented in games. Second, in this case, there's some merit to the argument that we don't depict domestic violence against males enough. If what we're trying to do is draw attention and be accurate, we should probably include that more often.
But most importantly, there's a question as to the value of this 'realism', even if it were accurate. A lot of terrible things happen in the world that we see fit to ignore. Physics, for one thing. We also don't seem to care about going to the bathroom, cancer or getting oil changes. We're willing to suspend disbelief; this is probably an area where we could live without the casual gendered violence that we've really become accustomed to.
Men die in the same way! And in much more gruesome and jovial manners. I think when this occasionally happens to women and it's considered more important is more of a reflection of our attitudes of men's lives being less important than women's than any negative view there is of women. You can't honestly believe that male video game characters do not die in heinous ways more than female characters. You don't think it's interesting that you find that totally normal for men and something that needs to be stopped for women? Women cannot be the same part of a narrative as a men unless they can actually be put in the same part. Which according to Sarkeesian and yourself they cannot be because *reasons*.
So if you watch the latest video, she does touch on that somewhat. I'm going to assume you haven't (or at least, that someone reading our discussion hasn't) and point out the salient bits.
First, that when men die in these games, they're generally an antagonist or actor that actually has a measure of agency. They're killed because they were involved in a conflict that revolved around more than just their gender or their victimhood.
Second, part of why you're gruesomely killing the men in these games is often justified by the violence that the men are (arbitrarily) enacting against women. The women die as props to show off how bad someone is in a wild caricature of evil. She's right in pointing out that violence against women is most often perpetrated by 'normal' men. A woman is FAR more likely to be raped by a friend or family member than a random bad man on the street.
Third, men die in ways that aren't overtly sexualised. Women die on beds in lingerie with their legs spread and their tits hanging out. They're still T&A even after brutal violence.
She's right that sexual and sexualised violence is used as a lazy shortcut to show how bad a person is. You can instantly justify murdering someone brutally (to bring it back to your complaint) if we've just shown them as hitting a woman or raping them. It's not the nicest cycle.
Given that we know men are far more likely to be murdered or die in war would it not be a good idea to hold off on this bit of violence? You can do what you want in your games. But when you're trying to tell other people they're being bad or "insensitive" based on the games they create or like to play you actually are trying to make them feel bad so that they stop.
The worst part about her criticisms is that she actually doesn't understand the tropes she's talking about. Or she just makes up new tropes. Tropes are pretty much a necessary part of storytelling. That's why we call them tropes. They've been around since the advent of storytelling. All stories are just rehashes and variations of old ones.
I don't think people have to stop doing anything. But I think they DO need to think about what they're doing, understand whether it's appropriate narratively, and make those decisions with open eyes. Speaking personally, for the first ten years of my career, I definitely didn't think about this stuff as much. Maybe I would've spoken up more about certain things if I had.
I understand that the word 'trope' actually has several meanings, but in this context, she's using the word 'trope' as 'cliché'. You DON'T need to write something that relies heavily on clichés. At the very least, you don't need to write something that heavily relies on the sorts of tropes that may be damaging to our ideas about women.
I really can't agree with that. Using her same irrational argument style you could paint that same problems onto any media. You think playwriting needs to respond to this criticism if it wants to be credible in the world? Shakespeare the misogynist! The gaming community tried to respond with the appropriate "you're going to have to do better" and explained why to her. She chose instead to focus on people making fun of her for saying stupid things. Everybody with
Sarkeesian has done video series on the tropes in popular media, too. She can't cover all the bases, and she's picked games this time around because she likes playing games.
I don't think that other media have been left out of criticism at all. (The Bechedel test, for instance, was first meant to apply to movies.)
But let's pretend you're right; let's pretend that the game industry--the industry that I work in and that pays my rent--really IS being singled out.
So what? It's GOOD for the industry. We NEED this criticism. If this industry and this medium were the only one that could legitimately hold its head up and say that it was less sexist, that would be great. If you look at it purely financially, I think it would be a huge boon. It's a relatively small change in behaviour that could drive a fairly large change in market.
Economics aside, it would be amazing if this industry were on the forefront of driving cultural and social change towards a more equitable society. Sexism is a real problem everywhere I look. I've been working as a programmer in this industry for 13 years. I've worked with 3 female programmers that I can remember. THREE. They were all exceptionally good at their jobs, too, and deeply nerdy gamers. But only three. It's a sad number. It makes no sense.
I watch Sarkeesian's videos and I enjoy them a great deal. She's INCREDIBLY repetitive on the point that you can still enjoy something while seriously critiquing its flaws. (I think she's said it in every single video she's done.) She's made me really think about the things I see in the games I make as well as the games I play. Whether or not she's 100% correct, every single time is not actually the point--she's just trying to get to think about the media you consume, and that's important.
I don't really think your point has much merit. I don't think it's true, and even if the community were being singled out, I think the community will come out ahead in the end. I think you've got to go a lot further and show a lot more evidence to claim that gamers are being bullied by some vast conspiracy.
Damnit. I was going to use some mod points, but I feel like I need to respond here.
Yes, a lot of men die in games. It's not really up for debate.
But when women die in games, they die as props or as a kind of sick joke (and it's usually a really unintentional joke, honestly). It's more a reflection of our attitudes at large about what a woman is worth than something solely limited to games per se, but that doesn't make it okay to have it in games.
I'm a (veteran--13 years, 3 companies) game developer, and I watch each of her videos with a lot of interest. She's not trying to make me feel bad, she's trying to make me pay attention to what I'm doing. I make games to entertain people, not to make a broad swathe of the population feel bad.
I'd like to stop using women as props in our games. I'd like to see more women as protagonists or just interesting characters in general. If there's a good reason to show a woman or a man dead in the game, that will still be okay. But when it happens, I'm going to be running through a little checklist in my head from now on. Was it necessary? Does it advance the game? Is it really a crucial bit of atmosphere, or could we do without it? Would it just be a good idea to hold off on showing this bit of violence given what we know about rape statistics and the deaths of sex workers?
From my perspective as a game developer (even though I'm a programmer), she's not blunting my ability to tell a story, but honing my desire to focus on the important parts of a story and make it better for everyone. This is criticism that the industry needs, and needs to respond to if it wants to be credible in the world. AAA games are huge and expensive to make. We can't afford to be sloppy with our storytelling any more. Players are interested in next generation graphics and AI and all that fancy stuff, but we need more strong critique and scrutiny to bring us up to the next generation of narrative and storytelling that I think they also desire.
(And to the trolls that seem to be lurking in the thread, do you notice how two people can have a discussion without it devolving into name calling and threats? There's zero need for any of the shit she's had to put up with. Adults can have discussions.)
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Well, I'm not sure. But don't worry, I'm sure the order page won't have the same capacity problems!
It won't, actually. Apple's prices don't drop in the middle of a cycle. It'll cost exactly the same in July of next year. In August, you may see carriers cut the prices to entice people to clear their existing stock.
How have people voted this up? I'm not a political scholar, but the goals of communism are generally diametrically opposed to rule by a dictator.
Communism works on small scales. Family scales, generally. I'd give my sister money if she needed it. She'd give me something that I needed. We don't have an economic transaction--we do things based on our mutual benefit. We share because we know that in the future, it'll probably come out even.
It seems to me that real communism wouldn't require anyone to dictate anything because people would be acting communally. They would willingly pool their resources, share and take care of one another. Tribal societies are and were like this.
Scaling up communism has always been the problem. It's easy to come up with scenarios where it works on small scales. It's the scaling up that lets the tyrants in. There's always an opportunist that wants to be the top of the heap. Those people aren't communists at all, I reckon.
Capitalism, so far, has scaled better than communism. There are a lot of problems with it (and most of them seem to be a matter of governments being too hands off, rather than too hands on, if you ask me), but it seems to have done a better job distributing resources than communism has. But if millions of people ever decide, en masse, to give up their possessions and work communally and REFUSE to allow a dictator or a leader, maybe it would work.
For all intents and purposes, it does replace a camcorder because most people only want a few minutes worth of video.
As with most Apple announcements, Apple is happy to ignore the existence of everything else in the same product category. The 5s also replaces a camcorder by the standards that he's talking about, and so do Android smartphones.
He's right that as a broad group, smartphones have destroyed the camera and camcorder industry. You only buy one of those devices if you want something fairly upscale, or that has features that are cumbersome or impossible to include in a smartphone (macro shots, extreme ruggedness and portability a la go pro, etc.)
They're not launching until 2015, so I think basically they're hedging their bets that they might be able to get a slightly better battery in 6 months than they can right now. It's very much like Apple to play their cards close to their chest in instances like this. They won't be able to say how long it lasts for a few months because they literally don't know, and they won't make up numbers that haven't been validated in some way.
However long it lasts, though, it's not long enough. I'd want 5 days, minimum.
It's a pretty piece of jewellery, though. On that front, they're at the front of the class again.
A lot of other people have gone over what's wrong with your argument, so I'll try not to rehash that too much.
I'll admit that my 13 years as a professional programmer (after my degree) are years that I would say are more fundamental to my general programming skill than my CS degree, but I learned a lot of things in University that are hard to come by elsewhere. I learned a lot of things that aren't about computers, and that's been really helpful.
Being good at programming isn't the only thing that makes a good programmer, it turns out. I'd way rather have 5 programmers on my team that rank as 7-8 out of 10 than 5 10/10 programmers. In my experience, those guys are too interested in being good at programming and not interested enough in making something that's going to work for everyone. I'm in the games industry, and our programmers need to be able to talk to artists and designers. You need a few of those really exemplary programmers here and there, but being broadly interested in things is way more useful than being able to pick apart a C++ compiler.
But also, I have a lot of options available to me now. I won't always work on games. I could probably jump ship to an environmental science firm without too much effort because my minor was in Earth and Atmospheric science. I speak geologist and meteorologist and even some palaeontologist. So much programming is undertaken by scientists that have no other choice but to program their own tools because the programmers of the world don't understand the problem space and it would be harder for them to learn the problem space than for the scientist to learn how to code a bit.
Lastly, I think you misunderstand computing science as a discipline. The fact that I finished my degree 13 years ago doesn't mean that much of it is out of date. The optimal rasterization of a line is still the same, algorithmically. All the graph theory that I learned is permanently correct--and permanently useful. Compiler implementations change, but compiler theory is largely the same. The stuff that you learn in computing science is actually really fundamental, which is what prevents it from going out of date. I can't stop learning without being left behind--the same as you--but I learned things up front that will always be mathematically, provably true. I'm not saying all of it is immediately useful (I think a lot of it isn't, in my field) but just because it's old doesn't mean that it's useless.
I wouldn't discount hiring a programmer without a degree. I've worked with several excellent--really, truly excellent--programmers that came to the industry without anything other than motivation. But don't tell me that just because out of my 18 years of being academically involved with computers, 4 of those were spent mostly in the classroom that I don't know how to fucking code.
This is how the games industry works. This was particularly necessary in the previous generation when writing 'optimised' code wasn't guaranteed to really be that much faster depending on the platform. The PS3 is fast, but making things run well on it involves jumping through a lot of hoops and understanding what data needs to be in what bit of memory at what time. As long as the general developers were writing code that wasn't obnoxiously slow, it was fine.
It's almost always a surprise when you run instrumentation tools and find out what the real bottlenecks are. There are a lot of interactions between various agents in large-scale games, so doing anything other than writing obvious, clean code is just making trouble for everyone else.
Some of the devices are powered by Samsung's Exynos chips, so Samsung probably stepped on the patents there. That's what I got out of it. Remember that Samsung doesn't just use other people's stuff--they do a lot of their own manufacturing when it suits them.
Seriously. You've got complaints, and Apple has solutions. If you think that this sort of service is essential enough to legislate, you should just buy from the company that does this thing you want. Does it outweigh the advantages of your Android phone? You've got an LG Optimus that you've complained about before, so the thing you seem to be concerned about is how much this phone costs.
I don't understand why you don't seem to get that your user experience is correlated with what you're willing to pay. You can get a NICE Android phone that avoids the problems you talked about in your other article, or you could get an iPhone. If having a quick turnover on a replacement phone is ALSO important to you, you're pretty much looking at Apple to fulfil your needs.
You can get the things you want by putting a little more money on the table. You don't seem to object to the notion that some of these things are costs to the store and you even say that you may have been willing to pay the $50 restocking fee in retrospect. Just gather up your pennies, pay the fees up front, and stop complaining about service that's lacking when a viable alternative exists.
But if price really is your main consideration, just buy a Moto E or G, phones that don't cost much that review really well (if I recall, you can get a G for less than your insurance claim + restocking fee that you were talking about--off contract) and be done with it. Honestly.
I took standard analysis. I wasn't in honours. It was a requirement for my computing science degree. Abstract Algebra *wasn't* a requirement for my computing science degree, but I took it anyway. For some reason, it was packed with education students, but it was what you'd expect--rings, fields, groups, etc.
I'm not saying that arts students are somehow also scientific powerhouses, merely that they've got science requirements to meet, and not all of them are fluff. Logic 101 was popular because it could fulfil either a science or an art requirement. Geology 101 was popular despite having a lab component because as these things go, it wasn't actually that difficult. Either way, those kinds of classes could help explain why science literacy is so high in this country. Even decent exposure to one or two classes could make a big difference.
Oh! I just remembered that you could actually Major in Mathematics at the U of A and get a BA. You'd do all the same Math courses as someone in the Science faculty, but your other requirements would be more arts focused.
I covered that. Read my comment again.
I'm tired of hearing how a calorie isn't a calorie. The problem isn't with calories. The problem is that people don't understand how to measure them when they're eating, or worse, that they don't measure them at all. You will starve eating junk food if you don't eat enough calories a day. You will get fat eating 6000 calories of apples a day. Calories are a measure of ENERGY, not QUALITY. They are neutral in determining how good a food is for you.
My metabolism and microbiome are essentially guaranteed to be different than yours, but we can still both be a healthy weight. It still is about the simple balance between calories in and calories out.
Claiming that calories are different from food to food is a different sort of quick fix problem. It encourages people to find the 'right' calories, and those don't exist. A variety of different food should be eaten to provide the best nutrition, and you should understand that different foods have different numbers of calories. Eat lots of fruits and vegetables. ALSO eat fat and protein. The body needs a lot of stuff.
If you don't mean to contradict the tautology that a calorie is a calorie, *don't say that*. Say something meaningful instead.
It wasn't as simple as that, honestly. And there were lots of arts students in my calculus and algebra classes.
I'm just contesting your 75% declaration. I don't have a better number to give, though. :)
I read the article but not the study. It sounds like they simply didn't restrict the calories, not that calories were equivalent. It also sounds like there's a natural calorie restriction going on by virtue of higher satiety when eating a low carb diet with more fat.
These results don't surprise me. I'm athletic, but I've moved away from carbs for various reasons. I don't keep bread in the house and rarely eat pasta. My weight and body fat have definitely been more controllable this year than previously. My exercise volume is up slightly, but not enough to explain the body composition difference.
Small meals also beget small meals, I've found. For instance, the mornings that I'm hungriest are the mornings after my biggest dinners. If I eat so much I feel a bit overfed one evening, the next morning I'm STARVING. You just feel like you need to fill that space. If you work to limit your meals, you come to balance at a new normal.
I just watched that video I linked you over again, and it seems to give conflicting info. It implies 5k for a resting day but then says 5k for an active day.
I do know from my own cycling that a 3-4 hour road race is by itself somewhere in the vicinity of 3k calories. I can easily believe Phelps' training routine took him up to the higher thousands of calories. Anyway.
Phelps was burning a lot more calories than that on an active day, actually. His BASAL metabolic rate was probably 4-5k. (I think I read that his peak was something like 12k kcals a day?)
There's a great little video about Shane Perkins on vimeo--he was a velodrome sprinter. He was at about 5k resting. On really active days, he literally couldn't digest enough food to fulfil his nutritional requirements. http://vimeo.com/26494905
Look, a calorie is a calorie. If you get a calorie from an apple and a calorie from fat, they are the same amount of energy. By definition.
The thing is that an apple is less calorie dense than an equivalent amount of butter. And you're right, how well your body extracts calories is a factor, too. But we're dealing with thermodynamics here. There's an upper bound to the number of calories in an apple, and an upper bound on how many are in that chunk of butter. (It's about 4kcal per gram of carbs, if I'm remembering right, and 9kcal per gram of fat.) You can't extract more energy than is there. If you and I both eat an apple, we're confined by the UPPER boundary of calories.
Even more simplistically, you can't gain more mass than is in your food. You don't extract energy from the air. Your gut microbiome can't be more than 100% efficient. (It can't even be 100% efficient.)
I'm not denying there are knock-on effects from eating certain foods. Satiety and insulin and all that stuff plays a part, certainly. But if you're having trouble measuring the number of calories in your food and it seems like there are more calories than there should be, it's because your measurements are off, not because the value of a calorie has changed from food to food. Stop underestimating your intake and overestimating your output.
I had a lot of arts students in my science classes. There was a Geology class with no lab requirement, and it picked up the name 'rocks for jocks', since PhysEd and Arts students could fit it in as an 'easy' option. At my University (the University of Alberta), you were generally forced to take a certain number of credits from other departments unless you were in Honours. I was doing a CS degree, but I took a lot of Geology. In the Arts realm, I chose Comparative Literature and took some Latin.
I'm not sure where your stats are from or if they're even Canadian. Maybe the UofA was weird--do you have a citation?
http://www.cbc.ca/newsblogs/yo...
51% of the Canadian population has attended post-secondary education. That means most Canadians had to perform fairly well in their science classes, and in University, were probably forced to take at least a few science courses even if they were in an unrelated field.
The worst thing for Canadian Health Care is the American news. It gives us a false sense of security and superiority. :/
Bilingual conversations are really common here. I'm from Alberta originally, and my spoken French isn't great (I can get by, but I don't like speaking it). That said, I have plenty of friends that speak to me in French. I answer in English. We just go with whatever's easiest. Montreallers are really easy going that way.
Usually it's just faster for them to switch to English, though. Quebec French has its own peculiarities, so I found that on the few times where I started a conversation in French, it would usually switch to English just to hurry things along.
If you watched her latest video all the way to the end, she does cover this. It's not enough to merely show suffering if there's no path to rectify the suffering. It's not really doing its job of drawing attention to the problem so much as making it a prop so that we have a reason to shoot someone. The violence that we commit becomes justified through the superficial application of the abuse of a woman in the game.
Besides, games DON'T accurately reflect what's going on. First of all, most rape and sexual assault is perpetrated by a relative or a friend or someone close to the victim. It's rarely a bad guy lurking in an alley. So that type of violence is over-represented in games. Second, in this case, there's some merit to the argument that we don't depict domestic violence against males enough. If what we're trying to do is draw attention and be accurate, we should probably include that more often.
But most importantly, there's a question as to the value of this 'realism', even if it were accurate. A lot of terrible things happen in the world that we see fit to ignore. Physics, for one thing. We also don't seem to care about going to the bathroom, cancer or getting oil changes. We're willing to suspend disbelief; this is probably an area where we could live without the casual gendered violence that we've really become accustomed to.
Men die in the same way! And in much more gruesome and jovial manners. I think when this occasionally happens to women and it's considered more important is more of a reflection of our attitudes of men's lives being less important than women's than any negative view there is of women. You can't honestly believe that male video game characters do not die in heinous ways more than female characters. You don't think it's interesting that you find that totally normal for men and something that needs to be stopped for women? Women cannot be the same part of a narrative as a men unless they can actually be put in the same part. Which according to Sarkeesian and yourself they cannot be because *reasons*.
So if you watch the latest video, she does touch on that somewhat. I'm going to assume you haven't (or at least, that someone reading our discussion hasn't) and point out the salient bits.
First, that when men die in these games, they're generally an antagonist or actor that actually has a measure of agency. They're killed because they were involved in a conflict that revolved around more than just their gender or their victimhood.
Second, part of why you're gruesomely killing the men in these games is often justified by the violence that the men are (arbitrarily) enacting against women. The women die as props to show off how bad someone is in a wild caricature of evil. She's right in pointing out that violence against women is most often perpetrated by 'normal' men. A woman is FAR more likely to be raped by a friend or family member than a random bad man on the street.
Third, men die in ways that aren't overtly sexualised. Women die on beds in lingerie with their legs spread and their tits hanging out. They're still T&A even after brutal violence.
She's right that sexual and sexualised violence is used as a lazy shortcut to show how bad a person is. You can instantly justify murdering someone brutally (to bring it back to your complaint) if we've just shown them as hitting a woman or raping them. It's not the nicest cycle.
Given that we know men are far more likely to be murdered or die in war would it not be a good idea to hold off on this bit of violence? You can do what you want in your games. But when you're trying to tell other people they're being bad or "insensitive" based on the games they create or like to play you actually are trying to make them feel bad so that they stop.
The worst part about her criticisms is that she actually doesn't understand the tropes she's talking about. Or she just makes up new tropes. Tropes are pretty much a necessary part of storytelling. That's why we call them tropes. They've been around since the advent of storytelling. All stories are just rehashes and variations of old ones.
I don't think people have to stop doing anything. But I think they DO need to think about what they're doing, understand whether it's appropriate narratively, and make those decisions with open eyes. Speaking personally, for the first ten years of my career, I definitely didn't think about this stuff as much. Maybe I would've spoken up more about certain things if I had.
I understand that the word 'trope' actually has several meanings, but in this context, she's using the word 'trope' as 'cliché'. You DON'T need to write something that relies heavily on clichés. At the very least, you don't need to write something that heavily relies on the sorts of tropes that may be damaging to our ideas about women.
I really can't agree with that. Using her same irrational argument style you could paint that same problems onto any media. You think playwriting needs to respond to this criticism if it wants to be credible in the world? Shakespeare the misogynist! The gaming community tried to respond with the appropriate "you're going to have to do better" and explained why to her. She chose instead to focus on people making fun of her for saying stupid things. Everybody with
Sarkeesian has done video series on the tropes in popular media, too. She can't cover all the bases, and she's picked games this time around because she likes playing games.
I don't think that other media have been left out of criticism at all. (The Bechedel test, for instance, was first meant to apply to movies.)
But let's pretend you're right; let's pretend that the game industry--the industry that I work in and that pays my rent--really IS being singled out.
So what? It's GOOD for the industry. We NEED this criticism. If this industry and this medium were the only one that could legitimately hold its head up and say that it was less sexist, that would be great. If you look at it purely financially, I think it would be a huge boon. It's a relatively small change in behaviour that could drive a fairly large change in market.
Economics aside, it would be amazing if this industry were on the forefront of driving cultural and social change towards a more equitable society. Sexism is a real problem everywhere I look. I've been working as a programmer in this industry for 13 years. I've worked with 3 female programmers that I can remember. THREE. They were all exceptionally good at their jobs, too, and deeply nerdy gamers. But only three. It's a sad number. It makes no sense.
I watch Sarkeesian's videos and I enjoy them a great deal. She's INCREDIBLY repetitive on the point that you can still enjoy something while seriously critiquing its flaws. (I think she's said it in every single video she's done.) She's made me really think about the things I see in the games I make as well as the games I play. Whether or not she's 100% correct, every single time is not actually the point--she's just trying to get to think about the media you consume, and that's important.
I don't really think your point has much merit. I don't think it's true, and even if the community were being singled out, I think the community will come out ahead in the end. I think you've got to go a lot further and show a lot more evidence to claim that gamers are being bullied by some vast conspiracy.
Damnit. I was going to use some mod points, but I feel like I need to respond here.
Yes, a lot of men die in games. It's not really up for debate.
But when women die in games, they die as props or as a kind of sick joke (and it's usually a really unintentional joke, honestly). It's more a reflection of our attitudes at large about what a woman is worth than something solely limited to games per se, but that doesn't make it okay to have it in games.
I'm a (veteran--13 years, 3 companies) game developer, and I watch each of her videos with a lot of interest. She's not trying to make me feel bad, she's trying to make me pay attention to what I'm doing. I make games to entertain people, not to make a broad swathe of the population feel bad.
I'd like to stop using women as props in our games. I'd like to see more women as protagonists or just interesting characters in general. If there's a good reason to show a woman or a man dead in the game, that will still be okay. But when it happens, I'm going to be running through a little checklist in my head from now on. Was it necessary? Does it advance the game? Is it really a crucial bit of atmosphere, or could we do without it? Would it just be a good idea to hold off on showing this bit of violence given what we know about rape statistics and the deaths of sex workers?
From my perspective as a game developer (even though I'm a programmer), she's not blunting my ability to tell a story, but honing my desire to focus on the important parts of a story and make it better for everyone. This is criticism that the industry needs, and needs to respond to if it wants to be credible in the world. AAA games are huge and expensive to make. We can't afford to be sloppy with our storytelling any more. Players are interested in next generation graphics and AI and all that fancy stuff, but we need more strong critique and scrutiny to bring us up to the next generation of narrative and storytelling that I think they also desire.
(And to the trolls that seem to be lurking in the thread, do you notice how two people can have a discussion without it devolving into name calling and threats? There's zero need for any of the shit she's had to put up with. Adults can have discussions.)