backprojection

So Meles was Tigray, and the new guy is from Wolayita, not Amhara. Why would these guys want to stamp out local cultures and replace them with the Amharic language?

I think rule #1 with regard to Ethiopia is that non-Ethiopians don't know what they're talking about, no matter how well-intentioned they are.

I don't really care; people can do whatever they want with their money, _obviously_. But I am kind of surprised Jobs owned/commissioned a yacht. I always figured owning a yacht was an abject status symbol, and that somehow Jobs tried to be 'above' these things. meh

I entirely agree. People tend to run away from abstract math, with the impression that it's difficult. But the whole point is that a more abstract view of these things makes them easier to understand, not harder.

So a better analogy would be to quote total FLOPS.

This sounds great, but why is it a kick starter project? If the claims they're making are reasonable, it seems to me that, for instance, Google would be more than a little interested, and could easily cough up $750K. What am I missing?

But at that point, do you need to own the car? Basically you just described a taxi service without human drivers.

Perhaps a taxi service based around self driving cars could drive costs below the cost of ownership. My guess is that the limiting factor is rush-hour.

Maybe I'm missing something, but why does actively restricting features that people clearly want enhance user experience, and exemplify good taste? Where's the bad taste in NFC?

I recently bought an SIII to replace my old, broken Galaxy Nexus (cracked screen from being hit by an SUV). I ended up buying another Galaxy Nexus, and will sell the SIII.

On paper the SIII blows the Nexus out of the water, but after using both for 2+ weeks, the SIII feels like shit to me, compared to the Nexus. It may just be because the Nexus is on Jelly Bean, and the SIII is (embarrassingly) still on ICS, or maybe its Samsung's TouchWiz that slows the phone down.

So I definitely agree with you; my anecdote matches your experience. But I'd still say the iPhone should be compared to the Nexus, rather than the SIII.

I finally received my invite, only to find out I need an iPhone to use the service. I won't give up my lovely galaxy nexus!

I do understand it's hard to develop these things, and for multiple platforms.

> And a calorie is a calorie with a big if: if your macro nutrients are in range

The statement, 'a calorie is a calorie' is used to make the point that macro ratios don't matter for weight loss/maintenance. ... so then the argument is won, and we can all agree that a calorie is not a calorie.

> Because any other hypothesis has to explain why it violates the conservation of energy and matter.

This comment is so infuriating. I may not be a genius, but I did manage to eek out a degree in physics. I think I, and anyone here on HN should be given the benefit of the doubt that they can figurer out if energy conservation is being violated.

Simply from a principle of assuming that the person suggesting the hypothesis is not an _idiot_, you could infer that any of these alternative hypotheses do _not _ violate energy conservation.

>But do you know why? It isn't the schedule that really matters.

You haven't shown that. Where's the randomized experiment where one group is assigned to eat 3000 cal/day evenly distributed, and the other group is assigned 6000 cal during an 8 hour window, every other day, and then the same thing but now 1800 cal per day, or 3600 every other day?

I don't fully understand this compulsion to explain anything successful in the weight-loss field, ultimatlely, in terms of calorie restriction.

> 20% increased risk of death or disease over the span of a generation is not worth getting excited about? For someone who's healthy, it may seem insignificant when the baseline risk is low, but for someone who develops a chronic disease, in hindsight a 20% reduction may be very appealing. Minimizing regret is important.T

You should read the article; the rest of the paragraph is as follows:

> So with lung cancer we could buy as a society the observation that cigarettes cause lung cancer because it was and remains virtually impossible to imagine what other factor could explain an association so huge and dramatic. Experiments didn’t need to be done to test the hypothesis because, well, the signal was just so big that the epidemiologists of the time could safely believe it was real. And then experiments were, in effect, done anyway. People quit smoking and lung cancer rates came down, or at least I assume they did. (If not, we’re in trouble here.) When I first wrote about the pseudoscience of epidemiology in Science back in 1995, “Epidemiology Faces It’s Limits”, I noted that very few epidemiologists would ever take seriously an association smaller than a 3- or 4-fold increase in risk. These Harvard people are discussing, and getting an extraordinary amount of media attention, over a 0.2-fold increased risk. (Horn-blowing alert: my Science article has since been cited by over 400 articles in the peer-reviewed medical literature, according to Thomson Reuter’s Web of Knowledge.)

The point is that we don't know if there's a 20% increase of risk if you start eating more red meat. We only know that the people who elected to do, and were sampled in the study (the top quintile), did have a 20% increase. There's a big difference here; statistics is subtle.

> As for scientific validity of those studies, doing proper scientific studies of diet is so difficult it might as well be impossible.

I agree, but then we should refrain from telling people that meat, and red meat in particular, is what's killing them. Especially when there are much more likely targets, like sugar.

Maybe you can view it as an intermediate step, the next being in vitro meat.

Is there any real evidence to suggest that real meat is bad?

These guys have me pretty convinced there isn't: http://goo.gl/eoDaF

> The problem with observational studies like those run by Willett and his colleagues is that they do none of this [test their hypotheses with real randomized controlled experiments]. That’s why it’s so frustrating. The hard part of science is left out and they skip straight to the endpoint, insisting that their interpretation of the association is the correct one and we should all change our diets accordingly.

> Moreover, this meat-eating association with disease is a tiny association. Tiny. It’s not the 20-fold increased risk of lung cancer that pack-a-day smokers have compared to non-smokers. It’s a 0.2-fold increased risk — 1/100th the size.

Maybe I'm missing the point, but what's the problem? It seems to me that the worst senario here is that Google supplants traditional telcos, and essentially becomes another monopoly for >1Gbps web access. Compared with what we have today, I'm pretty happy with that outcome.

Actually, the worst outcome will be that the general public doesn't care enough, Google fiber flops, and the traditional model becomes further entrenched.

I would also be a bit happier with a real, innovative, public broadband program. I don't think the US has the political culture to pull that off.

> In fact, Google has gained "question answering" capabilities in the last few years thanks to web spam farms run by companies like eHow.

I was under the general impression that they're trying to minimize this. It also seems like this kind of plague would affect any dominant search engine.

much better!

14,000 feet. Sorry to nitpick! You go with the min of the sigfigs in the expression, which here is 2 = sigfigs(12) < sigfigs(13,397.28) = 7

I'm curious what happens if you're wrong though. Suppose they successfully push on this and android devices are taken off the market, or priced so high to cover licensing fees that people won't buy them.

What recourse does Google have? Presumably they can't sue the patent office for granting ridiculous patents that ultimately drive them out of business.

Significant figures, you have too many of them.

1. I think the obviousness of an idea might change throughout time. 2. What if one industry is dominated by two companies, in the sense that all the experts are employed by one or the other, then how could they be unbiassed?

exactly.

> Extra terrestrial life that is more advanced than us has no reason to go on a suicide mission to come see us (a bunch of war-mongering primitive hairless baboons)

Just as advanced western scientists have no interest in going on biology field trips to remote parts of the world to study lesser species.

Being anti-google does indeed seem to be the hipster position at the moment. $5 says it'll soon be, 'I'm too cool even for Apple, I use Windows mobile'.

Not that there's anything wrong with windows mobile, it's quite nice. I can see it having a bit of the perception of the phone your parents would carry. Though, and that'll feed perfectly into hipsterism.

> High fat/high sugar foods offer the most calories/dollar. So what?

Well, the theory is that cheap vegetable oil and sugar causes these metabolic disorders which then causes obesity.

>Taubes' insulin theories have been debunked by experiments.

They're not his theories. He makes the point repeatedly in GCBC that they form part of modern, standard biochemistry. The only controversial points that he makes is that they should be applied to obesity research.

> Taubes' insulin theories have been debunked by experiments.

what are those experiments? My understanding is that carbohydrate-restricted diets generally fare better in terms of weight-loss, muscle-maintenance, and improvements in risk factors of chronic diseases:

http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/297/9/969.full http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eREuZEdMAVo

Apparently they results are best for people who are insulin resistant, as you might expect.

"PLASMA FREE FATTY ACID TURNOVER RATE IN OBESITY"

I'm not sure exactly what that means, is this referring just to the rate at which FFAs cross fat-cell membranes, or the rate of esterification and lipolysis? Because it's the latter that Taubes argues is primarily important.

> Are the yuppies with gym memberships and hipsters with their organic vegan raw paleo diets somehow immune?

Well, yes. As a paleo dieter, I can tell you I can't be eating more sugar than someone from the 1850s. My guess is that anyone conscious enough to be on a raw-vegan diet, doesn't either.

> This alleged environmental cause seems to primarily affect the lower income people.

My understanding is that refined carbohydrates and vegetable oils are cheap. Who was it that said that if you have $1.5 to spend on food, you're better off (calorically) buying potato chips than broccoli.

> Also, Taubes' insulin nonsense has been debunked. Lets move on.

I do suspect that it's simplistic. It's much better than the popular notion of calories-in/calories-out, though. That's why I said that it's controversial, but that it's the kind of thing, that's more on-the-mark than simply blaming sedentarity as a primary cause in obesity.

> The fact that exercise causes weight loss has been borne out by numerous controlled experiments. Something I found via a quick search: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.duke.car....

OTOH, exercise makes you hungry. What's more interesting is whether exercise is effective long-term to cure obesity. I'd suspect not alone, but that it certainly helps.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1914974,00....

"Overweight people have a tendency to sit, while lean ones have trouble holding still and spend two hours more a day on their feet, pacing around and fidgeting, researchers are reporting in findings published today."

That's exactly what I'm talking about. Most of us eat plentifully. If your metabolism is up to shape, you'll spend the extra calories fidgeting. That's what a lean person is. In this paradigm, a fat person is one who partitions off calories towards fat, regardless of physical activity. He then has to match expenditure to what's left.

It's not awful, it just seems off-the-mark. My point is that it seems avoiding physical activity at all costs is better viewed as a consequence of such a metabolic disorder, less so than a cause.

I completely agree that exercise is very important in maintaining health (exercise, especially weight-training is know to increase insulin sensitivity to some degree, for instance), I just think its role in weight-loss, for most people, is greatly exaggerated compared to fixing a diet which actively promotes fat storage (going beyond a caloric excess).

We've been telling overweight people to exercise more and eat less (esp. fat) for 40 years, it simply doesn't' seem to work [1].

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/magazine/tara-parker-pope-...

"Carlin Robinson, 12, walks from her grandmother's car to the school bus in Manchester, Ky. Her house can be seen in the background. A study published in 2010, investigating high obesity rates in the town found that residents used cars to minimize walking distance, to the detriment of their health."

Association != causation. While the picture this caption is from is indeed ridiculous (grandmother driving her daughter essentially to the end of her driveway for the school bus), the implication seems to be that Americans walking less somehow has a causative effect in skyrocketing obesity rates. This seems entirely wimpy and facile.

Here's an alternative: there exists an underlying metabolic disorder that develops in a large proportion of the population, in response to something new in our environment ( new compared to pre 1950's ). A major effect that this disorder has is to partition a large part of our calorie intake towards fat storage. Now we have less energy available for expenditure, and as a consequence we either eat more or behave more sedentarily. Sedentary behavior will be a compensatory effect, that will indeed associate with obesity ( as measured by observational studies, like the one mentioned).

A good candidate for such malady would be insulin resistance [1] (and more generally, metabolic syndrome); Gary Taubes makes a very compelling case [2] that this is indeed the case, and that the primary change(s) in our environment to cause these problems is our marked increase in sugar and refined carbohydrate consumption [3][4]. The same hypotheses also seem a good explanation for rising type II diabetes rates.

Now this is still a controversial topic [5], but my point this kind of explanation seems much stronger and more on-the-mark, than such flaccid ideas like 'americans are getting fat because they don't walk to school anymore'.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin_resistance [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Calories,_Bad_Calories [3] http://journeytoforever.org/farm_library/Cleave/cleave_ch2.h... [4] http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2012/02/by-2606-us-die... [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin_resistance#Causes

Wasn't the point, just a hypothetical example.

Couldn't you say the same for anyone who's product is seen as quite good?

FB is holding us back because new, more innovative social networks can't get users to switch, for example.