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Admin
Biggest loser club? Aw...
As for the third, I would totally sit there and click the button over and over, just to annoy them and give the developers a little heads up.
Admin
At least he wasn't completely 360% fat. ...or did they mean degrees?
Admin
The software you wrote doesn't know how to calculate body fat correctly, welcome to the biggest loser club.
Admin
Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
Admin
A 40" waist doesn't sound so bad? Are you serious?
A 40" waist makes you a bloater, however you look at it!
Admin
I don't think the second one qualifies as a WTF. Judging by the message, it's a JavaScript message box someone set up to pop right before the user would get a certificate warning. Sometimes this happens when there is a domain mismatch that is not a security issue (the cert was bought for www.whatever.com but you're being sent to store.whatever.com) or a security issue that's potentially irrelevant (the cert provider is not part of IE's "trusted providers").
I'm not saying the user should ignore the warning without a review, only that the use of such a pop-up is not irrational.
Admin
What's probably a little more humorous is that due to the contextual advertising this site is using, the web page is plastered with weight-loss advertisements when I view this article. I guess them knowing my browsing habits will allow them to show me ads that I am actually interested in!
Admin
The weight is using standard pounds and inches but is prompting for metric.
Admin
A quick search led me to this page - http://www.bmi-calculator.net/body-fat-calculator/metric-body-fat-calculator.php. Tried it with the same parameters and calculation was even more worrying - 361.83%.
Admin
Is TRWTF™ that Ian measured and entered his wrist, hips, and forearm, when that's only required for females?
Admin
It amused me that he filled in the numbers for women :) Unless Ian is yet another name that's crossed the gender boundary.
Admin
Seems like the metric-imperial choice only changes the labels. Still requires pounds and inches for the input values.
PS napalmEye - I think that's the page in the post.
Admin
40" circumference, or 12.7" diameter, assuming a cylindrical human. Not bad at all.
Admin
Except a human isn't cylindrical unless one is morbidly obese - the waist tends to be considerably flat in the front and back.
Admin
I've got a 38" waist, and i'm a pretty trim 6'3" dude. ~240 lbs.
now, if i had a 50" waist, there'd be problems
Admin
SEVENTEEHTHHH1!"12!11211!
Admin
On the other hand, it could be that those fields are required only for females, and optional but still useful to include for males.
Admin
Just curious here, but I tried it and got ~13.6%, and it suggested the South Beach Diet to me. Aren't diets for fat people?
Admin
The denotation of diet is actually just your eating habits, but WTF is it suggesting you change your diet with only 13% body fat?
Addendum (2007-12-07 15:00): *change your diet to one used to lose weight traditionally that is.
Admin
As a founder member of the Biggest Loser Club, i have to say that our organization has nothing to do with that web site. They're using our name without permission.
Admin
Actually, they are required by women. I'm not sure if that means the fields must be filled out only if women are running the site, or that only women need wrists, shoulders, and hips, or what. I'm pretty sure that it doesn't mean that only women need to fill in the fields, because, as already illustrated that would mean the fields were required "for" women, not "by".
Admin
I think I've actually seen the second box before, and it makes much more sense in context. While I don't know the context of the one the user submitted it could be a similar situation to what I remember:
What I recall being the exact same message appeared for me when installing Bluetooth drivers once. Because Microsoft doesn't offer a certification process for Bluetooth drivers, the "Are you sure you want to install this unsigned driver" box comes up. The message appeared right before, to instruct you to allow the driver to install.
If that's the same case here, then submitter just took a cheap shot because the message looks weird out of context. On another computer I recall installing Bluetooth drivers where the installer actually offered to disable the unsigned driver check before starting the install. I said no, but it must've disabled it anyway because I was never prompted with the unsigned driver boxes.
Admin
When I see "Imperial Body Fat Calculator" I envision Darth Vader walking into the Imperial Body Fat Calculation room (music playing), glaring at a general standing in the Calculator Machine, and intoning, "I find your lack of lean muscle mass... disturbing."
Admin
Admin
Was just gonna say. I'm 6'3", 240 lbs too. 38" waist.
But no dreadlocks. (captcha)
Admin
Tester: This can't be right. This man has 104% body fat! [turns to Homer] Hey, no eating in the tank! Homer: [with a chicken drumstick] Go to hell.
Admin
I just wasted three minutes of my life scrutinizing the "Teavalize" ad, trying to figure out what the WTF was until I realized that it wasn't part of the entry. So I guess the WTF is me.
Admin
Yes it is, in fact, irrational.
Such a pop-up is telling the user "ignore any security warnings and press forward anyway". This leads to two scenarios:
If #1 is the case, why make the pop-up in the first place?
If #2 is the case, you've set yourself up to be a target for hacking. After all, you've told your users to ignore any security problems, talk about low hanging fruit.
Anything worth doing is worth doing correctly. This is especially true with respect to security.
Admin
I was 31.57% body fat. Apparently I don't fall into a category.
http://www.bmi-calculator.net/body-fat-calculator/body-fat-chart.php
Admin
Does anyone else think it highly dubious that entering some measurements into a website will actually give you anything close your actual BMI? I swear I read that it can't really be calculated accurately outside of a lab (despite dozens of products like scales that claim to measure it). I can't imagine how some numbers typed into a web site would do the trick.
Admin
Good to see that we're all ignoring the message about ignoring the warning message so far.
craaazy - indeed!
Admin
The second one is almost certainly not the programmer's fault, but most likely Microsoft's. "Continue Anyway" is what the button says when you're installing a driver and the manufacturer of your hardware hasn't flushed away a big pile of money to get MS to rubber-stamp their driver installer. I assume that the displayed dialog box is just part of the driver installation package, telling you to expect the warning you're about to get. It's not uncommon at all.
Admin
Pretty dubious, yes. But they are using allometrics. And a model based on regression coefficients from a substantial data set, and the variables selected are the most sensitive to change with BMI. No idea what the confidence interval might be, however I suspect it is fairly large. But it is not too much a SWAG.
Admin
According to that calculator, you're once, twice, three times a fatty! :)
Admin
Admin
Upon filling in all 1's in the boxes:
You have a Body Fat Percentage of -9035.2%. You may want to try the south beach diet.
Appearently you need a diet if you defy physics by being less than nonexistant!
Admin
I see no WTF in the first one. You have seen the "average" American thundering down the road haven't you?
;)
Admin
Last morning I saw a lady with all three dimensions (height, width and length) roughly equal 50". No kidding.
Admin
Admin
I love people like this, because from the sound of it, this person has no self esteem, he probably looks in the mirror and wants to throw up and weighs next to nothing because he doesn't eat.
I'm all for a healthier society, but comments like this just show how shallow people are.
Admin
OK, count me in. 6'6", 16 stone 10 lbs (hah!), 38" waist. As has been pointed out recently, I'm drinking far too much. You lads are just a tad on the lardy side of healthy.
Worse Than Fatness?
(But I tan gorgeously...)
Admin
Actually, it could just as easily be a driver install from a manufacturer who hasn't paid the Microsoft Tax... I've come across this a few times - mostly from no-name hardware, but quite often from big companies too...
Admin
Not drastic diets, and especially not unbalanced diets like South Beach. Such diets can have their place, for people who want to drop a couple of inches very quickly in the short term for non-health-related reasons (e.g., to fit into a certain outfit on a certain date for a certain event, or to weigh into a lower weight class for wrestling), but if you're actually overweight and really looking to improve your health, that's not the way to do it.
There's also the weird psychological (or perhaps it's sociological) issue: statistically, skinny people are FAR more likely to be worried about their weight than fat people and also FAR more likely to want to go on a diet.
Of course, for most overweight Americans a large part of the problem isn't what we deliberately eat at meals, but all the snack food that's sitting around the home (and in many cases also the workplace) all the time, sitting there waiting to be eaten or go stale, practically begging to be munched on for no particular reason when we aren't even hungry really. Sometimes it seems like you can't walk ten feet in this country without passing at least two open dishes of some kind of unhealthy food. And frequently there's significant social pressure to eat, especially in the workplace.
It could be worse. I could live someplace where there's a serious food shortage. Then I'd probably have bigger problems than being a little overweight.
Admin
I was thinking driver installation, most drivers aren't signed and tell you to click 'Continue Anyway' with little to no explanation. Probably not a WTF, depends on the context.
Admin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_mass_index
Calculation Body mass index is defined as the individual's body weight divided by the square of their height.
BMI = weight (kg) / height² (m²)
Admin
And if it has some fancy-schmanzy acronym like XML^H^H^HBMI, it must be a useful tool, right?
And if it's defined in SIU terms, it's just gotta be full of Euclidean crunchiness, of course.
Maybe it's just me (and possibly dcardani), but this looks like a marketing attempt to look faintly like Newton's second law, without any experimental evidence to back it up. To start off with, most humans tend to be three-dimensional, which immediately leads to the thought that the "height²" is a faulty abstraction. At the very least, your body needs to support "height" with enough infrastructure to deal with "volume" (assuming that unit density remains fairly constant, which is surely the point of these measures). Body infrastructure demands any number of things, from bones to muscle (doing nothing but holding it all together) to, presumably, an enlarged set of almost any organ you can think of, other than the brain, to keep up with metabolic demands. There's no guarantee that a sensible "Darwinian" ratio of fat would be linear (or quadratic) to height, either. Fat is an energy store. It's arguable that, if you are taller and in a cold climate, you need more of it to survive the occasional catastrophe.
And then there's endomorphism, exomorphism, and the simple result of genetic variance. I've never seen a fat aborigine, and I rather doubt there are any skinny Inuits.
I'd have more faith in the concept of a BMI if the abstraction in question was a cylinder, presumably based upon an average diameter of bust, waist and bum ("Here's the gorgeous Marilyn Monroe: 11.46, 7.64, 11.46!").
Height² seems to me to lead to a measure which is not, in fact, a measure at all. If there's any value in the signal, it surely gets lost in the noise.
Awww shit. All that thinking it through, and all I really needed to say is that "the concept of BMI is utter bollocks."
Incidentally, if your BMI, like mine, tends to the magic number of 4, what would you do about it?
Addendum (2007-12-08 16:50): (Well, "4" would be "25". Must get that preprocessor working properly.)
Admin
yes you're doing the exact same thing the guys in the lab would do: measure your height, weigh you, enter both parameters on that formula and compare the result to a table that ranges from "very underweight" to "very overweight"
CAPTCHA: pirates. Oh great, right when I have just pilleaged all this gold
Admin
The problem with the "ignore the next message" message is not that it has been taken out of context, but that it provides no explanation.
Sure, Microsoft didn't give vendors a chance to put their side of the story, and maybe made uncertified software sound worse than it is. But just saying "ignore the next thing anyone says" is just asking for people to get into bad security habits.
Perhaps assume your users have a modicum of intelligence, and explain why the following dialogue shouldn't worry them; something like this maybe:
Admin
Everything about the site of the third message screams "Broken!" One message calculator says I'm class 1 obese but the other says my body fat % is 17. Which should I believe? (Hint: I <3 micro brews)
My weight really doesn't concern me anyways. My liver will fail long before my heart anyways.
Admin
Okay, this bmi calculator is just plain faulty. It told me that I'm just below obese (30.6%) but I know I'm much closer to being underweight (18.1%, according to the National American Heart and Blood Institute). I'm a rather skinny girl...it's hard to believe I'm nearly obese just because they use hips, waist, wrist, and forearm measurements.