That's totally true. My good friend used to work as a sous chef at a high end (Michelin star) restaurant. One time we were cooking a meal together and he added multiple sticks of butter to things. While I think many of the high end restaurants have moved away from this practice, this is what most of the mid and low end do to make their food taste better and to not use the freshest ingredients. Chinese sauces are the perfect example of this - I might use 1-2 tablespoons of oil (180ish kcal) to stir fry broccoli, but in a restaurant with a sauce, I'd imagine it's far more than that. And yes, on a 2000kcal diet, 180kcal counts, but it's not so bad since everything else in stir fried broccoli is close to free. Bagels are notorious for hiding calories, both their own and what goes in/on them.
However, the massive calories in food is not US specific. Kids in asia eat pure grease from food kiosks everywhere. The french. Most of the girls I know eat a ton and yet are skinny. There are very large differences in how people process calories. The thermodynamics argument was made by Richard Muller at Berkeley and he was rightfully blasted for it. Not because thermodynamics doesn't work, but because you have to draw the system boundary and inputs and outputs correctly before it does work.
I was the AC above and I did actually read your reply. I agree with your thermodynamics approach, if you'll grant me that the actual equation is:
A*(cal in)-B*(cal out) = C*3500lbs
Where A, B, and C are efficiency factors that depend on physical processes occurring inside the machine that is a person (yep, I'm agreeing with you about the mechanical idea)
When I was training, no I didn't track what I ate very closely. Why would I? I was working out 25 or so hours a week. However there have been times in my life where I tracked my intake obsessively. We can forget the first 10ish lbs, they're easy. But beyond that I seem to lose weight somewhere around 17-1800 kcal/day with an hour of exercise. That's not very much food. A friend decided to try to lose 10 lbs along with me, she weighed 135 and barely worked out. Her baseline food intake was approximately 2500 kcal. 1700 was starvation for her.
And that's pretty much my argument. We can control the height of people with food intake too. If you don't eat enough as a child, you will not be as tall as you would be otherwise, however when someone is very tall or very short we don't blame them for it. Yes, put me in a concentration camp and I'll lose weight. But the question is, why is it so difficult for some people and for others, they just never had to worry about it?
One more interesting data point, in at least 1 followup study for weight loss (I don't have the source right now) formerly fat people had to eat approximately 1/3 less than people who had always been at that weight in order to maintain. That's giant. It's the difference between 3000kcal and 2000kcal. At 2000kcal, you have to be pretty careful about what you eat. At 3000kcal, you really don't need to be careful at all - as long as you aren't eating an entire onion bloom at chili's every day, you probably won't gain weight.
Many people in this comments section keep pointing to one thing or another thing as a pro or a con. But there are a ton of factors, everything from brown fat to gut bacteria, to genetics as well as food availability and type, medication usage, and the overused "glandular (thyroid) problem." (Don't get me started on thyroid problems, they are not very common - genetics is a far easier argument.) And we really can't point to any single factor as THE REASON. However what we can say is that there are a variety of human responses to food, exercise and energy storage and therefore an equation like cal in - cal out = 3500 x lbs may be off in some people by a factor of two. One way to think about this is that auto efficiency has changed dramatically in my lifetime, even though power output has been increasing. It's possible to have two mechanical objects that are very similar in form and function, but that have very different inputs and outputs. And I'm sure you'll agree with me that cars are bound by the laws of thermodynamics.
(There's a study I've looked for in the past and never found, but it's incredibly obvious... I'd like to monitor people's intake and then measure the calorie content of their poo. I'd be willing to bet that skinny people poop out far more calorie rich poo than fat people.)
I've heard this story before. There is one major problem with it:
Over the last 20 years, the rich guy has experienced all the economic growth of the country and everyone else is poorer than they were 20 years ago. The rich guy should be paying 60 percent of the bill because he's making even more money than that, as compared to the poor. (In terms of wealth, which is the real power of money, the top 5% have half of it and the top 20% have 80% of it [see Gar Alperovitz])
I once had a talk with a small business owner (by definition - he had 47 employees) who was a millionaire many times over. In his opinion, it was worth it for him to go to work as long as he didn't pay more than 50% on every marginal dollar. This idea that the rich won't want to work unless they have low taxes is ludicrous.
There's a quote I can't seem to remember but paraphrased, it's something like this:
If you think no one takes you seriously because you're beautiful, just see how seriously they'd take you when you're ugly.
The human condition is that most of us are a$$holes to people we don't know. Beautiful people tend to have different experiences with jerks, but studies have shown time and time again that they ultimately benefit from their beauty. Including lower rates of depression and teenage suicide as well as other metrics such as paycheck size. When I hear someone prettier than me complain that people don't take them seriously because they are beautiful, it generally annoys me... at least they're getting some attention at all.
It's a similar comparison to a rich person who is stressed out about the fact that they're going to wear the same outfit to two parties. The stress is real, but it's nothing like worrying about whether you can pay your next rent bill.
In my experience, the prettier people who complain about problems due to their attractiveness are not attention whoring, but actually feel as if their attractiveness is a burden, but fortunately for them, they have never actually had to worry about the isolation and other problems that occur when one is unattractive.
Economist Roland Fryer has done research on "acting white," i.e. the phenomenon by which black children who excel academically are stigmatized by their peers.
Recently, he was in a New York City school and asked some of the seventh graders he was talking to whether they had ever heard the phrase "acting white."
The kids laughed at him and said, "Of course, but that's old school. Now it's called 'acting Asian.'"
I've pretty much read every comment on this thread and am impressed by the fat hatred amongst nerds. I could spend all afternoon trying to correct the incorrect information people have posted so far with respect to current obesity research, but instead I'd like to propose a different question:
Why is increasing life expectancy a moral imperative?
Is living fast (or fat or smoking or sexually active) and dying young a valid life choice? If it's valid for a person, why not for a society?
If the claim is that dying young costs society more, just remember, death costs money and we're all going to die. From a monetary standpoint, the best thing that can happen is that we get hit by a truck the day we retire.
I just want to agree with you about Amazon. I've placed over 250 separate orders with them dating back to their first month in operation. A few months ago a 150 dollar order got lost, probably stolen from outside my apartment. They shipped a duplicate item to the UPS store across the street and all I had to do was send one email explaining the situation.
While they may do this type of thing for everyone, I sometimes imagine it was a customer service rep looking at my purchase record and bending the rules for one of their best customers.
You haven't lived in the bay area in a while. The temperature outside of SF has gone up. Sunnyvale routinely is in the high 90's or 100, Berkeley spends a month in the 90's as well.
There's something wrong with the weather out here.
Actually, have another few videos going in the background. So that you can say... the entire time we've been doing this history thing, look at what else we've been doing. It's what BeOS did to impress the journalists a few years ago.
In a cube. With people interrupting me. And annoying me. Whenever I have a long task to complete: programming, writing a scientific paper, etc, I took my cell phone and my computer to Starbucks and WIFIed in. No one knows where I am, and those are my most productive times. I won't work any other way!
One other issue is that you don't always want certain customers... as a business. The average slashdot user will sit with a manual for 2 hours trying to get something working. My cousin called AOL twice while installing it. Which customer would you rather have? By growing with only high margin customers, Red Hat has more money to play with in the long run.
It might be to RH's advantage for some other company to get newbies on board. And then switch them over later... say when they buy a second computer or want to do something advanced. That's why it makes sense to hook people on... say... PDAs first, it is a much lower maintainance type of product than a PC.
Actually, out of all of win2k's new features, the ability of the OS to hide anything is the most annoying feature.
I constantly find myself looking for a program that I know that I have, but unable to find it because Windows has decided that I haven't used it in a week and that it should be hidden.
This leads to even more assinine cases in programs such as Word where undo may be shown in a menu, but redo is hidden. I've aready turned off the menu hiding option in every program that I own. (It took me a while to find the option tho... thanks to how deeply it is buried in Word).
Hiding options is just a stupid way to make an OS easier to use. It makes it nearly impossible to form a cognitive map of the system because everything keeps changing.
CERN would like to be known for discovering the Higgs particle. Shutting down the LEP, replacing it, and getting the new accelerator up to speed (including calibration) could take a long time... time enough for competitors to catch up or surpass researchers at CERN.
But it is not the government charging the rates for stolen towels. This is the difference. Company B might charge less to cover its stolen towels and therefore you might go to company B instead.
Re:This *should* be a position at every University
on
Computer Historian?
·
· Score: 1
At Cornell we have a Science and Technology Studies program. It also has a sister program, Bio and Society. Both courses of study look at the history of technology and deal with issues of ethics, innovation, and historical patterns. I've taken 2 STS courses, in one we spent some time talking about the debate about vacuums and the ether. In the other, I wrote a paper about the beginnings of television. It would seem as the STS program might suit the type of career that you seem to want to persue.
I recently bought a Dell Inspiron. You're right about the initial installation. The stock config had a system tray that filled up about 1/3 of the screen, and this had the super xga 15" monster screen. Not only that, but they installed some software that was supposed to tell me when my computer was going to crash, before it crashed. In addition they installed a Macromedia introduction program to help me get started.
So what happened?
The macromedia startup crashed before I ever saw the true desktop. I restarted and made it through on my 3rd try. About 3 hours after that, the crash detection software started crashing my computer. Inside of 24 hours the computer was too unstable to use. I had to run windows, so at that point, I reformatted and reinstalled and the system became the most stable windows system I've ever owned.
The moral is that no matter what, preinstalled software should just be summarily deleted.
While I realize that some may consider Easter Eggs to be a pointless waste of program size, the amount of room devoted to such eggs is really very small. Furthermore, they are a creative outlet for the programmers. It's a way to give an individual touch to a product that is shrink wrapped and sanitized. When I see an easter egg, I feel like I have some insight into the author and for me, as an engineer, it is somehow comforting.
Slashdot Mirror
That's totally true. My good friend used to work as a sous chef at a high end (Michelin star) restaurant. One time we were cooking a meal together and he added multiple sticks of butter to things. While I think many of the high end restaurants have moved away from this practice, this is what most of the mid and low end do to make their food taste better and to not use the freshest ingredients. Chinese sauces are the perfect example of this - I might use 1-2 tablespoons of oil (180ish kcal) to stir fry broccoli, but in a restaurant with a sauce, I'd imagine it's far more than that. And yes, on a 2000kcal diet, 180kcal counts, but it's not so bad since everything else in stir fried broccoli is close to free. Bagels are notorious for hiding calories, both their own and what goes in/on them.
However, the massive calories in food is not US specific. Kids in asia eat pure grease from food kiosks everywhere. The french. Most of the girls I know eat a ton and yet are skinny. There are very large differences in how people process calories. The thermodynamics argument was made by Richard Muller at Berkeley and he was rightfully blasted for it. Not because thermodynamics doesn't work, but because you have to draw the system boundary and inputs and outputs correctly before it does work.
I was the AC above and I did actually read your reply. I agree with your thermodynamics approach, if you'll grant me that the actual equation is:
A*(cal in)-B*(cal out) = C*3500lbs
Where A, B, and C are efficiency factors that depend on physical processes occurring inside the machine that is a person (yep, I'm agreeing with you about the mechanical idea)
When I was training, no I didn't track what I ate very closely. Why would I? I was working out 25 or so hours a week. However there have been times in my life where I tracked my intake obsessively. We can forget the first 10ish lbs, they're easy. But beyond that I seem to lose weight somewhere around 17-1800 kcal/day with an hour of exercise. That's not very much food. A friend decided to try to lose 10 lbs along with me, she weighed 135 and barely worked out. Her baseline food intake was approximately 2500 kcal. 1700 was starvation for her.
And that's pretty much my argument. We can control the height of people with food intake too. If you don't eat enough as a child, you will not be as tall as you would be otherwise, however when someone is very tall or very short we don't blame them for it. Yes, put me in a concentration camp and I'll lose weight. But the question is, why is it so difficult for some people and for others, they just never had to worry about it?
One more interesting data point, in at least 1 followup study for weight loss (I don't have the source right now) formerly fat people had to eat approximately 1/3 less than people who had always been at that weight in order to maintain. That's giant. It's the difference between 3000kcal and 2000kcal. At 2000kcal, you have to be pretty careful about what you eat. At 3000kcal, you really don't need to be careful at all - as long as you aren't eating an entire onion bloom at chili's every day, you probably won't gain weight.
Many people in this comments section keep pointing to one thing or another thing as a pro or a con. But there are a ton of factors, everything from brown fat to gut bacteria, to genetics as well as food availability and type, medication usage, and the overused "glandular (thyroid) problem." (Don't get me started on thyroid problems, they are not very common - genetics is a far easier argument.) And we really can't point to any single factor as THE REASON. However what we can say is that there are a variety of human responses to food, exercise and energy storage and therefore an equation like cal in - cal out = 3500 x lbs may be off in some people by a factor of two. One way to think about this is that auto efficiency has changed dramatically in my lifetime, even though power output has been increasing. It's possible to have two mechanical objects that are very similar in form and function, but that have very different inputs and outputs. And I'm sure you'll agree with me that cars are bound by the laws of thermodynamics.
(There's a study I've looked for in the past and never found, but it's incredibly obvious... I'd like to monitor people's intake and then measure the calorie content of their poo. I'd be willing to bet that skinny people poop out far more calorie rich poo than fat people.)
I've heard this story before. There is one major problem with it:
Over the last 20 years, the rich guy has experienced all the economic growth of the country and everyone else is poorer than they were 20 years ago. The rich guy should be paying 60 percent of the bill because he's making even more money than that, as compared to the poor. (In terms of wealth, which is the real power of money, the top 5% have half of it and the top 20% have 80% of it [see Gar Alperovitz])
I once had a talk with a small business owner (by definition - he had 47 employees) who was a millionaire many times over. In his opinion, it was worth it for him to go to work as long as he didn't pay more than 50% on every marginal dollar. This idea that the rich won't want to work unless they have low taxes is ludicrous.
Mod this guy up... out of the last 100 comments I've read, he's the only one that's said something intelligent.
There's a quote I can't seem to remember but paraphrased, it's something like this:
If you think no one takes you seriously because you're beautiful, just see how seriously they'd take you when you're ugly.
The human condition is that most of us are a$$holes to people we don't know. Beautiful people tend to have different experiences with jerks, but studies have shown time and time again that they ultimately benefit from their beauty. Including lower rates of depression and teenage suicide as well as other metrics such as paycheck size. When I hear someone prettier than me complain that people don't take them seriously because they are beautiful, it generally annoys me... at least they're getting some attention at all.
It's a similar comparison to a rich person who is stressed out about the fact that they're going to wear the same outfit to two parties. The stress is real, but it's nothing like worrying about whether you can pay your next rent bill.
In my experience, the prettier people who complain about problems due to their attractiveness are not attention whoring, but actually feel as if their attractiveness is a burden, but fortunately for them, they have never actually had to worry about the isolation and other problems that occur when one is unattractive.
It's no longer called "acting white."
From the Freakinomics blog:
Economist Roland Fryer has done research on "acting white," i.e. the phenomenon by which black children who excel academically are stigmatized by their peers.
Recently, he was in a New York City school and asked some of the seventh graders he was talking to whether they had ever heard the phrase "acting white."
The kids laughed at him and said, "Of course, but that's old school. Now it's called 'acting Asian.'"
I've pretty much read every comment on this thread and am impressed by the fat hatred amongst nerds. I could spend all afternoon trying to correct the incorrect information people have posted so far with respect to current obesity research, but instead I'd like to propose a different question:
Why is increasing life expectancy a moral imperative?
Is living fast (or fat or smoking or sexually active) and dying young a valid life choice? If it's valid for a person, why not for a society?
If the claim is that dying young costs society more, just remember, death costs money and we're all going to die. From a monetary standpoint, the best thing that can happen is that we get hit by a truck the day we retire.
I just want to agree with you about Amazon. I've placed over 250 separate orders with them dating back to their first month in operation. A few months ago a 150 dollar order got lost, probably stolen from outside my apartment. They shipped a duplicate item to the UPS store across the street and all I had to do was send one email explaining the situation.
While they may do this type of thing for everyone, I sometimes imagine it was a customer service rep looking at my purchase record and bending the rules for one of their best customers.
The article claims that BoA hopes to save $100 million over 5 years, or roughly 20 million a year.
u /database.cfm?tkr=BAC&pg=1
Check out CEO pay here:
http://www.aflcio.org/corporatewatch/paywatch/ceo
What's the easiest way for a company to cut $20 million from their budget?
You haven't lived in the bay area in a while. The temperature outside of SF has gone up. Sunnyvale routinely is in the high 90's or 100, Berkeley spends a month in the 90's as well.
There's something wrong with the weather out here.
up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Select, Start
Actually, have another few videos going in the background. So that you can say... the entire time we've been doing this history thing, look at what else we've been doing. It's what BeOS did to impress the journalists a few years ago.
In a cube. With people interrupting me. And annoying me. Whenever I have a long task to complete: programming, writing a scientific paper, etc, I took my cell phone and my computer to Starbucks and WIFIed in. No one knows where I am, and those are my most productive times. I won't work any other way!
The republicans want censor sex, the democrats, violence.
One other issue is that you don't always want certain customers... as a business. The average slashdot user will sit with a manual for 2 hours trying to get something working. My cousin called AOL twice while installing it. Which customer would you rather have? By growing with only high margin customers, Red Hat has more money to play with in the long run.
It might be to RH's advantage for some other company to get newbies on board. And then switch them over later... say when they buy a second computer or want to do something advanced. That's why it makes sense to hook people on... say... PDAs first, it is a much lower maintainance type of product than a PC.
Wasn't there a Simpsons episode about this? Some bum claims to have invented Itcy and Scratchy, but the film strip that proves this burns up?
Mirror the movie quickly before it's too late!!!
I checked out the site. What I see is that now, instead of just windows with new icons, it's windows with skins.
Apple is still so far ahead in design, it's scary.
Personally, I'm guessing that Sony and Palm and Nintendo will release the first true consumer OSes and we'll be done with this MS BS forever.
Actually, out of all of win2k's new features, the ability of the OS to hide anything is the most annoying feature.
I constantly find myself looking for a program that I know that I have, but unable to find it because Windows has decided that I haven't used it in a week and that it should be hidden.
This leads to even more assinine cases in programs such as Word where undo may be shown in a menu, but redo is hidden. I've aready turned off the menu hiding option in every program that I own. (It took me a while to find the option tho... thanks to how deeply it is buried in Word).
Hiding options is just a stupid way to make an OS easier to use. It makes it nearly impossible to form a cognitive map of the system because everything keeps changing.
CERN would like to be known for discovering the Higgs particle. Shutting down the LEP, replacing it, and getting the new accelerator up to speed (including calibration) could take a long time... time enough for competitors to catch up or surpass researchers at CERN.
But it is not the government charging the rates for stolen towels. This is the difference. Company B might charge less to cover its stolen towels and therefore you might go to company B instead.
At Cornell we have a Science and Technology Studies program. It also has a sister program, Bio and Society. Both courses of study look at the history of technology and deal with issues of ethics, innovation, and historical patterns. I've taken 2 STS courses, in one we spent some time talking about the debate about vacuums and the ether. In the other, I wrote a paper about the beginnings of television. It would seem as the STS program might suit the type of career that you seem to want to persue.
Goodluck
I misread this the first time. I read it as:
...give this guy a fat pipe and a gnutella node.
Guess we know where my mind is right now.
I recently bought a Dell Inspiron. You're right about the initial installation. The stock config had a system tray that filled up about 1/3 of the screen, and this had the super xga 15" monster screen. Not only that, but they installed some software that was supposed to tell me when my computer was going to crash, before it crashed. In addition they installed a Macromedia introduction program to help me get started.
So what happened?
The macromedia startup crashed before I ever saw the true desktop. I restarted and made it through on my 3rd try. About 3 hours after that, the crash detection software started crashing my computer. Inside of 24 hours the computer was too unstable to use. I had to run windows, so at that point, I reformatted and reinstalled and the system became the most stable windows system I've ever owned.
The moral is that no matter what, preinstalled software should just be summarily deleted.
Very funny. Kinda reminds me of the old line:
"I'm not vegetarian because I like animals, I'm vegetarian because I hate vegetables."
While I realize that some may consider Easter Eggs to be a pointless waste of program size, the amount of room devoted to such eggs is really very small. Furthermore, they are a creative outlet for the programmers. It's a way to give an individual touch to a product that is shrink wrapped and sanitized. When I see an easter egg, I feel like I have some insight into the author and for me, as an engineer, it is somehow comforting.