The Weird, Random, and Interesting things that Fit Nowhere Else Thread..

[Malcador]

I've heard naval aviators lovingly call oversized surface combatants like the Kirov-class battlecruisers "Navy Crosses waiting to happen". 

Do they usually wander around at sea with no escort ?

 

Shortcomings aside, old battleships' durability was kind of impressive looking at the (contemporary) abuse they took before sinking.

Edited March 3, 2015 by Malcador

[Agiel]

 

I've heard naval aviators lovingly call oversized surface combatants like the Kirov-class battlecruisers "Navy Crosses waiting to happen". 

Do they usually wander around at sea with no escort ?

 

At risk of getting all of this moved to the Modern Wars thread:

 

Since the Russian Navy only has the one aircraft carrier (and calling it a big deck carrier is a bit... generous) and there are very, very few countries willing to host Russian air defence fighters on their territory, it usually does whenever its traversing open ocean.

[ManifestedISO]

Still infatuated with artist Chrissie Zullo, who maintains boss-level nerd empathy. Her rendition of Leia in honor of today's new mini-series comic book release. 

 

[Valsuelm]

Beautiful art. Thanks for introducing me to her. Love the Ghibli influence. I immediately wanted to make something she did my wallpaper, but alas, I couldn't find anything big enough.

[JadedWolf]

Danish museum employs tiny mole archeaologists.

 

No, I am not making this up.

 

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-31711934

[catterpillar]

loved this animation: 

death is having a bad day at work))))

[Blarghagh]

I really enjoyed that one. Thanks!

[Woldan]

Go pro vid form the very innovative Nissan LMP-1. Love the sound.

 

Edited March 7, 2015 by Woldan

[ManifestedISO]

I guess sometimes the bread lands buttered-side up. 

 

I was just dipping Ruffles with ridges into a plastic saucer filled with hummus, because delicious, and all of sudden post-dip the whole container jumped off the glass desktop, bounced into my lap, slid down my pant leg, and landed on the mat below my monitor right-side up without spilling a single spec of hummus. Maybe there is a god afterall.  

[Gromnir]

would be kinda a funny joke on the universe if the only genuine God were the god o' hummus.

 

HA! Good Fun!

[Malcador]

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/tech-support-scammer-threatened-to-kill-man-when-scam-call-backfired/

 

Hate these people. Surprised the guy said they chop up Anglos though, was expecting rape, heh

[Raithe]

On that subject of the Biggest Loser that came up in one of the other threads....

 

NYPost - Contestant Reveals Brutal Secrets

 

 

 

She had always struggled with her weight, but in January 2006, Kai Hibbard was in real trouble: At just 26 years old, her 5-foot-6 frame carried 265 pounds.

Her best friend staged a mini-intervention. “She said, ‘Hey, I love you, but you’re super-fat right now,’ ” Hibbard recalls. The pal encouraged Hibbard to try out for the smash NBC reality show “The Biggest Loser.”

 

“So I made a videotape,” Hibbard says, “and the next thing I know, I’m on a reality TV show.” Hibbard had never seen “The Biggest Loser.” She had no idea what she was in for.

“The whole f- -king show,” she says today, “is a fat-shaming disaster that I’m embarrassed to have participated in.” Since its premiere in 2004, “The Biggest Loser” — which pits obese contestants against one another in a race to lose the most weight — has been one of the most popular reality shows of all time.

 

The 16th-season finale will air live on Jan. 29. Average weekly viewership is 7 million people, and about 200,000 people audition per season.

The show rakes in about $100 million annually in ad sales, with ancillary products such as cookbooks, DVDs, protein powder, clothing, video games and branded weight-loss camps bringing in tens of millions of dollars more per year.

 

In a country where two-thirds of the population is overweight or obese, “The Biggest Loser” has multifaceted appeal: It’s aspirational and grotesque, punitive and redemptive — skinny or fat, it’s got something for you. It’s not uncommon to see contestants worked out to the point of vomiting or collapsing from exhaustion. Contestants, collegially and poignantly, refer to one another as “losers.” “You just think you’re so lucky to be there,” Hibbard says, “that you don’t think to question or complain about anything.”

 

Contestants are made to sign contracts giving away rights to their own story lines and forbidding them to speak badly about the show.

Once selected, Hibbard was flown to LA. When she got to her hotel, she was greeted by a production assistant, who checked her in and took away her key card. When not filming, she was to stay in her room at all times. “The hotel will report to them if you leave your room,” Hibbard says. “They assume you’re going to talk to other contestants.”

Another competitor, who spoke to The Post on the condition of anonymity, says that when she first checked in, a production assistant also took her cellphone and laptop for 24 hours. She suspects her computer was bugged. “The camera light on my MacBook would sometimes come on when I hadn’t checked in,” she says. “It was like Big Brother was always watching you.” The sequestration lasts five days.

 

After an initial winnowing process, 14 of 50 finalists are taken to “the ranch,” where they live, work out and suffer in seclusion. (The remaining 36 are sent home to lose weight on their own, and return later in the season.)

 

Those who remain, Hibbard says, are not allowed to call home. “You might give away show secrets,” she says. After six weeks, contestants get to make a five-minute call, monitored by production. “I know that one of the contestants’ children became very ill and was in the ICU,” Hibbard says. “He was allowed to talk to his family — but he didn’t want to leave, because the show would have been done with him.”

 

Once at the ranch, contestants are given a medical exam, then start working out immediately, for dangerous lengths of time — from five to eight hours straight.

“There was no easing into it,” Hibbard says. “That doesn’t make for good TV. My feet were bleeding through my shoes for the first three weeks.”

“My first workout was four hours long,” says the other contestant. She came on the show a few years ago at more than 300 pounds. On her first day, she was put through this regimen:

 

• Rowing
• Body-weight work
• Kettle bells
• Cool-down on treadmill
• Interval training
• Stairmaster
• Outside work with tires

At one point, she collapsed. “I thought I was going to die,” she says. “I couldn’t take any more.” Her trainer yelled, “Get up!,” then made a comment about a sick and overweight relative. “I got up,” she says. “You’re just in shock. Your body’s in shock. All the contestants would say to each other, ‘What the f- -k just happened?’ ”

The trainers, she says, took satisfaction in bringing their charges to physical and mental collapse. “They’d get a sick pleasure out of it,” she says. “They’d say, ‘It’s because you’re fat. Look at all the fat you have on you.’ And that was our fault, so this was our punishment.”

 

Hibbard had the same experience. “They would say things to contestants like, ‘You’re going die before your children grow up.’ ‘You’re going to die, just like your mother.’ ‘We’ve picked out your fat-person coffin’ — that was in a text message. One production assistant told a contestant to take up smoking because it would cut her appetite in half.”

Meanwhile, their calories were severely restricted. The recommended daily intake for a person of average height and weight is 1,200 to 1,600 calories per day. The contestants were ingesting far less than 1,000 per day.

 

Hibbard says the bulk of food on her season was provided by sponsors and had little to no nutritional value.

“Your grocery list is approved by your trainer,” she says. “My season had a lot of Franken-foods: I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter spray, Kraft fat-free cheese, Rockstar Energy Drinks, Jell-O.”

 

At one point, Hibbard says, production did bloodwork on all the contestants, and the show’s doctor prescribed electrolyte drinks. “And the trainer said, ‘Don’t drink that — it’ll put weight on you. You’ll lose your last chance to save your life.’ ”

 

Such extreme, daily workouts and calorie restriction result in steep weight losses — up to 30 pounds lost in one week.

“Safe weight loss is one to two pounds per week, and most people find that hard,” says Lynn Darby, a professor of exercise science at Bowling Green State University. “If you reduce your calories to less than 800 to 1,000 a day, your metabolism will shut down. Add five to eight hours of exercise a day — that’s like running a marathon, in poor shape, five days a week. I’m surprised that no one’s ­really been injured on the show.”

 

In fact, contestants have been seriously injured, but it’s not often shown. The first-ever “Biggest Loser,” Ryan Benson, went from 330 pounds to 208 — but after the show, he said, he was so malnourished that he was urinating blood. “That’s a sign of kidney damage, if not failure,” Darby says. Benson later gained back all the weight and was disowned by the show.

In 2009, two contestants were hospitalized — one via airlift. And 2014’s Biggest Loser, Rachel Frederickson, became the first winner to generate concern that she had lost too much weight, dropping 155 pounds in months. She appeared on the cover of People with the headline “Too Thin, Too Fast?” Frederickson (5 feet 4, 105 pounds) admitted to working out four times a day, and within one month of the finale had gained back 20 pounds.

 

"Just calorie restriction in and of itself has to be supervised,” Darby says. “I mean, people die. Then add that exercise load on top of it. The joints of someone who has never exercised absorbing the force of 300 pounds of jumping or bouncing? It’s just not safe.” Hibbard says she and other contestants sustained major physical damage.

“One contestant had a torn calf muscle and bursitis in her knees,” Hibbard says. “The doctor told her, ‘You need to rest.’ She said, ‘Production told me I can’t rest.’ At one point after that, production ordered her to run, and she said, ‘I can’t.’ She was seriously injured. But they edited her to make her look lazy and bitchy and combative.”

Hibbard’s own health declined dramatically. “My hair was falling out,” she says. “My period stopped. I was only sleeping three hours a night.” Hibbard says that to this day, her period is irregular, her hair still falls out, and her knees “sound like Saran Wrap” every time she goes up and down stairs. “My thyroid, which I never had problems with, is now crap,” she says.

 

“One of the other ‘losers’ and I started taking showers together, because we couldn’t lift our arms over our heads,” says the other contestant. “We’d duck down so we could shampoo each other.”

 

The trainers, she says, were unmoved. “They’d say stuff like, ‘Pain is just weakness leaving the body.’ ”

This contestant says she and most of her castmates came away with bad knees. “There was one guy whose back was so bad, he could only exercise in the swimming pool. By the end of the show, I was running on 400 calories and eight- to nine-hour workouts per day. Someone asked me where I was born, and I couldn’t remember. My short-term memory still sucks.”

 

So why do so many contestants stick with the show?

“You’re brainwashed to believe that you’re super-lucky to be there,” Hibbard says. One doctor told a contestant she was exhibiting signs of Stockholm syndrome, and Hibbard herself fell prey to it.

 

“I was thinking, ‘Dear God, don’t let anybody down. You will appear ungrateful if you don’t lose more weight before the season finale.’ ”

The other contestant had a similar response. Despite “the harassment and the bullying, I wanted to please them,” she says. She lost seven pounds in one week and apologized. “I’d lost 12 pounds the week before,” she says.

 

For Hibbard, the low point came when she and her fellow “losers” were brought to a racetrack, where they were housed in individual horse stalls. When a bell went off, they had to run neck-and-neck like animals, picking up sacks filled with their lost weight on the way.

“I walked,” she says. It was her minor form of protest. “They edited it to look like I was lazy,” she says, “but I wasn’t participating because it was humiliating.”

When Hibbard got home, her best friend and boyfriend took her straight to the doctor. “She said I had such severe shin splints that she didn’t know how I was still walking,” Hibbard says.

 

The show’s most famous trainer, Jillian Michaels, quit “The Biggest Loser” for the third time in June 2014, with People magazine reporting she was “deeply concerned” about the show’s “poor care of the contestants.”

 

In a statement to The Post, NBC said only: “Our contestants are closely monitored and medically supervised. The consistent ‘Biggest Loser’ health transformations of over 300 contestants through 16 seasons of the program speak for themselves.”

 

Expert Darby doesn’t buy it. “With most weight-loss programs, people gain at least half of the weight back,” she says. “And the people who are most successful in our studies are the ones who make small changes over the long term — so I can’t imagine that anyone on ‘The Biggest Loser’ has weight loss that’s sustainable.”

 

Hibbard, who lost 121 pounds to end up at 144, put weight back on, but won’t say how much. Yet she feels a responsibility as someone once held up as false inspiration.

“If I’m going to walk around collecting accolades, I also have a responsibility [to tell the truth],” she says. “There’s a moral and ethical question here when you take people who are morbidly obese and work them out to the point where they vomit, all because it makes for good TV.”

 

 

Edited March 8, 2015 by Raithe

[Hurlshort]

Well I guess that explains why Jillian Michaels keeps quitting the show.  

[Malcador]

Good on her for revealing that stuff.   Surprised anyone could say "Pain is weakness leaving the body" with a straight face though, worrying.

[Blarghagh]

Especially a "personal trainer".

[Woldan]

I find it endlessly puzzling how so many people struggle with losing weight, its such a simple process yet it seems a new creative way to completely screw it up is found every single day. Either they work out so hard with circle training they're wrecking themselves, or they do a reasonable amount of exercise but increase their caloric intake by 300%, or they do a couple of crunches every three days and despair because nothing happens, or they stop eating while working out till the inevitable collapse happens, or they get a highly dangerous bariatric surgery and die, or they start weight lifting with isolations and wonder why they get heavier.

[Blarghagh]

It's such a simple process, here's all these ways to totally screw it up.

[Woldan]

Theoretically there is an infinite amount of ridiculous ways to fail at any task. This does not mean, however, that all those tasks are complex.

[213374U]

I find it endlessly puzzling how so many people struggle with losing weight, its such a simple process yet it seems a new creative way to completely screw it up is found every single day. Either they work out so hard with circle training they're wrecking themselves, or they do a reasonable amount of exercise but increase their caloric intake by 300%, or they do a couple of crunches every three days and despair because nothing happens, or they stop eating while working out till the inevitable collapse happens, or they get a highly dangerous bariatric surgery and die, or they start weight lifting with isolations and wonder why they get heavier.

 

Because you are operating from the premise that since simply picking up weight and putting it down worked for you, it must work for everyone. In reality, it is not so simple.

 

A landmark study by Hubal used 585 male and female human subjects and showed that twelve weeks of progressive dynamic exercise resulted in a shockingly wide range of responses.

 

The worst responders lost 2% of their muscle cross-sectional area and didn't gain any strength whatsoever. The best responders increased muscle cross-sectional area by 59% and increased their 1RM strength by 250%. Keep in mind these individuals were subjected to the exact same training protocol.

 

The study for your perusal.

[Woldan]

Because you are operating from the premise that since simply picking up weight and putting it down worked for you, it must work for everyone.

A proven method is a method that works for the majority of people through a process of what could be described as evolution. There are time proven and highly successful methods to lose weight, just as there are highly effective and time proven ways to build muscle. There are always exceptions, but there are methods which are described as standards because it works for most people. You cannot deny this. Edited March 8, 2015 by Woldan

[Gromnir]

 

I find it endlessly puzzling how so many people struggle with losing weight, its such a simple process yet it seems a new creative way to completely screw it up is found every single day. Either they work out so hard with circle training they're wrecking themselves, or they do a reasonable amount of exercise but increase their caloric intake by 300%, or they do a couple of crunches every three days and despair because nothing happens, or they stop eating while working out till the inevitable collapse happens, or they get a highly dangerous bariatric surgery and die, or they start weight lifting with isolations and wonder why they get heavier.

 

Because you are operating from the premise that since simply picking up weight and putting it down worked for you, it must work for everyone. In reality, it is not so simple.

 

 

you have no idea how many times we has beaten that drum for woldan.  we keep pointing out the flaws o' seeing general rules o' applicability based on nothing more than personal experience, but he don't learn.

 

one time a virgin accidentally gets fatal knocked off a cliff or killed by a horse contemporaneous with the ending o' a drought or plague.  next thing you know, the primitives is lining up their virgins yearly to bring good harvests.  we woulda' hoped such nonsense had been abandoned by nearly everybody.

 

HA! Good Fun!

[213374U]

 

Because you are operating from the premise that since simply picking up weight and putting it down worked for you, it must work for everyone.

A proven method is a method that works for the majority of people through a process of what could be described as evolution. There are time proven and highly successful methods to lose weight, just as there are highly effective and time proven ways to build muscle. There are always exceptions, but there are methods which are described as standards because it works for most people. You cannot deny this.

 

No, I won't deny the effectiveness of proven methods, because disproving a tautology is impossible.

 

I'm challenging the assertion that "proven methods" exist at all. I guess that there are methods that work for the majority (i.e. 50% + 1), but those are still going to be counterproductive for a great many people, whose failure will leave you "endlessly puzzled" (they must be doing something wrong). It all comes down to what constitutes a sufficient effectiveness threshold for you. Is it 50%? 80%? 99%? This is why most commercial gyms are full of fail, and a majority of pre-packaged fitness "programs" are little more than marketing gimmicks that fail to produce significant body composition changes over time.

 

Now, let's talk about "evolution". I guess you are referring to the theory that the knowledge pool of training has, through a process of trial and error, improved to produce a set of guiding principles and specific protocols that work for everyone, or at least for an arbitrary proportion such that you consider it sufficient to declare them "proven". That's your hypothesis, yes?

 

Mine is that these principles and protocols have in fact changed little over time and natural selection hasn't so much applied to the body of knowledge itself as it has to those who try and apply said "knowledge". This means that, for some it works great, and for some others, it doesn't, reflecting that the one-size-fits-all approach is a crapshoot. The second group tend to quit due to lack of progress, frustration and injuries, leaving only the the individuals that respond well to these methods. Therefore, anyone looking only at the end result would conclude that these methods do in fact work, and if they didn't it's because "they did something wrong" or quit, when it's the other way around.

 

I'll admit, I haven't found much research on this matter other than the study I linked back there. Do you have any?

[Guard Dog]

The one proven way to lose weight, that any one can do and has ALWAYS worked for everyone: Don't eat so much!

 

The single most effective exercise is the push-away. As in push the chair away from the table!  

[213374U]

The one proven way to lose weight, that any one can do and has ALWAYS worked for everyone: Don't eat so much!

 

The single most effective exercise is the push-away. As in push the chair away from the table!

Edited March 8, 2015 by 213374U

[Gromnir]

The one proven way to lose weight, that any one can do and has ALWAYS worked for everyone: Don't eat so much!

 

The single most effective exercise is the push-away. As in push the chair away from the table!  

dieting isn't the hard part for most people.  all the wacky solutions is to help folks find something that works for them.

 

1) eat less

 

2) exercise

 

is not particular complicated.  

 

however, the reality is that many folks genuine don't have the time to exercise enough, and while eating less can always be done, getting enough & proper nutrition while eating less can be a tougher proposition.   getting older and working hard frequent means that you are exhausted all the time.

 

we don't pay any attention to oprah.  in the past 15 years we can recall three oprah stories. tom cruise were jumping on her couch professing love for katie holes (sp?) and she claimed that a shop clerk in switzerland or somesuch treated her inappropriately and she suggested that the reason for the mistreatment were 'cause she were black.  the third story were interesting 'cause o' a moment o' honesty.  cnn were on our tv in the background and for whatever reason, oprah were doing some kinda silly interview; oprah's weight issues became a topic.  oprah noted that she has always had weight issues.  she gots a personal chef to make food. she gots a personal trainer to help her exercise, and she still has problems.  the only reason the story stuck with us is that oprah mentioned how one night she got home late and were exhausted and she were hungry, so she got out some maple syrup and covered a hot dog bun with the sugary stuff.  that were her meal. 

 

eat less

 

exercise

 

sounds easy.  it is easy.  the thing is, particularly for folks who has been fat in the past, changing a lifestyle to keep weight off and be healthy is frequent very difficult.  is our understanding that the fat cells never go away with dieting, they just kinda shrink. once you got the fat, it is with you forever, and you is far more likely to return to fat than a skinny person is to become fat even if you eat and exercise the same. genetics and a host o' other factors is involved.

 

Gromnir exercises all the time, and it is a chore.  one o' these days we is gonna have an illness or condition that prevents us from doing the ridiculous amount o' exercise we currently do.  am suspecting that we will have weight issues in our 50s or 60s, 'cause we can't keep up our current rate o' exercise, and our diet is more 'bout eating stuff that tastes good than concerns 'bout health.  at the same time, if eating healthy means we subsist on kale and chicken breast, then we would rather die at 70 stead o' 80+.  

 

HA! Good Fun!