MP3 fell under computing devices, not home audio. Same as CD-R's, actually; computers were allowed to write to CD-R anything they liked, while standalone recorders had to use those special "music" CD-R's.
What's funny is that not going to an Ivy was for me the sort of experience Maugham wrote about in The Verger, which has always been one of my favorite short stories. If I'd gone there, I'd almost certainly make quite a lot less money than I do now.
Glad to hear things have improved. It was quite hairy twenty years ago. "Giving a bit" back then was approx 40% of your (the student's) assets as expected contribution per year.
Truly poor people pay no tuition, true. I'm not sure what the room and board policy is (fairly safe bet it's not cheap) nor about books, etc., but even if they are covered there are substantial costs associated with college that do not have to do with the college itself, such as transportation to and from (e.g., dorms aren't open over holidays). Most students in that situation are better off taking a proper full ride from a slightly lesser school, since it will not be taken out from under them if they or their parents make some extra money one year (unlike need-based aid, which will be affected by expected family and student contribution).
Yes, I was admitted, no, I didn't go, and that is why. I needed security, something my parents were ill equipped to provide. Why do you think high expectations Asian father macros (just making a point, I'm not from an Asian or immigrant family) all talk about med school or engineering? Reliable professional jobs are a great place for middle class kids with brains; they can send their own kids to the big name schools. Was it the right choice? I aimed too low for my lesser school and although I made about $5000 a year from excess scholarship money and graduated without debt I probably could have gotten the same offer from a better place, so it is hard to tell - but then I make mid six figures in an area with a very low cost of living, so it's not like I ended up in the gutter.
That's the central thesis of the biology behind the Atkins diet: carbohydrates cause excessive fat storage in a significant portion of people. These people are known as "overweight". Getting rid of carbohydrates eliminates their abnormal insulin reactions and leads to them leaking fat from their tissue at proper rates. They feel more energetic, so they tend to be able to eat more calories while still losing weight. It's not the exercise that causes the weight loss; it's the excess energy from weight loss that causes people to exercise.
I've plateaued a couple of times. Started last March, had a plateau in early June for a couple of weeks, big spurt in October, obviously a slowdown at the holidays as I took five days off from the diet for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and parties, and I've just started making progress again since maybe first week of January. Based on my experience I find I lose a lot faster if I'm very strict, so my default is less than 10g a day, basically seasonings, salad dressing, and cheeses only. I've also found that doing an occasional intermittent fast can kick-start the process by making sure you're in continuous ketosis for a while - IME I find it easiest to eat a nice big breakfast (usually just bacon, actually) and then not eat until the next morning, especially when I know I'm going to have a busy day at work and will appreciate not having to break for lunch.
I'd definitely cut your carbs, just to accelerate things, but I'd also ignore the scale and use clothes to measure yourself (since you're exercising). Go buy a cheap pair of jeans at Old Navy that are just a little too tight and use them to measure your progress.
Do anonymous cowards misread everything that is put in front of them? The USA does what it does, as great powers always have. Sometimes it overreaches; sometimes it is too timid. Is it right to do so? I'd say that the net benefit to the world of the combined Pax Britannica et Americana has been almost immeasurably large and far more valuable than the gold and silver than the Spaniards looted from Central and South America. That doesn't make the actions of the USA (or Britain, for that matter) right, but it does mean that there are two sides to the equation.
exploiting them for thier resources
Yeah, that's why people talk about how invading Iraq was a great idea because the captured oil more than pays for the cost of occupation!
Isn't it tragic? Since I started doing this I've run into plenty of people at the hospital (I'm a physician) whose attitude toward Atkins is "Well, it does work, but...". Bizarre. I was furious for months over having the fact that oh, unlike all the others, this diet actually works for most people who follow it professionally hidden from me in order for a handful of researchers and nutritionists to feel better about themselves. Now I just try to tell everyone I can, because getting mad at those jokers isn't going to accomplish anything except making me look like a nut. BTW, totally impressed by your weight loss. I wish I could have kept up the 10 lbs/mo for as long as you did. Big props.
I've been doing a lot of cycling which makes it easy to shift excess weight
I just gave you a completely on-point counterexample. You find it easy to shift excess weight while cycling, likely because your body metabolizes carbohydrates properly. Others (like the lady I know at work) don't. If you find the prospect hard to believe, consider pregnancy, which is famous for odd food choices, before you tell me that hormones don't play a role in what we eat. I know it sounds insane because you've learned the conventional wisdom, but the CW is wrong. If you think you can ignore the sensation of real hunger picking at your sensorium 24/7, you're either one in a million or you've never tried.
reducing calorific intake below calorific expenditure will result in eventual loss of weight due to simple physics
This is the fundamental disconnect between basically-thin and basically-fat people, because the former group has never really felt what it's like to be truly hungry all the time even when you're overweight, and the latter has. If you don't believe me, eat less until you've cut a third or more of your daily caloric intake off your diet and see how you feel. The deficit between what your body accepts as adequate to maintain a steady state of weight and what you consider an acceptable minimum intake is what matters here, not the absolute value, because everyone is different. Mind you: if you can't do that, your explanation is it's your fault for being a glutton tied to your stomach. If it's easy for overweight people to cut a thousand calories, it should be easy for everyone else too. But it's not, because in the overwhelming majority of cases gluttony is not the problem. I out-eat my father-in-law in terms of calories, though I weigh about 100 pounds less, because I don't touch the carbs.
Calories in = calories out is only correct at a cellular level. I'll give you the short version of why: let us assume that there is a hormone that could cause the liver and muscle tissue to pull sugars out of circulation, and that could cause fat tissue to store fatty acids as triglycerides. It exists, and it's insulin. In that case, it is entirely possible that the circulating stores of energy in the bloodstream could run amazingly low in response to this hormone, triggering a sense of hunger (which is clearly neurologically driven - otherwise gastric bypass would be a cure for obesity) even while the abundant stores of energy (those sugars and fatty acids) in the bloodstream are being stored rather than utilized. The person then eats more food, but they're not becoming obese because they overeat - they're overeating because they're storing their energy intake as fat rather than using it and are chronically energy-deprived in the only place that counts when you're regulating food intake: the bloodstream. We don't try to pretend that teenage boys grow because they're overeating - their appetite increases because their body is growing. Why is this completely the accepted wisdom when the growth is vertical, but not when it's horizontal? One of the major hormones involved is called insulin-like growth factor!
If it doesn't rot, then it's not good food.
Well, that's very true, and actually a pretty clear path to a low-carbohydrate diet. What doesn't rot? Refined carbohydrates... go read one of those books I mentioned (they're on Pirate Bay, if you don't want to pay $12), or go read eatingacademy.com. Taubes is an experienced science reporter who has published academic articles, and the eatingacademy guy is a Stanford med school grad who did a surgery residency at Johns Hopkins, so we're not exactly talking about a couple of backwoods practitioners trying something out on their cousins.
Only at a cellular level. As soon as you have more than one cell, you find that hormones interfere. This is the point where you really need to read something like Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories (the longer, more scientific of the two) or Why We Get Fat (the shorter, more accessible of the two).
I'm not a biologist or nutritionist
Don't let that stop you. I'm a physician, and I was giving out the same awful advice even as I saw it didn't work in my own life, because that's what I was taught (see, at least you had an excuse - I was supposed to know better). Learn this stuff and make up a plan that suits you.
Sorry I didn't put this in the other comment, but it just occurred to me. There's a woman at work who is about 50 years old and at least 50 pounds overweight, but she's an avid bike rider, routinely doing 50+ miles a weekend in addition to her weekday workouts, year-round, in the South. She has plenty of muscle mass, which I know because I've watched her move heavy objects with ease. And her meals at work are pretty modest - she might go home and gulp a gallon of ice cream every night, but I don't think she does.
What is she supposed to do to lose weight? Increase from ten hours of vigorous exercise a week to twenty? Forty?
Spoken like someone who's never been overweight by more than a couple of pounds, or perhaps has always struggled to gain weight. One of my college roommates was like that; his lunch plate was piled high with potatoes and meat covered in sauces, and he always had a piece of pie or cake and usually a cookie too, for dessert, and he didn't do any exercise, but at 6'2" he never weighed over 140 pounds.
Are some people gluttonous fatasses? Yes, I suppose so. Funnily enough, though, if you eliminate sugar and starch from their diet, most people can lose quite a bit of weight while eating all they care to eat. Obesity is enough to cause massive social stigma, significant professional consequences (for most), and bad health, and all fat people already know they're fat. If it were simple for them to stop eating, they would, but most really don't consume any more than a thin person of roughly equal lean mass when they're at a steady-state weight (which most are - the occasional 700-pound nightmare aside). They have a disease that can be treated in many cases by altering what they eat, not how much they eat. This isn't new; it's old knowledge that we've just ignored.
Hah! My wife is an epileptologist. A few months ago, she was at a conference and the topic of ketogenic diets came up. Several of the people were from pediatric institutions and reported that they had great results but that it was often hard to get compliance, especially if the rest of the family wouldn't go along. She piped up and mentioned what I was doing - and they told her that she was wrong, that nobody could keep up a ketosis for seven months (my duration at the time). Oh well; there are none so blind as those who will not see.
The last time I was this thin, I was eating 800-1000 calories a day and was constantly hungry.
The line about "I can totally eat like this forever" is a comparison between eating like this and eating like I did the last time I lost a lot of weight. One is sustainable, because it doesn't make me hungry. One isn't, because it does. Just trying to help more people escape their weight.
It's roughly equivalent to Atkins induction, actually. Just out of curiosity, why would you think it would punish the liver? Synthesizing ketones or synthesizing glycogen or fatty acids, either way it's going to be synthesizing one form of metabolically available energy or another.
Metabolically, alcohol is no different than fat. Animals can't make three-carbon fragments out of two-carbon fragments. Protein can be turned into sugar, but alcohol and fatty acids can't. And it's the sugar that makes your adipose tissue blow up, via the effect of insulin.
Oh, I didn't mean to claim I did any of the work to "rediscover" it - ultimately I was inspired by Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories - but I find that calling it Atkins leads to two problems: people who think about someone who is on maintenance and think that's how I plan to eat, and thus serve me stuff I don't want to eat, and people who are just batshit nuts Atkins haters.
The hardest I've ever pushed myself was, as noted, in high school playing football, in a reasonably demanding program - weights four times a week (I could bench 250, squat 370 - not enough for Division I, but also not "I walk around the block once a week and don't get the point of exercise"), three days of three to four hours of full-contact practice a week, plus games. I was losing weight while eating north of 5000 calories a day just to try to keep up. If that's not hard enough to get a runner's high, then indeed my brain must be broken.
This is much slower than what can be done by a carbine
It's a lot slower than what a carbine is mechanically capable of doing, but it's not a lot slower than what a human trigger finger is capable of producing. I don't know that I've ever fired over three rounds a second in anything less than full auto, and I've got a Ruger 10/22 I've worn the crap out of. I guess I might make it to four or five rounds a second, if I were willing to abandon accuracy as a goal.
Slashdot Mirror
MP3 fell under computing devices, not home audio. Same as CD-R's, actually; computers were allowed to write to CD-R anything they liked, while standalone recorders had to use those special "music" CD-R's.
Ok... never heard of that and neither has Google. Snipe hunting on /.?
Huh? How? You mean the "continue editing" on preview, or a real after-you-submitted edit?
They probably invested in fax->computer image software back when digital signatures were new but faxed ones were established case law.
What's funny is that not going to an Ivy was for me the sort of experience Maugham wrote about in The Verger, which has always been one of my favorite short stories. If I'd gone there, I'd almost certainly make quite a lot less money than I do now.
Glad to hear things have improved. It was quite hairy twenty years ago. "Giving a bit" back then was approx 40% of your (the student's) assets as expected contribution per year.
Truly poor people pay no tuition, true. I'm not sure what the room and board policy is (fairly safe bet it's not cheap) nor about books, etc., but even if they are covered there are substantial costs associated with college that do not have to do with the college itself, such as transportation to and from (e.g., dorms aren't open over holidays). Most students in that situation are better off taking a proper full ride from a slightly lesser school, since it will not be taken out from under them if they or their parents make some extra money one year (unlike need-based aid, which will be affected by expected family and student contribution).
Yes, I was admitted, no, I didn't go, and that is why. I needed security, something my parents were ill equipped to provide. Why do you think high expectations Asian father macros (just making a point, I'm not from an Asian or immigrant family) all talk about med school or engineering? Reliable professional jobs are a great place for middle class kids with brains; they can send their own kids to the big name schools. Was it the right choice? I aimed too low for my lesser school and although I made about $5000 a year from excess scholarship money and graduated without debt I probably could have gotten the same offer from a better place, so it is hard to tell - but then I make mid six figures in an area with a very low cost of living, so it's not like I ended up in the gutter.
That's the central thesis of the biology behind the Atkins diet: carbohydrates cause excessive fat storage in a significant portion of people. These people are known as "overweight". Getting rid of carbohydrates eliminates their abnormal insulin reactions and leads to them leaking fat from their tissue at proper rates. They feel more energetic, so they tend to be able to eat more calories while still losing weight. It's not the exercise that causes the weight loss; it's the excess energy from weight loss that causes people to exercise.
I've plateaued a couple of times. Started last March, had a plateau in early June for a couple of weeks, big spurt in October, obviously a slowdown at the holidays as I took five days off from the diet for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and parties, and I've just started making progress again since maybe first week of January. Based on my experience I find I lose a lot faster if I'm very strict, so my default is less than 10g a day, basically seasonings, salad dressing, and cheeses only. I've also found that doing an occasional intermittent fast can kick-start the process by making sure you're in continuous ketosis for a while - IME I find it easiest to eat a nice big breakfast (usually just bacon, actually) and then not eat until the next morning, especially when I know I'm going to have a busy day at work and will appreciate not having to break for lunch.
I'd definitely cut your carbs, just to accelerate things, but I'd also ignore the scale and use clothes to measure yourself (since you're exercising). Go buy a cheap pair of jeans at Old Navy that are just a little too tight and use them to measure your progress.
exploiting them for thier resources
Yeah, that's why people talk about how invading Iraq was a great idea because the captured oil more than pays for the cost of occupation!
Isn't it tragic? Since I started doing this I've run into plenty of people at the hospital (I'm a physician) whose attitude toward Atkins is "Well, it does work, but...". Bizarre. I was furious for months over having the fact that oh, unlike all the others, this diet actually works for most people who follow it professionally hidden from me in order for a handful of researchers and nutritionists to feel better about themselves. Now I just try to tell everyone I can, because getting mad at those jokers isn't going to accomplish anything except making me look like a nut. BTW, totally impressed by your weight loss. I wish I could have kept up the 10 lbs/mo for as long as you did. Big props.
I've been doing a lot of cycling which makes it easy to shift excess weight
I just gave you a completely on-point counterexample. You find it easy to shift excess weight while cycling, likely because your body metabolizes carbohydrates properly. Others (like the lady I know at work) don't. If you find the prospect hard to believe, consider pregnancy, which is famous for odd food choices, before you tell me that hormones don't play a role in what we eat. I know it sounds insane because you've learned the conventional wisdom, but the CW is wrong. If you think you can ignore the sensation of real hunger picking at your sensorium 24/7, you're either one in a million or you've never tried.
reducing calorific intake below calorific expenditure will result in eventual loss of weight due to simple physics
This is the fundamental disconnect between basically-thin and basically-fat people, because the former group has never really felt what it's like to be truly hungry all the time even when you're overweight, and the latter has. If you don't believe me, eat less until you've cut a third or more of your daily caloric intake off your diet and see how you feel. The deficit between what your body accepts as adequate to maintain a steady state of weight and what you consider an acceptable minimum intake is what matters here, not the absolute value, because everyone is different. Mind you: if you can't do that, your explanation is it's your fault for being a glutton tied to your stomach. If it's easy for overweight people to cut a thousand calories, it should be easy for everyone else too. But it's not, because in the overwhelming majority of cases gluttony is not the problem. I out-eat my father-in-law in terms of calories, though I weigh about 100 pounds less, because I don't touch the carbs.
Calories in = calories out is only correct at a cellular level. I'll give you the short version of why: let us assume that there is a hormone that could cause the liver and muscle tissue to pull sugars out of circulation, and that could cause fat tissue to store fatty acids as triglycerides. It exists, and it's insulin. In that case, it is entirely possible that the circulating stores of energy in the bloodstream could run amazingly low in response to this hormone, triggering a sense of hunger (which is clearly neurologically driven - otherwise gastric bypass would be a cure for obesity) even while the abundant stores of energy (those sugars and fatty acids) in the bloodstream are being stored rather than utilized. The person then eats more food, but they're not becoming obese because they overeat - they're overeating because they're storing their energy intake as fat rather than using it and are chronically energy-deprived in the only place that counts when you're regulating food intake: the bloodstream. We don't try to pretend that teenage boys grow because they're overeating - their appetite increases because their body is growing. Why is this completely the accepted wisdom when the growth is vertical, but not when it's horizontal? One of the major hormones involved is called insulin-like growth factor!
If it doesn't rot, then it's not good food.
Well, that's very true, and actually a pretty clear path to a low-carbohydrate diet. What doesn't rot? Refined carbohydrates... go read one of those books I mentioned (they're on Pirate Bay, if you don't want to pay $12), or go read eatingacademy.com. Taubes is an experienced science reporter who has published academic articles, and the eatingacademy guy is a Stanford med school grad who did a surgery residency at Johns Hopkins, so we're not exactly talking about a couple of backwoods practitioners trying something out on their cousins.
it boils down to calories in vs calories expended
Only at a cellular level. As soon as you have more than one cell, you find that hormones interfere. This is the point where you really need to read something like Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories (the longer, more scientific of the two) or Why We Get Fat (the shorter, more accessible of the two).
I'm not a biologist or nutritionist
Don't let that stop you. I'm a physician, and I was giving out the same awful advice even as I saw it didn't work in my own life, because that's what I was taught (see, at least you had an excuse - I was supposed to know better). Learn this stuff and make up a plan that suits you.
I figured that they thought the licensed guns were a cheap way to add a "realistic" touch to the game.
Sorry I didn't put this in the other comment, but it just occurred to me. There's a woman at work who is about 50 years old and at least 50 pounds overweight, but she's an avid bike rider, routinely doing 50+ miles a weekend in addition to her weekday workouts, year-round, in the South. She has plenty of muscle mass, which I know because I've watched her move heavy objects with ease. And her meals at work are pretty modest - she might go home and gulp a gallon of ice cream every night, but I don't think she does.
What is she supposed to do to lose weight? Increase from ten hours of vigorous exercise a week to twenty? Forty?
Spoken like someone who's never been overweight by more than a couple of pounds, or perhaps has always struggled to gain weight. One of my college roommates was like that; his lunch plate was piled high with potatoes and meat covered in sauces, and he always had a piece of pie or cake and usually a cookie too, for dessert, and he didn't do any exercise, but at 6'2" he never weighed over 140 pounds.
Are some people gluttonous fatasses? Yes, I suppose so. Funnily enough, though, if you eliminate sugar and starch from their diet, most people can lose quite a bit of weight while eating all they care to eat. Obesity is enough to cause massive social stigma, significant professional consequences (for most), and bad health, and all fat people already know they're fat. If it were simple for them to stop eating, they would, but most really don't consume any more than a thin person of roughly equal lean mass when they're at a steady-state weight (which most are - the occasional 700-pound nightmare aside). They have a disease that can be treated in many cases by altering what they eat, not how much they eat. This isn't new; it's old knowledge that we've just ignored.
Hah! My wife is an epileptologist. A few months ago, she was at a conference and the topic of ketogenic diets came up. Several of the people were from pediatric institutions and reported that they had great results but that it was often hard to get compliance, especially if the rest of the family wouldn't go along. She piped up and mentioned what I was doing - and they told her that she was wrong, that nobody could keep up a ketosis for seven months (my duration at the time). Oh well; there are none so blind as those who will not see.
Runner's high or not, exercise *always* leaves you in worse shape than before
Completely true, but the runner's high makes some people enjoy exercise. I hate it, because I get all the crappy and none of the good.
then compare it to a decent low calorie diet.
I have. See:
The last time I was this thin, I was eating 800-1000 calories a day and was constantly hungry.
The line about "I can totally eat like this forever" is a comparison between eating like this and eating like I did the last time I lost a lot of weight. One is sustainable, because it doesn't make me hungry. One isn't, because it does. Just trying to help more people escape their weight.
It's roughly equivalent to Atkins induction, actually. Just out of curiosity, why would you think it would punish the liver? Synthesizing ketones or synthesizing glycogen or fatty acids, either way it's going to be synthesizing one form of metabolically available energy or another.
This is going to sound completely lame, but I hate being wet. Good idea, though.
Metabolically, alcohol is no different than fat. Animals can't make three-carbon fragments out of two-carbon fragments. Protein can be turned into sugar, but alcohol and fatty acids can't. And it's the sugar that makes your adipose tissue blow up, via the effect of insulin.
Oh, I didn't mean to claim I did any of the work to "rediscover" it - ultimately I was inspired by Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories - but I find that calling it Atkins leads to two problems: people who think about someone who is on maintenance and think that's how I plan to eat, and thus serve me stuff I don't want to eat, and people who are just batshit nuts Atkins haters.
The hardest I've ever pushed myself was, as noted, in high school playing football, in a reasonably demanding program - weights four times a week (I could bench 250, squat 370 - not enough for Division I, but also not "I walk around the block once a week and don't get the point of exercise"), three days of three to four hours of full-contact practice a week, plus games. I was losing weight while eating north of 5000 calories a day just to try to keep up. If that's not hard enough to get a runner's high, then indeed my brain must be broken.
This is much slower than what can be done by a carbine
It's a lot slower than what a carbine is mechanically capable of doing, but it's not a lot slower than what a human trigger finger is capable of producing. I don't know that I've ever fired over three rounds a second in anything less than full auto, and I've got a Ruger 10/22 I've worn the crap out of. I guess I might make it to four or five rounds a second, if I were willing to abandon accuracy as a goal.