The subject of your own post is "Re:Please can". Why did I bother reading it?
Look at a random sample of subject comments in this thread, under this story, all over slashdot. An overwhelming majority are useless, not worth reading. No reasonable person should bother reading the subject.
Ok, so you use the word "know" a lot more lightly than I do. That is fine. Though it did lead you to trust food label calorie numbers a lot more than they deserve, so I thought you might be in reverse gear about this. Probably not.
It's tough to say. On the one hand, I'm surprised to see so much disagreement over something I had assumed to be settled science. Clearly there is some non-negligible variability in the way different people (at different times) turn food into ATP. Though, on the other hand, it's hard for me to dismiss federal regulations outright based on claims for which there is no real consensus. If the calorie numbers on food labels are inaccurate, what numbers would be accurate? I'd argue that the FDA-approved numbers, even if incorrect, are better than no numbers at all. Perhaps the best way forward for me would be to use food label calorie numbers merely as an upper bound, not an expected value.
I've never used slashdot as an instant messaging platform like this before. I wonder if we get an 'achievement' if this thread hits a length of 100 posts. We're over 3/4 of the way there.
It must've been around 2007, since googling for 'freeman dyson genetics' brings me to thesearticles.
Anyway, his argument might best be summed up with his own words:
"I see a bright future for the biotechnology industry when it follows the path of the computer industry, the path that von Neumann failed to foresee, becoming small and domesticated rather than big and centralized."
Cyclists are, generally, safer on the road than on sidewalks. Drivers see and stop for road traffic, not for sidewalks.
So isn't that what this is all about? Right of way, not safety?
If safety was the primary concern, cyclists could stick to the sidewalk and yield to any crossing traffic (and maintain a safe enough speed to do so). The problem is that cyclists don't want to yield to traffic from small cross streets or driveways, and they don't want to limit their speed to enable such safety. They want motorists to be the ones giving up another bit of the driving experience. Since motorists are the ones paying for the roads to begin with (via gasoline tax), I don't see that as a reasonable proposition.
Neither cyclists nor pedestrians travel down the middle of the road.
Your earlier post seemed to indicate that you were suggesting that sidewalks were not any safer than roads and that "at least when you're on the road, drivers usually see you". When you were little and your parents yelled at you to get out of the middle of the road, they went horribly wrong by not smacking you for replying "but technically I'm not equidistant from both sides". It's a figure of speech, much like the imperative "eat shit and die".
As I said, only a small fraction of cyclists are hit while traveling down the road not near an intersection.
Your original statement, the one I object to, was that sidewalks aren't safer than roads (due to driveways, side streets, etc.). Now you're talking about intersections, which as you helpfully point out, have nothing to do with sidewalks, as they're roads by definition. Intersections (ones with no sidewalks, therefore excluding intersections with driveways and side streets for which there is continuity of a sidewalk) aren't relevant to the conversation. They may be relevant to a general conversation about safety, but not to one about the relative safety of roads as compared against sidewalks.
The issue is that motorists rarely look for objects moving faster than 0.5mph coming from a sidewalk.
Or conversely, the issue is that cyclists rarely look for objects moving faster than 0.5mph coming from a roadway. If they did, they wouldn't be running directly into the sides of cars that pull up to intersections (I've actually had this happen to me, and holy shit was I laughing my ass off at the guy that crashed directly into my front quarter panel / fender and ended up splayed across my hood), and they wouldn't be complaining about an unsafe cycling environment. If motorists drove the same entitled way cyclists ride, we'd all be dead.
Maybe instead of making cyclists stop and dismount at every goddamned driveway as you want, we should address the original source of the risk and institute a nationwide comprehensive 15 mph speed limit.
Or perhaps we can babyproof the entire world for the safety of our precious cyclists. After all, 15 mph is still more than enough to run someone over.
Where did you come up with that idea? Pedestrians are routinely killed at intersections, coming from sidewalks. Where do you get the idea that that's acceptable?
From the very next sentence in that post.
Maybe they're whiny because they hear unsubstantiated crap like this all the time from ill-informed people like you.
Unsubstantiated crap like "more people get ran over in the road than on the sidewalk" and "cars moving at high speed are more dangerous than those that are stopped or moving at a low speed"? I thought these were self-evident claims. You really want me to dig up statistics for these claims? Seriously?
I attended a talk given by Freeman Dyson roughly a decade ago. His opinion on the future of technology was clear: grassroots biohacking (I doubt that he called it that verbatim, but the concept was the same) would be the next Wild West of technology. Increasingly accessible tools would open up the world of genetic engineering to an entire generation just like the desktop computer opened up software development to curious kids. His opinion, if I remember correctly, was that the "government overreach" thing was a non-issue because of the inevitable ubiquity of such tools (much like "government overreach" limiting the availability of software development tools today seems impossible).
Since drivers rarely look for traffic on sidewalks as they go in and out of driveways and side streets, you run a high risk of getting run over at every curb cut. At least when you're on the road, drivers usually see you when they bother to glance up from their cellphones.
Your statement should apply equally to pedestrians and cyclists. However, pedestrians aren't the ones arguing that they'd be safer walking down the middle of the road than on the sidewalk. Because most pedestrians that are hit by an automobile are not on the sidewalk, they're in the road.
Pedestrians get killed by cars all the time. Please stop talking out of your ass.
I never suggested they didn't get killed by cars all the time. I said they manage to handle intersections just fine. That is, with an acceptable surivaval rate. I don't hear nearly as much whining from pedestrians rights groups as I do from cyclists rights groups, so I assume that pedestrians have greater success in intersections than cyclists do. Of course, it's possible that cyclists are more whiney. Could go either way.
See, currently, in most places, there are two surfaces for two different speeds of travel. The road has traffic moving at automobile speeds. The sidewalk has traffic moving at pedestrian speeds. The bicyclist is stuck in limbo between these two speeds, with no surface catering to cyclist speeds. Cycling in the road slows down motorists and creates a safety issue for cyclists. Cycling on the sidewalk slows down the cyclist and creates a safety issue for pedestrians. This is why there's such a widespread disdain for cyclists: they're trying to squeeze into a system that quite literally has no place for them.
As a cyclist, you have to accept that either you'll be pissing off drivers while putting yourself at risk or you'll be putting pedestrians at risk while being annoyed by a lack of speed. Or you can move to somewhere that has bicycle lanes.
But my original point was that you might not be kept away from cars on a sidewalk, but you should at least be kept away from fast moving cars on a sidewalk. And fast moving cars are considerably more dangerous for a cyclist than parked or slowly moving cars. If there's fast moving cars on your sidewalks, it's going to take a lot more than bicycle lanes to fix your neighborhood.
Yes, it is complicated, and not really known to mankind.
Well, I'm not sure if anyone is saying that. I've found several contradictory sources that each claim to have the answer. It seems like they're saying it is known, they're just disagreeing on how it works. I suppose that's not much different than this thread, in some sense.
It would be good if you point out the error when slashdotters and people elsewhere make the mistake of considering it simple and lecture others.
I'll do my best.
Diet effect on water retention are also significant.
Sure, but water weight is a bit of a red herring. When someone's goal is to lose weight, it's generally to lose fat. Losing muscle, skeletal mass, or water weight does not usually satisfy their goals. While diet does have a significant effect on water weight, I don't think danaris was talking about water weight when "hugely fat" was mentioned, nor do I know of any weight-loss diets that seek specifically to minimize water weight as a primary goal (except for professional athletes just prior to weigh-in).
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler". I see these attempts to quantify the as yet unquantifiable as violation of the principle in second half of the alleged Einstein quote.
And I see them as an attempt to put definite bounds on the efficiency of human digestion, if not determine a sufficiently accurate heuristic approach to the problem in the context of dieting.
"The perfect is the enemy of the good". I see your application of Einstein's quote as a violation of the principle in Voltaire's.
Yet only something like 5% of bike injuries involve being rear-ended by cars on roads.
I never said anything about being rear-ended. What percentage of bike injuries involve being hit (in any manner) by cars on roads? What percentage of bike injuries involve being hit (in any manner) by cars on sidewalks? What if we break it down by severity of injury? It sure seems like cyclists are much safer from motorists if they stay on the sidewalk. A guy pulling out of his driveway without checking for cyclist traffic on the sidewalk might cause you to run into him and go flying over his hood, but he's probably not going to pancake you or hit you at highway speeds.
Almost all other cases would involve intersections of some sort, where being on the sidewalk doesn't help or is counterproductive. You're still vulnerable to the high-speed cars while crossing roads, and you're more likely to collide because they're not looking at where you're coming from.
Somehow pedestrians manage to handle intersections just fine, all while staying on sidewalks and crosswalks. Perhaps if navigating intersections is too challenging on a bicycle, one might dismount and walk the bike across?
The average speed of cars on roadways is considerably greater than the average speed of cars on driveways. Higher speeds correlate with greater collision injuries.
So I'm trying to quantify the proprtion of nutrition label calories that get turned to ATP, and it seems that there's not much consensus. Here is an article claiming that "the calories that you see written on the back of a food pack have already had all of these adjustments made for the amount that will be digested and absorbed". Here is an article claiming that what's on the label could differ from what you actually metabolize by maybe 20%. Based on my non-scientific survey of google search results, a majority of people believe actual caloric value to differ from label caloric value, but there doesn't seem to be any consensus regarding what percentage is metabolized on average. Looks like I'll need to shit into a bomb calorimeter if I want a real answer.
Was hoping that I'd have some extra wiggle room in my diet based on all of this, but it's not clear that that's the case. So much for quantified self.
It looks like Red Faction: Guerilla only allows buildings, cover, and other structures to be destroyed, whereas the original Red Faction allowed for the destruction of all terrain. Either way, I've never heard of these games, and look forward to checking them out. Thanks!
Interesting factoid: The original Red Faction started development as Descent 4, a prequel to the Descent series.
I believe it's mostly because "destructible environments" became a gimmick rather quickly. (Red Faction) It was fun blowing holes in the rock beneath tanks and making your own tunnels and such, but the problem was that the designers still felt the need to create indestructible areas that you couldn't skip around for the sake of maintaining story. Similar to how some doors in Oblivion and Skyrim were "Locked and required a key" despite these games being made with in an open world format. Designers still have trouble figuring out how to implement extreme freedom features while still keeping players' progress through levels at a minimum somewhat predictable. I can't really blame them for that either - it's a rather perplexing problem.
And that's just it, it's a rather perplexing problem, but only in the context of today's expectations. Despite an increasing tendency to pretend otherwise, most games are very strictly scripted. Any deviation from this script "ruins" the game, or at least the developers' vision of it. Consequently, player choice must be limited to maintain the story, because the story itself is very static and can only accomodate a few different arcs (at best). The biggest obstacle to further expanding player options in "open world" games is, in my opinion, the dependence on scripted gameplay. By tackling these two issues together, by replacing strict scripting with better AI (for example) and thereby removing this artificial limitation on player choice, a new game could be as revolutionary in opening up a virtual world as was GTA3. So what the hell is the hold up?
This is already accounted for in food labelling. The calories on the label all get metabolized, and the calories that don't get metabolized aren't listed on the label.
So no, it is definitely a retrospective change you made to your own sentence. While I don't mind educating someone, even for free, you can't convince me you meant this from the start.
Indeed, I was incorrect on that point. I knew that the caloric values on nutrition labels (in the US) were not determined by gross bomb calorimetry, and instead by the summing the products of masses of macronutrients and their respective specific heats, as specified by the Code of Federal Regulations and described here under the "Calculations used to determine energy content" heading. However, I did not know that any significant quantity of these macronutrients would pass through a normal healthy human digestive system and escape conversion to ATP (with the exception of dietary fiber). If it's not asking too much, could you please link me to additionaly reading on which macronutrients are expelled unmetabolized in non-neglible amounts?
You didn't deserve the benefit of doubt, because of other sentences you posted exposed that you did really mean "eat" , and you did NOT mean "eat, digest, and metabolize". ...
Which is good, because useless statements disguised as simple actionable statements are dangerous.
Despite your insistence that I've been having this conversation in bad faith, I still maintain that the context of my first post in this thread should make it clear that that's not the case.
danaris was talking about "vast amounts of sugar" in the modern diet as being the reason (or a reason, at least) why people are hugely fat, and I was merely trying to state that replacing these vast amounts of sugar with vast amounts (calorically-equivalent amounts) of fats wouldn't make any appreciable difference. Even in light of this new (to me, at least) information about nutrition labels not accurately reflecting metabolized energy content, and using the numbers from your pizza example (not because I expect that they're accurate but merely because I have no other numbers in front of me), we're looking at something on the order of a 5% discrepancy. When people talk about some fad diet being amazing, I don't think they mean "5% more effective than a traditional calorie-counting diet". The perceived efficacy of low-carb diets is much greater than 5%, and therefore is not explained by this discrepancy.
danaris also stated that "Some kinds of energy are easier for our bodies to extract from food than others" and that "Some kinds of food make our bodies feel more full than others". I countered that the second statement, while true, has no bearing on the fact that a calorie is still a calorie. The first statement I took to be a reference to the discrepancy between bomb calorimetry and the method outlined by the Code of Federal Regulations. This discrepancy is indeed significant (probably larger than the discrepancy you highlighted), but has no relevance to the discussion either since nutrition labels don't go by bomb calorimetry.
In any case, thanks for the insight, as I myself am in the middle of trying a low carb diet and would be very interested in better quantifying my energy intake.
My original objection was to the sentence "Whether you eat 12 thousand Calories in pizza or 12 thousand Calories in kale, the impact on your weight will be the same". To which you have already made one retrospective change without an apology, while using the universal arithmetical addition operator in a non-standard way and not even objected on my earlier interpretating it thus. Moreover, this is not a minor change because the original sentence pretended to be useful, was falsifiable, actionable - and I pointed out many ways in which it is either wrong, or needs citation.
I apologize, I was clearly saying "eat" where I meant to say "eat, digest, and metabolize". I'm okay with you not giving me the benefit of the doubt, instead insisting on casting this as a retrospective change and not a clarification of my words. That's fine. Not exactly reasonable, but fine nonetheless. My intended meaning should have been obvious from context, as I repeatedly mentioned that my statement was a tautology (and therefore explicitly not falsifiable). I'm not sure what "useful" or "actionable" mean in this context, so I withhold comment on that.
I sought to clarify this misunderstanding with this post 6 days (or entrely too many posts) ago. I suppose that would've been a better time for me to have apologized for the misunderstanding. In any case, I disagree that the plus sign is a "universal arithmetic addition operator", or that I was using it in a non-standard way, since the plus sign is the most commonly used operator for string concatenation. Furthermore, you point out that I didn't object earlier to your incorrect interpretation. Indeed, this is true, and I explain this in my previous post, stating "I honestly thought you were just trolling me when you started talking about summation". You see, with two reasonable interpretations of the plus sign (addition and concatenation) to choose from, you chose the one that made no sense over the one that would further my argument. Due to your seeming disingenuousness, I opted to play along with your apparent trolling instead of pointing out the obviously (and ostensibly deliberately) incorrect interpretation. It now seems that I was giving you too much credit, and that you weren't trolling me but earnestly misunderstanding me. I apologize for this as well.
The new sentence does not have these qualities (except of incorrectness). Even so, when you have turned your sentence into such a useless sentence, I can still prove it to be wrong - or at least in desperate need of citation. But I think you will again change it retrospectively, so it would be best if you put down the sentence which you now want to replace your aforementioned original sentence with, and I will address only that.
The new sentence ("Whether you turn some quantity of pizza into 12000 Calories worth of ATP (~1644 molecules) or you turn some quantity of kale into 12000 Calories worth of ATP (~1644 molecules), the impact of the consumed, digested, and metabolized calories (i.e. ATP) on your weight will be independent of their dietary source (but not independent of things like individual biology, gut biome, water weight, metabolic abnormalities, endocrine/hormonal state, blood glucose, and other unrelated factors."), which is a very pedantic way of phrasing my original claim, also seems tautologous to me. I'd be interested in hearing why you believe it to be incorrect now that we seem to no longer be talking past each other.
One thing which has long irked me about the FPS genre is the static nature of the game world.
The advent of realistic physics engines has made it possible to move past this limitation, but very little effort has been expended to actually do so. Admittedly, I don't game as much as I used to, but the only game that's coming to mind right now is Crysis. I don't think I ever got very far in the game, but I vaguely remember buildings and other larger structures actually being made up of smaller pieces which could then be blown apart. A step in the right direction, for sure, but I've played a few shooters since then and this feature doesn't seem to have gained adoption in other games. In any case, even the implementation in Crysis was rather limited; as far as I know, the distinct structural elements of buildings couldn't be subsequently broken down into smaller-still pieces.
In Fallout 4, I want the explosives skill to be useful for gaining entry to otherwise-inaccessible areas by way of blowing up walls, doors, rubble. Wishful thinking, I know, but why can't we have this level of realism in 2014 when game physics engines have been impressing us for nearly a decade now? Couldn't this level of realism be used to enhance gameplay instead of just serving as eye candy?
The context of your homework I was helping with you with was about summation working differently on pizza and kale
I honestly thought you were just trolling me when you started talking about summation. Now it's apparent that you were being earnest. Let me clarify.
In this post (and earlier in this post), I said " All normal people will get the same caloric input from 12000 consumed, digested, and metabolized calories, by definition... I recommend you s/eat/eat+digest+metabolize/g on all of my posts."
It seems that you have mistaken the '+' operator for arithmetic addition, not string concatenation. I'm not sure how you could have misunderstood me there (since I specifically said "consumed, digested, and metabolized calories" without mentioning any sort of addition), or why you would find "the sum of calories eaten, calories digested, and calories metabolized" to be a meaningful value, as it involves counting each calorie roughly 3 times. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you weren't intentionally misunderstanding me simply to be argumentative. In any case, my statement applied to "relevant calories", where a relevant calorie is one that is metabolized after having being eaten and digested, or one which is turned into ATP within the human body. To clarify, my statement was not intended to be applied to calories which are not eaten or calories which are not digested or calories which are not metabolized.
Thus, pizza calories available to increase body fat include all calories which have been eaten, digested, and metabolized. 12000 Calories.
Kale calories available to increase body fat include all calories which have been eaten, digested, and metabolized. 12000 Calories.
You might argue that in the case of pizza, it's only 11500 Calories, since 500 Calories from milk fat are not digested or metabolized. I would argue that you didn't have enough pizza, because we defined the amount of pizza consumed to be sufficient to yield 12000 Calories in ATP.
Additionally, your summation idea is at odds with reality, in that it has a person gaining 35000 or 36000 Calories when they've only eaten 12000 Calories worth of food. That would amount to free energy, or an inexplicable net increase in energy. That's not consistent with the known laws of physics. That's why I thought you were trolling me, as I didn't expect you would have truly believed that 12000 Calories of food could somehow triple in caloric value by virtue of human digestion.
What we've learned today:
Triple-counting calories doesn't really make sense.
My statements were specifically about "calories which are eaten, digested, and metabolized, i.e. turned into ATP", not "an arbitrary summing of the same calories three times over".
In light of that, is it clear now why my claim of caloric fungibility could only be false if the chemical potential energy of ATP molecules was dependent on their dietary source?
Wait a decade or 2.
Ah, so it wasn't an earnest offer of help then? In a decade or two, the Kinect sensor will be long obsolete and we'll all have ToF cameras available for the same cost. Weak sauce.
I've demonstated the falseness of that canard already.
After repeatedly being given the opportunity to clearly state the reasoning behind your objection to my claim of caloric fungibility, you've refused to do so. Your justification for this refusal has been demonstated to be false.
I'll kindly take you up on your offer for homework help, though. I'm working on fusing gyroscope and accelerometer data with a Kinect sensor's color and depth streams using a Kalman filter. Why isn't fakenect working?
Slashdot Mirror
The subject of your own post is "Re:Please can". Why did I bother reading it?
Look at a random sample of subject comments in this thread, under this story, all over slashdot. An overwhelming majority are useless, not worth reading. No reasonable person should bother reading the subject.
Ok, so you use the word "know" a lot more lightly than I do. That is fine. Though it did lead you to trust food label calorie numbers a lot more than they deserve, so I thought you might be in reverse gear about this. Probably not.
It's tough to say. On the one hand, I'm surprised to see so much disagreement over something I had assumed to be settled science. Clearly there is some non-negligible variability in the way different people (at different times) turn food into ATP. Though, on the other hand, it's hard for me to dismiss federal regulations outright based on claims for which there is no real consensus. If the calorie numbers on food labels are inaccurate, what numbers would be accurate? I'd argue that the FDA-approved numbers, even if incorrect, are better than no numbers at all. Perhaps the best way forward for me would be to use food label calorie numbers merely as an upper bound, not an expected value.
I've never used slashdot as an instant messaging platform like this before. I wonder if we get an 'achievement' if this thread hits a length of 100 posts. We're over 3/4 of the way there.
It must've been around 2007, since googling for 'freeman dyson genetics' brings me to these articles.
Anyway, his argument might best be summed up with his own words:
"I see a bright future for the biotechnology industry when it follows the path of the computer industry, the path that von Neumann failed to foresee, becoming small and domesticated rather than big and centralized."
Cyclists are, generally, safer on the road than on sidewalks. Drivers see and stop for road traffic, not for sidewalks.
So isn't that what this is all about? Right of way, not safety?
If safety was the primary concern, cyclists could stick to the sidewalk and yield to any crossing traffic (and maintain a safe enough speed to do so). The problem is that cyclists don't want to yield to traffic from small cross streets or driveways, and they don't want to limit their speed to enable such safety. They want motorists to be the ones giving up another bit of the driving experience. Since motorists are the ones paying for the roads to begin with (via gasoline tax), I don't see that as a reasonable proposition.
Neither cyclists nor pedestrians travel down the middle of the road.
Your earlier post seemed to indicate that you were suggesting that sidewalks were not any safer than roads and that "at least when you're on the road, drivers usually see you". When you were little and your parents yelled at you to get out of the middle of the road, they went horribly wrong by not smacking you for replying "but technically I'm not equidistant from both sides". It's a figure of speech, much like the imperative "eat shit and die".
As I said, only a small fraction of cyclists are hit while traveling down the road not near an intersection.
Your original statement, the one I object to, was that sidewalks aren't safer than roads (due to driveways, side streets, etc.). Now you're talking about intersections, which as you helpfully point out, have nothing to do with sidewalks, as they're roads by definition. Intersections (ones with no sidewalks, therefore excluding intersections with driveways and side streets for which there is continuity of a sidewalk) aren't relevant to the conversation. They may be relevant to a general conversation about safety, but not to one about the relative safety of roads as compared against sidewalks.
The issue is that motorists rarely look for objects moving faster than 0.5mph coming from a sidewalk.
Or conversely, the issue is that cyclists rarely look for objects moving faster than 0.5mph coming from a roadway. If they did, they wouldn't be running directly into the sides of cars that pull up to intersections (I've actually had this happen to me, and holy shit was I laughing my ass off at the guy that crashed directly into my front quarter panel / fender and ended up splayed across my hood), and they wouldn't be complaining about an unsafe cycling environment. If motorists drove the same entitled way cyclists ride, we'd all be dead.
Maybe instead of making cyclists stop and dismount at every goddamned driveway as you want, we should address the original source of the risk and institute a nationwide comprehensive 15 mph speed limit.
Or perhaps we can babyproof the entire world for the safety of our precious cyclists. After all, 15 mph is still more than enough to run someone over.
Where did you come up with that idea? Pedestrians are routinely killed at intersections, coming from sidewalks. Where do you get the idea that that's acceptable?
From the very next sentence in that post.
Maybe they're whiny because they hear unsubstantiated crap like this all the time from ill-informed people like you.
Unsubstantiated crap like "more people get ran over in the road than on the sidewalk" and "cars moving at high speed are more dangerous than those that are stopped or moving at a low speed"? I thought these were self-evident claims. You really want me to dig up statistics for these claims? Seriously?
I attended a talk given by Freeman Dyson roughly a decade ago. His opinion on the future of technology was clear: grassroots biohacking (I doubt that he called it that verbatim, but the concept was the same) would be the next Wild West of technology. Increasingly accessible tools would open up the world of genetic engineering to an entire generation just like the desktop computer opened up software development to curious kids. His opinion, if I remember correctly, was that the "government overreach" thing was a non-issue because of the inevitable ubiquity of such tools (much like "government overreach" limiting the availability of software development tools today seems impossible).
You said
You are not kept away from cars on a sidewalk.
Since drivers rarely look for traffic on sidewalks as they go in and out of driveways and side streets, you run a high risk of getting run over at every curb cut. At least when you're on the road, drivers usually see you when they bother to glance up from their cellphones.
Your statement should apply equally to pedestrians and cyclists. However, pedestrians aren't the ones arguing that they'd be safer walking down the middle of the road than on the sidewalk. Because most pedestrians that are hit by an automobile are not on the sidewalk, they're in the road.
Pedestrians get killed by cars all the time. Please stop talking out of your ass.
I never suggested they didn't get killed by cars all the time. I said they manage to handle intersections just fine. That is, with an acceptable surivaval rate. I don't hear nearly as much whining from pedestrians rights groups as I do from cyclists rights groups, so I assume that pedestrians have greater success in intersections than cyclists do. Of course, it's possible that cyclists are more whiney. Could go either way.
Perhaps cycling slower would help?
See, currently, in most places, there are two surfaces for two different speeds of travel. The road has traffic moving at automobile speeds. The sidewalk has traffic moving at pedestrian speeds. The bicyclist is stuck in limbo between these two speeds, with no surface catering to cyclist speeds. Cycling in the road slows down motorists and creates a safety issue for cyclists. Cycling on the sidewalk slows down the cyclist and creates a safety issue for pedestrians. This is why there's such a widespread disdain for cyclists: they're trying to squeeze into a system that quite literally has no place for them.
As a cyclist, you have to accept that either you'll be pissing off drivers while putting yourself at risk or you'll be putting pedestrians at risk while being annoyed by a lack of speed. Or you can move to somewhere that has bicycle lanes.
But my original point was that you might not be kept away from cars on a sidewalk, but you should at least be kept away from fast moving cars on a sidewalk. And fast moving cars are considerably more dangerous for a cyclist than parked or slowly moving cars. If there's fast moving cars on your sidewalks, it's going to take a lot more than bicycle lanes to fix your neighborhood.
misogyny
You keep using that word... I do not think it means what you think it means...
Yes, it is complicated, and not really known to mankind.
Well, I'm not sure if anyone is saying that. I've found several contradictory sources that each claim to have the answer. It seems like they're saying it is known, they're just disagreeing on how it works. I suppose that's not much different than this thread, in some sense.
It would be good if you point out the error when slashdotters and people elsewhere make the mistake of considering it simple and lecture others.
I'll do my best.
Diet effect on water retention are also significant.
Sure, but water weight is a bit of a red herring. When someone's goal is to lose weight, it's generally to lose fat. Losing muscle, skeletal mass, or water weight does not usually satisfy their goals. While diet does have a significant effect on water weight, I don't think danaris was talking about water weight when "hugely fat" was mentioned, nor do I know of any weight-loss diets that seek specifically to minimize water weight as a primary goal (except for professional athletes just prior to weigh-in).
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler". I see these attempts to quantify the as yet unquantifiable as violation of the principle in second half of the alleged Einstein quote.
And I see them as an attempt to put definite bounds on the efficiency of human digestion, if not determine a sufficiently accurate heuristic approach to the problem in the context of dieting.
"The perfect is the enemy of the good". I see your application of Einstein's quote as a violation of the principle in Voltaire's.
Yet only something like 5% of bike injuries involve being rear-ended by cars on roads.
I never said anything about being rear-ended. What percentage of bike injuries involve being hit (in any manner) by cars on roads? What percentage of bike injuries involve being hit (in any manner) by cars on sidewalks? What if we break it down by severity of injury? It sure seems like cyclists are much safer from motorists if they stay on the sidewalk. A guy pulling out of his driveway without checking for cyclist traffic on the sidewalk might cause you to run into him and go flying over his hood, but he's probably not going to pancake you or hit you at highway speeds.
Almost all other cases would involve intersections of some sort, where being on the sidewalk doesn't help or is counterproductive. You're still vulnerable to the high-speed cars while crossing roads, and you're more likely to collide because they're not looking at where you're coming from.
Somehow pedestrians manage to handle intersections just fine, all while staying on sidewalks and crosswalks. Perhaps if navigating intersections is too challenging on a bicycle, one might dismount and walk the bike across?
The average speed of cars on roadways is considerably greater than the average speed of cars on driveways. Higher speeds correlate with greater collision injuries.
So I'm trying to quantify the proprtion of nutrition label calories that get turned to ATP, and it seems that there's not much consensus. Here is an article claiming that "the calories that you see written on the back of a food pack have already had all of these adjustments made for the amount that will be digested and absorbed". Here is an article claiming that what's on the label could differ from what you actually metabolize by maybe 20%. Based on my non-scientific survey of google search results, a majority of people believe actual caloric value to differ from label caloric value, but there doesn't seem to be any consensus regarding what percentage is metabolized on average. Looks like I'll need to shit into a bomb calorimeter if I want a real answer.
Was hoping that I'd have some extra wiggle room in my diet based on all of this, but it's not clear that that's the case. So much for quantified self.
It looks like Red Faction: Guerilla only allows buildings, cover, and other structures to be destroyed, whereas the original Red Faction allowed for the destruction of all terrain. Either way, I've never heard of these games, and look forward to checking them out. Thanks!
Interesting factoid: The original Red Faction started development as Descent 4, a prequel to the Descent series.
Thanks, will have to check it out!
I believe it's mostly because "destructible environments" became a gimmick rather quickly. (Red Faction) It was fun blowing holes in the rock beneath tanks and making your own tunnels and such, but the problem was that the designers still felt the need to create indestructible areas that you couldn't skip around for the sake of maintaining story. Similar to how some doors in Oblivion and Skyrim were "Locked and required a key" despite these games being made with in an open world format. Designers still have trouble figuring out how to implement extreme freedom features while still keeping players' progress through levels at a minimum somewhat predictable. I can't really blame them for that either - it's a rather perplexing problem.
And that's just it, it's a rather perplexing problem, but only in the context of today's expectations. Despite an increasing tendency to pretend otherwise, most games are very strictly scripted. Any deviation from this script "ruins" the game, or at least the developers' vision of it. Consequently, player choice must be limited to maintain the story, because the story itself is very static and can only accomodate a few different arcs (at best). The biggest obstacle to further expanding player options in "open world" games is, in my opinion, the dependence on scripted gameplay. By tackling these two issues together, by replacing strict scripting with better AI (for example) and thereby removing this artificial limitation on player choice, a new game could be as revolutionary in opening up a virtual world as was GTA3. So what the hell is the hold up?
I assume you're also irked by Boston, Southampton, Clacton and even Downton
I would be if there were also a Bostown, Southamptown, or Clactown in the English language. Much like there is a Downtown.
This is already accounted for in food labelling. The calories on the label all get metabolized, and the calories that don't get metabolized aren't listed on the label.
So no, it is definitely a retrospective change you made to your own sentence. While I don't mind educating someone, even for free, you can't convince me you meant this from the start.
Indeed, I was incorrect on that point. I knew that the caloric values on nutrition labels (in the US) were not determined by gross bomb calorimetry, and instead by the summing the products of masses of macronutrients and their respective specific heats, as specified by the Code of Federal Regulations and described here under the "Calculations used to determine energy content" heading. However, I did not know that any significant quantity of these macronutrients would pass through a normal healthy human digestive system and escape conversion to ATP (with the exception of dietary fiber). If it's not asking too much, could you please link me to additionaly reading on which macronutrients are expelled unmetabolized in non-neglible amounts?
You didn't deserve the benefit of doubt, because of other sentences you posted exposed that you did really mean "eat" , and you did NOT mean "eat, digest, and metabolize".
...
Which is good, because useless statements disguised as simple actionable statements are dangerous.
Despite your insistence that I've been having this conversation in bad faith, I still maintain that the context of my first post in this thread should make it clear that that's not the case.
danaris was talking about "vast amounts of sugar" in the modern diet as being the reason (or a reason, at least) why people are hugely fat, and I was merely trying to state that replacing these vast amounts of sugar with vast amounts (calorically-equivalent amounts) of fats wouldn't make any appreciable difference. Even in light of this new (to me, at least) information about nutrition labels not accurately reflecting metabolized energy content, and using the numbers from your pizza example (not because I expect that they're accurate but merely because I have no other numbers in front of me), we're looking at something on the order of a 5% discrepancy. When people talk about some fad diet being amazing, I don't think they mean "5% more effective than a traditional calorie-counting diet". The perceived efficacy of low-carb diets is much greater than 5%, and therefore is not explained by this discrepancy.
danaris also stated that "Some kinds of energy are easier for our bodies to extract from food than others" and that "Some kinds of food make our bodies feel more full than others". I countered that the second statement, while true, has no bearing on the fact that a calorie is still a calorie. The first statement I took to be a reference to the discrepancy between bomb calorimetry and the method outlined by the Code of Federal Regulations. This discrepancy is indeed significant (probably larger than the discrepancy you highlighted), but has no relevance to the discussion either since nutrition labels don't go by bomb calorimetry.
In any case, thanks for the insight, as I myself am in the middle of trying a low carb diet and would be very interested in better quantifying my energy intake.
My original objection was to the sentence "Whether you eat 12 thousand Calories in pizza or 12 thousand Calories in kale, the impact on your weight will be the same". To which you have already made one retrospective change without an apology, while using the universal arithmetical addition operator in a non-standard way and not even objected on my earlier interpretating it thus. Moreover, this is not a minor change because the original sentence pretended to be useful, was falsifiable, actionable - and I pointed out many ways in which it is either wrong, or needs citation.
I apologize, I was clearly saying "eat" where I meant to say "eat, digest, and metabolize". I'm okay with you not giving me the benefit of the doubt, instead insisting on casting this as a retrospective change and not a clarification of my words. That's fine. Not exactly reasonable, but fine nonetheless. My intended meaning should have been obvious from context, as I repeatedly mentioned that my statement was a tautology (and therefore explicitly not falsifiable). I'm not sure what "useful" or "actionable" mean in this context, so I withhold comment on that.
I sought to clarify this misunderstanding with this post 6 days (or entrely too many posts) ago. I suppose that would've been a better time for me to have apologized for the misunderstanding. In any case, I disagree that the plus sign is a "universal arithmetic addition operator", or that I was using it in a non-standard way, since the plus sign is the most commonly used operator for string concatenation. Furthermore, you point out that I didn't object earlier to your incorrect interpretation. Indeed, this is true, and I explain this in my previous post, stating "I honestly thought you were just trolling me when you started talking about summation". You see, with two reasonable interpretations of the plus sign (addition and concatenation) to choose from, you chose the one that made no sense over the one that would further my argument. Due to your seeming disingenuousness, I opted to play along with your apparent trolling instead of pointing out the obviously (and ostensibly deliberately) incorrect interpretation. It now seems that I was giving you too much credit, and that you weren't trolling me but earnestly misunderstanding me. I apologize for this as well.
The new sentence does not have these qualities (except of incorrectness). Even so, when you have turned your sentence into such a useless sentence, I can still prove it to be wrong - or at least in desperate need of citation. But I think you will again change it retrospectively, so it would be best if you put down the sentence which you now want to replace your aforementioned original sentence with, and I will address only that.
The new sentence ("Whether you turn some quantity of pizza into 12000 Calories worth of ATP (~1644 molecules) or you turn some quantity of kale into 12000 Calories worth of ATP (~1644 molecules), the impact of the consumed, digested, and metabolized calories (i.e. ATP) on your weight will be independent of their dietary source (but not independent of things like individual biology, gut biome, water weight, metabolic abnormalities, endocrine/hormonal state, blood glucose, and other unrelated factors."), which is a very pedantic way of phrasing my original claim, also seems tautologous to me. I'd be interested in hearing why you believe it to be incorrect now that we seem to no longer be talking past each other.
One thing which has long irked me about the FPS genre is the static nature of the game world.
The advent of realistic physics engines has made it possible to move past this limitation, but very little effort has been expended to actually do so. Admittedly, I don't game as much as I used to, but the only game that's coming to mind right now is Crysis. I don't think I ever got very far in the game, but I vaguely remember buildings and other larger structures actually being made up of smaller pieces which could then be blown apart. A step in the right direction, for sure, but I've played a few shooters since then and this feature doesn't seem to have gained adoption in other games. In any case, even the implementation in Crysis was rather limited; as far as I know, the distinct structural elements of buildings couldn't be subsequently broken down into smaller-still pieces.
In Fallout 4, I want the explosives skill to be useful for gaining entry to otherwise-inaccessible areas by way of blowing up walls, doors, rubble. Wishful thinking, I know, but why can't we have this level of realism in 2014 when game physics engines have been impressing us for nearly a decade now? Couldn't this level of realism be used to enhance gameplay instead of just serving as eye candy?
The context of your homework I was helping with you with was about summation working differently on pizza and kale
I honestly thought you were just trolling me when you started talking about summation. Now it's apparent that you were being earnest. Let me clarify.
In this post (and earlier in this post), I said " All normal people will get the same caloric input from 12000 consumed, digested, and metabolized calories, by definition... I recommend you s/eat/eat+digest+metabolize/g on all of my posts."
It seems that you have mistaken the '+' operator for arithmetic addition, not string concatenation. I'm not sure how you could have misunderstood me there (since I specifically said "consumed, digested, and metabolized calories" without mentioning any sort of addition), or why you would find "the sum of calories eaten, calories digested, and calories metabolized" to be a meaningful value, as it involves counting each calorie roughly 3 times. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you weren't intentionally misunderstanding me simply to be argumentative. In any case, my statement applied to "relevant calories", where a relevant calorie is one that is metabolized after having being eaten and digested, or one which is turned into ATP within the human body. To clarify, my statement was not intended to be applied to calories which are not eaten or calories which are not digested or calories which are not metabolized.
Thus, pizza calories available to increase body fat include all calories which have been eaten, digested, and metabolized. 12000 Calories.
Kale calories available to increase body fat include all calories which have been eaten, digested, and metabolized. 12000 Calories.
You might argue that in the case of pizza, it's only 11500 Calories, since 500 Calories from milk fat are not digested or metabolized. I would argue that you didn't have enough pizza, because we defined the amount of pizza consumed to be sufficient to yield 12000 Calories in ATP.
Additionally, your summation idea is at odds with reality, in that it has a person gaining 35000 or 36000 Calories when they've only eaten 12000 Calories worth of food. That would amount to free energy, or an inexplicable net increase in energy. That's not consistent with the known laws of physics. That's why I thought you were trolling me, as I didn't expect you would have truly believed that 12000 Calories of food could somehow triple in caloric value by virtue of human digestion.
What we've learned today:
Triple-counting calories doesn't really make sense.
My statements were specifically about "calories which are eaten, digested, and metabolized, i.e. turned into ATP", not "an arbitrary summing of the same calories three times over".
In light of that, is it clear now why my claim of caloric fungibility could only be false if the chemical potential energy of ATP molecules was dependent on their dietary source?
Wait a decade or 2.
Ah, so it wasn't an earnest offer of help then? In a decade or two, the Kinect sensor will be long obsolete and we'll all have ToF cameras available for the same cost. Weak sauce.
I've demonstated the falseness of that canard already.
After repeatedly being given the opportunity to clearly state the reasoning behind your objection to my claim of caloric fungibility, you've refused to do so. Your justification for this refusal has been demonstated to be false.
I'll kindly take you up on your offer for homework help, though. I'm working on fusing gyroscope and accelerometer data with a Kinect sensor's color and depth streams using a Kalman filter. Why isn't fakenect working?
Downtown Abbey
Downton. I don't know why there's no second 'w' in there, but it is Downton.
Disclaimer: Never seen the show but am persistently irked by the missing second 'w'.
You've already posted 31 times in this thread. Surely one post that actually contains some content isn't too much to ask for.
So $200K is the new 640K?
Disclaimer: I'm in favor of 1950s style tax rates (only strictly enforced).