Oh come on people. Thermal depolymerization. I'm pretty sure it's not the only method of manufacturing synthetic fossil fuels, but it's certainly one of the most practical, at least currently. There are patents relating to it going back to 1939, it passed the break even point in the 90s, it went into production in 1999, there was an article on slashdot about it almost a decade ago.
This is not some radical new technology that should be available in 25 years, this is a tried and proven technology that we can put into full scale production whenever the economics justify it.
Uh, what the heck dude? The parent strongly implied that we are all DOOOOOMED, I said we're not inescapably doomed, but there is a path, albeit a difficult one, by which we can save ourselves.
Did you not catch the implication that, i dunno, maybe we should try really hard to take that path? Or do you disagree with my premise that we are not in fact doomed? Are you suggesting that we should prepare for the worst by all committing suicide right now because there is no hope?
This is a problem that is NOT just going to go away, and i for one am not happy with the idea of just giving up because people with limited vision say we're all going to die. We damn well better invent a way around the problem, whether that's by physical engineering or social engineering or more likely a combination of both.
Actually energy and economics are it. We can make more fresh water and fossil fuels, and thus more food, if we have enough energy and the will to do it. (And we can even turn waste into fossil fuel at a "net energy gain." (As opposed to just throwing the waste away that is.))
You're right that anything that grows will exhaust its resources but you're missing two key points. First, humans tend to expand the amount of resources at their disposal through new technology. Second, in general the first world is no longer experiencing population growth.
It is thus conceivable that we could expand our resources enough to get everyone up to a first world standard of living and thereby achieve a steady state population. I'm not saying this will be easy, just that disaster is not foreordained. (Well, outside the heat death of the universe anyways, but we might even figure that one out if we last long enough =)
Okay, now that i've actually tried it.... dear gods what is that thing? In Chrome the new tab page has smallish pictures of your most recently/commonly visited sites, with borders between them and titles underneath each one. I just opened up a new tab in FF and practically burned my eyes out.
There are no borders between the pictures, it's just a three by three grid of screenshots mashed together. Two of the images are of www.google.com (why two? I dunno) but it only shows the top left corner of the page. For all the other sites it shows the whole page, and then repeats the first third of the page along the right side. And then on top of the messed up images, in very small letters that still somehow manage to clash, is the name of the page/site. When you mouse over one of the images two small grey boxes appear at the upper left and upper right corners. The boxes are blank, but if you mouse over them you see that one is to "pin" the site, and the other is to remove it.
Maybe one of my plug-ins is breaking stuff (even though i told NoScript to allow "about:newtab") but there's just something messed up if what is supposedly a fundamental part of the browser itself is broken that easily. And if that's actually how it's supposed to look... they really need to fire whoever they have in charge of UI over there.
In short, i don't think the page launcher in Chrome is necessary (i'll use it sometimes just because it's there, especially since there are only a couple sites i visit with Chrome anyways, but i never felt the lack in FireFox) however at least that one doesn't hurt to look at.
"There's a new New Tab Page launcher, with your favorite and most-used websites, and a new default home page with one-click access to Bookmarks, Settings, Add-ons, etc."
Okay, that's great, but what are the much-needed features that they added?
Agreed, i was going to recommend that if someone else hadn't already. I really wish she'd do more relatively light humorous stuff. "Bellwether" and "To Say Nothing of the Dog" are my favorite books by her.
Nintendo: Kiddie games, outdated tech, milk their franchises to death (unlike the franchises of all the other companies which are handled _totally_ responsibly.)
Sony: Overpriced, installs rootkits and disables components of their systems after you've already bought them, gives your credit card number away to hackers.
Microsoft: The original borg, convicted monopolist and patent troll, Windows sucks and the XBox keeps suffering hardware failures.
Apple: The new borg, walled garden and patent troll, designed for hipsters.
Linux: The one true system, but ported games are frequently buggy and often just don't work at all. (This is of course all the fault of the people who made the games.)
I guess as a responsible geek i'm not supposed to be playing any games at all?
I've played a fair bit of "House of the Dead", but i'm intrigued by this new "House of the Head" thing, though i'm not sure what to think of the "Overkill" part. What's overkill in terms of head?
Why can't they just use the Mojave Spaceport? Okay, yes, it would be hard to find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy, but at least they wouldn't have to worry about getting the idea past a bunch of environmentalists first.
"And that one link right there blows the rest of your argument away."
I don't really see how it does. He got the color spectrum of light absorption by chlorophyll wrong, but he's correct that you got the law of conservation of energy wrong. Claiming that a single error disproves everything someone said, even the parts unrelated to the error, is a logical fallacy, and claiming so in an arrogant manner just makes you sound like an ass and makes people more inclined to distrust what you have to say.
Do yourself a favor, either learn how to discourse in a more polite manner, or stop trying to "help" by arguing in a manner that's just going to drive everyone away from what you're trying to convince them of.
"That said, World of Goo, Frozen Synapse & Dungeons of Dredmor alone were worth all the frustration."
Also, if you feel like you're only getting 50% of the worth, why not then just pay about half what you would otherwise expect if the games all worked? Or shift the balance so less money goes to the developers and more goes to Child's Play or the EFF?
(Also, are you playing on Linux or something? I haven't had any issues getting the games to run. Admittedly i haven't actually tried all of them yet, but i know specifically that SpaceChem, Crayon Physics Deluxe and Braid run just fine on my Windows 7 machine.)
Very much agreed. I know that i sometimes work better without audio distractions going on. However there are a lot of times where if i'm not listening to anything i'll distract myself with the internet or playing with spreadsheets or any number of other things. For those times i'll listen to music or podcasts or audiobooks. There's a delicate balancing act that needs to go on between what kind of task i'm supposed to be working on, how distracted my brain is trying to be, and what kind of audio stimulus i should listen to. It's a balancing act that i admittedly fail at a non-trivial amount, but so far all my attempts to go cold turkey without have been even more disastrous.
I don't know about the original poster, and i don't have an iPhone myself, but it's not especially infrequent that when i'm in areas with poor reception i won't have any internet access but still have enough of a connection to make phone calls.
I mean cyberterrorism isn't a huge risk, but "real" terrorism is even less of a problem. It's not like anything like the 9/11 attacks could ever happen again. (As so many people have pointed out, it took the passengers of flight 93 less than an hour to figure out how to prevent that kind of attack from being effective.) Short of terrorists actually managing to acquire a nuclear weapon any direct attacks they carry out will probably be pretty small and totally dwarfed by all the more mundane dangers we face in our day to day lives and have learned to live with.
_If_ cyberterrorists managed to bring down a portion of the powergrid it would probably affect more people than a "regular" attack, though since hospitals and such usually have backup power the actual number of deaths might be lower.
Though to be "fair", the cynical part of me suspects that this has nothing to do with people actually getting grip on how little a risk terrorism actually represents currently and does indeed have a lot more to do with fearmongering and a lack of understanding of computer networks in general.
I reluctantly agree with you. As a mild anti-Microsoft fanboy and a lifetime avid gamer i'm pissed that they were able to use monopoly profits from another industry to leverage their way into the video game industry (they poured billions of dollars into the project without the original XBox ever making a profit) but claiming that that division isn't a big success now would be a pretty serious case of denialism.
What they did most definitely qualifies as a hack. It's an awkward short term solution to a very particular and non-standard problem. I'm not saying it's not _also_ fraud, but it's definitely a hack.
Will driverless cars magically create more capacity on the roads so that there is enough space for all the cars that want to drive on the same road at the same time? Because that would be a neat trick.
Yes. When all the cars are automated speed limits can be raised and the cars will travel in convey formation, each car inches away from the one in front of it. Since each car will know what all the other cars are doing (presuming the system is well designed of course) when the first car see something it needs to slow down for it can instantly tell all the other cars in the pack and they will all slow down together, so no need for stopping space inbetween them. So you'll have more cars packed in a smaller volume traveling faster.
Furthermore because of that ability to communicate with each other when there is too much traffic on the freeway all the cars will just slow down a little instead of producing the compression waves that currently cause traffic jams/congestion.
Well here's the thing. As a neophyte i got halfway through your post before my brain glazed over and i was going "he wants me to do _what_?"
It sounds like you (and rycamor judging from his posts above) are geeks for whom exercise/nutrition is one of your areas of interest. You want to dive in and figure out everything about it. However for a lot of geeks when we encounter a problem outside our areas of interest we don't want to delve into the subject, we just want a quick hack or script to get us the results we want so we can carry on with our actual areas of interest.
If someone is just interested in losing a little weight and getting in slightly better shape then throwing a paragraph or two at them about how they should completely change their diet and providing a list of a half dozen exercise regimes they should be following to get the most effective results is just going to scare them off. For someone just getting started "don't change what you eat, just eat a little less" and "why don't you spend a couple weeks doing push-ups?" are entirely reasonable suggestions. Maybe when they get done with that they'll feel like something a little more ambitious, but even if not then at least they've accomplished something. I really don't give a damn about diminishing returns or hypertrophy (i'm not even sure what that is, much less if i ought to be concerned about it or not,) if in three or four more weeks i'm actually able to do 100 push-ups i'm going to be really frickin impressed with myself.
Well again, we're looking at two views of the truth, kind of like Newton and Einstein.
First of all, i never said anything about what percentage of calories go towards fat, i said it doesn't matter if the calories spend some time as fat before getting burned (speaking purely from a weight loss perspective.)
As for an absolute rule regarding overall number of calories, well there is one. It's called the law of conservation of energy. The sum of all the inputs has to equal the sum of all the outputs. If you're using more energy that you're getting it generally doesn't matter if some of the incoming calories get turned to fat, in the grand scheme of things they're not going to stay that way for long. Believing that everything has to stay balanced is only an over-simplification if you also believe that you blindly trust the numbers written on nutrition labels and exercise websites instead of taking them as general guidelines.
Again of course the difficulty is in measuring all the inputs and outputs. I suspect that the inputs are _probably_ pretty constant for everyone. At least except in for weird genetic cases i'm reasonably certain that if person A and person B both eat 100 Calories of food X then they're both going to gain 100 Calories. The big difference is in the output. Depending on your metabolism you're going to do different things with those calories at different levels of efficiency. So maybe person A can do 100 push-ups with those calories while person B can do 200 push-ups. That's great for person B in times of famine, not so great if they're trying to lose weight.
A wise geek will know that their weight is balanced by the laws of thermodynamics but they will also know that they don't know the exact efficiency at which their own body runs. (At least not without a lot more analysis and testing than most of us want to deal with.) What you're suggesting is varying the kinds of inputs to try and reduce the efficiency of the body, but it's equally valid to accept whatever efficiency your body is currently at and try to balance the incoming and outgoing calories.
Of course none of those changes take place in a vacuum. As you said reducing the efficiency of your system by changing your diet resulted in you consuming more calories, likewise someone who just reduces the number of calories they eat without changing the contents of their diet and increases their exercise level will probably also change their efficiency. (Downwards if they're building more muscle mass and making their metabolism more active, upwards if they're not consuming enough calories and their metabolism goes into starvation mode.) So with both methods it's important to pay attention to the changes in your body and adapt accordingly.
In short your body isn't a computer crunching calorie bits, it's a car burning calorie fuel. Depending on genetics and current diet you may be a super efficient compact or a gas-guzzling muscle car, but there are still rules about how much gas going in results in how much work going out. (Wow, for once a car analogy is actually perfectly appropriate!)
Well you're right, but so am i. In the grand scheme of things if you could measure _exactly_ how many calories you use every day and _exactly_ how many calories you absorb from the food you eat, you could constantly adjust the later to be slightly smaller than the former, and the laws of thermodynamics require that you lose weight. Whether the calories spend some time as fat first or not, you can't produce energy out of nothing.
Of course the complication is that everyone has a different metabolism, and any change to your diet is going to alter your metabolism. And that change will be different for every person, maybe in a small way and maybe in a big way.
On the other hand if you keep your diet the same but reduce the total amount of calories by a large enough amount (subtracting equally from all the kinds of food you eat) then you will lose weight... eventually. Probably not in the fastest possible manner, but it will happen. Likewise if you keep your diet exactly the same but increase your activity level by a large enough amount then you will lose weight... eventually.
Now ideally if you could figure out exactly what your own metabolism is like you could design the perfect diet that would produce the maximum reduction in fat and the maximum increase in muscle over the shortest period of time with the smallest decrease in calories. However that would require a huge amount of medical knowledge (some of which probably doesn't even exist yet) and accumulating an assload of biometric data about yourself. In other words, it would only be possible for the kind of "serious health freaks or competitive athletes who have the time and need to micromanage their eating, sleeping, and physical activities, and later analyzing all of the accumulated data" that most of us seem to agree aren't very common.
So overall a reasonable plan of decreasing the total calories you consume by a moderate amount and increasing your activity level by a moderate amount seems like perfectly sound plan from a thermodynamic standpoint.
(Oh, and you're right, constantly snacking on small amount of high carb foods all day doesn't sound very appealing, but neither does giving up all grains. Especially since i don't suffer from the problems with heartburn and excessive mucus that seem to bother you.)
I agree, i'm interested in the science, but i'm not willing to put the effort into micromanaging my entire life and and analyzing everything in detail.
A geeky friend of mine recently pointed me at the One Hundred Push-Ups program. It appeals to me because it's a webpage, it doesn't require anything complicated in the way of equipment or anything like that, it presents a simple and easy to understand plan with lots of numbers, and it takes place over a specific time period. You follow the plan, and the numbers keep going up till you reach your goal. (Assuming you manage to stick through to the end.) It might take more than six weeks if you have to take some do-overs, but it's definitely a finite period of time at the end of which you should see some definite improvement, something that really appeals to me. (I'm just starting week four myself right now.)
Another site i've used in the past is Calories Per Hour, particularly the BMR and RMR calculator. You can use it in conjunction with an exercise program, or just for setting up a diet plan. There's lots of numbers and math, which appeal to me as a geek, but at the end you have a nice simple number or two which tell you how much you can eat every day if you don't want to gain weight, and how much you can eat every day if you want to lose weight in a methodical and long term manner.
Of course on that note there's also The Hacker's Diet, which similarly takes the fairly straightforward approach that losing weight = consuming less calories than you burn.
You can argue a long time about paleo diet vs atkins diet vs south beach(?) or whatever other fad diet you've heard of, but in the end weight is just a matter of calories in vs calories out. If you want to lose weight you can reduce the calories going in or increase the calories going out. Certainly adjusting the kind of food you eat can make you healthier in other ways, but controlling the number of calories you eat is the first step. And if you start paying attention to the number of calories you eat you'll quickly discover that the healthier you eat the more you get to eat. Even just making the same food at home that you would have gotten at a fast food restaurant will save you a lot of calories than you can then spend on a snack or something. So instead of feeling like you _have_ to eat healthy to fit some particular diet you've decided to subject yourself to, you feel like you're getting rewarded for eating healthy.
The way to build a community is to clearly express what it is that _you_ want out of the game and then attract other people who want the same thing. Do listen to any comments they might have of course because they might come up with something that inspires you, but as long as you're clear up front about what kind of game you're making you're not beholden to them to make any changes you don't want.
Minecraft didn't start out as a poll of "what do you guys want to see in a game?" Notch built the type of game he wanted to make and was lucky enough to build a huge community around it.
Of course there's always the chance that your ideas just won't appeal to enough people to build a self-supporting community, but given how large and diverse the gaming population is it would have to be a pretty extreme case for no one else to like it.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahhh, i see, you didn't actually have any anything constructive to add to the discussion, you're just a nitpicking grammar nazi, okay.
Oh come on people. Thermal depolymerization. I'm pretty sure it's not the only method of manufacturing synthetic fossil fuels, but it's certainly one of the most practical, at least currently. There are patents relating to it going back to 1939, it passed the break even point in the 90s, it went into production in 1999, there was an article on slashdot about it almost a decade ago.
This is not some radical new technology that should be available in 25 years, this is a tried and proven technology that we can put into full scale production whenever the economics justify it.
Uh, what the heck dude? The parent strongly implied that we are all DOOOOOMED, I said we're not inescapably doomed, but there is a path, albeit a difficult one, by which we can save ourselves.
Did you not catch the implication that, i dunno, maybe we should try really hard to take that path? Or do you disagree with my premise that we are not in fact doomed? Are you suggesting that we should prepare for the worst by all committing suicide right now because there is no hope?
This is a problem that is NOT just going to go away, and i for one am not happy with the idea of just giving up because people with limited vision say we're all going to die. We damn well better invent a way around the problem, whether that's by physical engineering or social engineering or more likely a combination of both.
Actually energy and economics are it. We can make more fresh water and fossil fuels, and thus more food, if we have enough energy and the will to do it. (And we can even turn waste into fossil fuel at a "net energy gain." (As opposed to just throwing the waste away that is.))
You're right that anything that grows will exhaust its resources but you're missing two key points. First, humans tend to expand the amount of resources at their disposal through new technology. Second, in general the first world is no longer experiencing population growth.
It is thus conceivable that we could expand our resources enough to get everyone up to a first world standard of living and thereby achieve a steady state population. I'm not saying this will be easy, just that disaster is not foreordained. (Well, outside the heat death of the universe anyways, but we might even figure that one out if we last long enough =)
You never know if you still have any left until you open your wallet to check.
Okay, now that i've actually tried it.... dear gods what is that thing? In Chrome the new tab page has smallish pictures of your most recently/commonly visited sites, with borders between them and titles underneath each one. I just opened up a new tab in FF and practically burned my eyes out.
There are no borders between the pictures, it's just a three by three grid of screenshots mashed together. Two of the images are of www.google.com (why two? I dunno) but it only shows the top left corner of the page. For all the other sites it shows the whole page, and then repeats the first third of the page along the right side. And then on top of the messed up images, in very small letters that still somehow manage to clash, is the name of the page/site. When you mouse over one of the images two small grey boxes appear at the upper left and upper right corners. The boxes are blank, but if you mouse over them you see that one is to "pin" the site, and the other is to remove it.
Maybe one of my plug-ins is breaking stuff (even though i told NoScript to allow "about:newtab") but there's just something messed up if what is supposedly a fundamental part of the browser itself is broken that easily. And if that's actually how it's supposed to look... they really need to fire whoever they have in charge of UI over there.
In short, i don't think the page launcher in Chrome is necessary (i'll use it sometimes just because it's there, especially since there are only a couple sites i visit with Chrome anyways, but i never felt the lack in FireFox) however at least that one doesn't hurt to look at.
"There's a new New Tab Page launcher, with your favorite and most-used websites, and a new default home page with one-click access to Bookmarks, Settings, Add-ons, etc."
Okay, that's great, but what are the much-needed features that they added?
Agreed, i was going to recommend that if someone else hadn't already. I really wish she'd do more relatively light humorous stuff. "Bellwether" and "To Say Nothing of the Dog" are my favorite books by her.
Let's see if i've got this all figured out.
Nintendo: Kiddie games, outdated tech, milk their franchises to death (unlike the franchises of all the other companies which are handled _totally_ responsibly.)
Sony: Overpriced, installs rootkits and disables components of their systems after you've already bought them, gives your credit card number away to hackers.
Microsoft: The original borg, convicted monopolist and patent troll, Windows sucks and the XBox keeps suffering hardware failures.
Apple: The new borg, walled garden and patent troll, designed for hipsters.
Linux: The one true system, but ported games are frequently buggy and often just don't work at all. (This is of course all the fault of the people who made the games.)
I guess as a responsible geek i'm not supposed to be playing any games at all?
I've played a fair bit of "House of the Dead", but i'm intrigued by this new "House of the Head" thing, though i'm not sure what to think of the "Overkill" part. What's overkill in terms of head?
Why can't they just use the Mojave Spaceport? Okay, yes, it would be hard to find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy, but at least they wouldn't have to worry about getting the idea past a bunch of environmentalists first.
Thought not part of the usual obligatory set:
http://thedevilspanties.com/archives/6062
"And that one link right there blows the rest of your argument away."
I don't really see how it does. He got the color spectrum of light absorption by chlorophyll wrong, but he's correct that you got the law of conservation of energy wrong. Claiming that a single error disproves everything someone said, even the parts unrelated to the error, is a logical fallacy, and claiming so in an arrogant manner just makes you sound like an ass and makes people more inclined to distrust what you have to say.
Do yourself a favor, either learn how to discourse in a more polite manner, or stop trying to "help" by arguing in a manner that's just going to drive everyone away from what you're trying to convince them of.
"Don't know why I keep buying these"
"That said, World of Goo, Frozen Synapse & Dungeons of Dredmor alone were worth all the frustration."
Also, if you feel like you're only getting 50% of the worth, why not then just pay about half what you would otherwise expect if the games all worked? Or shift the balance so less money goes to the developers and more goes to Child's Play or the EFF?
(Also, are you playing on Linux or something? I haven't had any issues getting the games to run. Admittedly i haven't actually tried all of them yet, but i know specifically that SpaceChem, Crayon Physics Deluxe and Braid run just fine on my Windows 7 machine.)
Very much agreed. I know that i sometimes work better without audio distractions going on. However there are a lot of times where if i'm not listening to anything i'll distract myself with the internet or playing with spreadsheets or any number of other things. For those times i'll listen to music or podcasts or audiobooks. There's a delicate balancing act that needs to go on between what kind of task i'm supposed to be working on, how distracted my brain is trying to be, and what kind of audio stimulus i should listen to. It's a balancing act that i admittedly fail at a non-trivial amount, but so far all my attempts to go cold turkey without have been even more disastrous.
I don't know about the original poster, and i don't have an iPhone myself, but it's not especially infrequent that when i'm in areas with poor reception i won't have any internet access but still have enough of a connection to make phone calls.
I mean cyberterrorism isn't a huge risk, but "real" terrorism is even less of a problem. It's not like anything like the 9/11 attacks could ever happen again. (As so many people have pointed out, it took the passengers of flight 93 less than an hour to figure out how to prevent that kind of attack from being effective.) Short of terrorists actually managing to acquire a nuclear weapon any direct attacks they carry out will probably be pretty small and totally dwarfed by all the more mundane dangers we face in our day to day lives and have learned to live with.
_If_ cyberterrorists managed to bring down a portion of the powergrid it would probably affect more people than a "regular" attack, though since hospitals and such usually have backup power the actual number of deaths might be lower.
Though to be "fair", the cynical part of me suspects that this has nothing to do with people actually getting grip on how little a risk terrorism actually represents currently and does indeed have a lot more to do with fearmongering and a lack of understanding of computer networks in general.
I reluctantly agree with you. As a mild anti-Microsoft fanboy and a lifetime avid gamer i'm pissed that they were able to use monopoly profits from another industry to leverage their way into the video game industry (they poured billions of dollars into the project without the original XBox ever making a profit) but claiming that that division isn't a big success now would be a pretty serious case of denialism.
Apparently a lot of people have forgotten every other definition of hack besides the most popular one? "In modern computing terminology, a kludge (or often a 'hack') is a solution to a problem, doing a task, or fixing a system that is inefficient, inelegant, or even unfathomable, but which nevertheless (more or less) works."
What they did most definitely qualifies as a hack. It's an awkward short term solution to a very particular and non-standard problem. I'm not saying it's not _also_ fraud, but it's definitely a hack.
Will driverless cars magically create more capacity on the roads so that there is enough space for all the cars that want to drive on the same road at the same time? Because that would be a neat trick.
Yes. When all the cars are automated speed limits can be raised and the cars will travel in convey formation, each car inches away from the one in front of it. Since each car will know what all the other cars are doing (presuming the system is well designed of course) when the first car see something it needs to slow down for it can instantly tell all the other cars in the pack and they will all slow down together, so no need for stopping space inbetween them. So you'll have more cars packed in a smaller volume traveling faster.
Furthermore because of that ability to communicate with each other when there is too much traffic on the freeway all the cars will just slow down a little instead of producing the compression waves that currently cause traffic jams/congestion.
So not quite magic, but it is a neat trick.
Well here's the thing. As a neophyte i got halfway through your post before my brain glazed over and i was going "he wants me to do _what_?"
It sounds like you (and rycamor judging from his posts above) are geeks for whom exercise/nutrition is one of your areas of interest. You want to dive in and figure out everything about it. However for a lot of geeks when we encounter a problem outside our areas of interest we don't want to delve into the subject, we just want a quick hack or script to get us the results we want so we can carry on with our actual areas of interest.
If someone is just interested in losing a little weight and getting in slightly better shape then throwing a paragraph or two at them about how they should completely change their diet and providing a list of a half dozen exercise regimes they should be following to get the most effective results is just going to scare them off. For someone just getting started "don't change what you eat, just eat a little less" and "why don't you spend a couple weeks doing push-ups?" are entirely reasonable suggestions. Maybe when they get done with that they'll feel like something a little more ambitious, but even if not then at least they've accomplished something. I really don't give a damn about diminishing returns or hypertrophy (i'm not even sure what that is, much less if i ought to be concerned about it or not,) if in three or four more weeks i'm actually able to do 100 push-ups i'm going to be really frickin impressed with myself.
Well again, we're looking at two views of the truth, kind of like Newton and Einstein.
First of all, i never said anything about what percentage of calories go towards fat, i said it doesn't matter if the calories spend some time as fat before getting burned (speaking purely from a weight loss perspective.)
As for an absolute rule regarding overall number of calories, well there is one. It's called the law of conservation of energy. The sum of all the inputs has to equal the sum of all the outputs. If you're using more energy that you're getting it generally doesn't matter if some of the incoming calories get turned to fat, in the grand scheme of things they're not going to stay that way for long. Believing that everything has to stay balanced is only an over-simplification if you also believe that you blindly trust the numbers written on nutrition labels and exercise websites instead of taking them as general guidelines.
Again of course the difficulty is in measuring all the inputs and outputs. I suspect that the inputs are _probably_ pretty constant for everyone. At least except in for weird genetic cases i'm reasonably certain that if person A and person B both eat 100 Calories of food X then they're both going to gain 100 Calories. The big difference is in the output. Depending on your metabolism you're going to do different things with those calories at different levels of efficiency. So maybe person A can do 100 push-ups with those calories while person B can do 200 push-ups. That's great for person B in times of famine, not so great if they're trying to lose weight.
A wise geek will know that their weight is balanced by the laws of thermodynamics but they will also know that they don't know the exact efficiency at which their own body runs. (At least not without a lot more analysis and testing than most of us want to deal with.) What you're suggesting is varying the kinds of inputs to try and reduce the efficiency of the body, but it's equally valid to accept whatever efficiency your body is currently at and try to balance the incoming and outgoing calories.
Of course none of those changes take place in a vacuum. As you said reducing the efficiency of your system by changing your diet resulted in you consuming more calories, likewise someone who just reduces the number of calories they eat without changing the contents of their diet and increases their exercise level will probably also change their efficiency. (Downwards if they're building more muscle mass and making their metabolism more active, upwards if they're not consuming enough calories and their metabolism goes into starvation mode.) So with both methods it's important to pay attention to the changes in your body and adapt accordingly.
In short your body isn't a computer crunching calorie bits, it's a car burning calorie fuel. Depending on genetics and current diet you may be a super efficient compact or a gas-guzzling muscle car, but there are still rules about how much gas going in results in how much work going out. (Wow, for once a car analogy is actually perfectly appropriate!)
Well you're right, but so am i. In the grand scheme of things if you could measure _exactly_ how many calories you use every day and _exactly_ how many calories you absorb from the food you eat, you could constantly adjust the later to be slightly smaller than the former, and the laws of thermodynamics require that you lose weight. Whether the calories spend some time as fat first or not, you can't produce energy out of nothing.
Of course the complication is that everyone has a different metabolism, and any change to your diet is going to alter your metabolism. And that change will be different for every person, maybe in a small way and maybe in a big way.
On the other hand if you keep your diet the same but reduce the total amount of calories by a large enough amount (subtracting equally from all the kinds of food you eat) then you will lose weight... eventually. Probably not in the fastest possible manner, but it will happen. Likewise if you keep your diet exactly the same but increase your activity level by a large enough amount then you will lose weight... eventually.
Now ideally if you could figure out exactly what your own metabolism is like you could design the perfect diet that would produce the maximum reduction in fat and the maximum increase in muscle over the shortest period of time with the smallest decrease in calories. However that would require a huge amount of medical knowledge (some of which probably doesn't even exist yet) and accumulating an assload of biometric data about yourself. In other words, it would only be possible for the kind of "serious health freaks or competitive athletes who have the time and need to micromanage their eating, sleeping, and physical activities, and later analyzing all of the accumulated data" that most of us seem to agree aren't very common.
So overall a reasonable plan of decreasing the total calories you consume by a moderate amount and increasing your activity level by a moderate amount seems like perfectly sound plan from a thermodynamic standpoint.
(Oh, and you're right, constantly snacking on small amount of high carb foods all day doesn't sound very appealing, but neither does giving up all grains. Especially since i don't suffer from the problems with heartburn and excessive mucus that seem to bother you.)
I agree, i'm interested in the science, but i'm not willing to put the effort into micromanaging my entire life and and analyzing everything in detail.
A geeky friend of mine recently pointed me at the One Hundred Push-Ups program. It appeals to me because it's a webpage, it doesn't require anything complicated in the way of equipment or anything like that, it presents a simple and easy to understand plan with lots of numbers, and it takes place over a specific time period. You follow the plan, and the numbers keep going up till you reach your goal. (Assuming you manage to stick through to the end.) It might take more than six weeks if you have to take some do-overs, but it's definitely a finite period of time at the end of which you should see some definite improvement, something that really appeals to me. (I'm just starting week four myself right now.)
Another site i've used in the past is Calories Per Hour, particularly the BMR and RMR calculator. You can use it in conjunction with an exercise program, or just for setting up a diet plan. There's lots of numbers and math, which appeal to me as a geek, but at the end you have a nice simple number or two which tell you how much you can eat every day if you don't want to gain weight, and how much you can eat every day if you want to lose weight in a methodical and long term manner.
Of course on that note there's also The Hacker's Diet, which similarly takes the fairly straightforward approach that losing weight = consuming less calories than you burn.
You can argue a long time about paleo diet vs atkins diet vs south beach(?) or whatever other fad diet you've heard of, but in the end weight is just a matter of calories in vs calories out. If you want to lose weight you can reduce the calories going in or increase the calories going out. Certainly adjusting the kind of food you eat can make you healthier in other ways, but controlling the number of calories you eat is the first step. And if you start paying attention to the number of calories you eat you'll quickly discover that the healthier you eat the more you get to eat. Even just making the same food at home that you would have gotten at a fast food restaurant will save you a lot of calories than you can then spend on a snack or something. So instead of feeling like you _have_ to eat healthy to fit some particular diet you've decided to subject yourself to, you feel like you're getting rewarded for eating healthy.
The way to build a community is to clearly express what it is that _you_ want out of the game and then attract other people who want the same thing. Do listen to any comments they might have of course because they might come up with something that inspires you, but as long as you're clear up front about what kind of game you're making you're not beholden to them to make any changes you don't want.
Minecraft didn't start out as a poll of "what do you guys want to see in a game?" Notch built the type of game he wanted to make and was lucky enough to build a huge community around it.
Of course there's always the chance that your ideas just won't appeal to enough people to build a self-supporting community, but given how large and diverse the gaming population is it would have to be a pretty extreme case for no one else to like it.