The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2007-12-09 Reply Admin

Kinglink:
jzlondon:
A 40" waist doesn't sound so bad? Are you serious?
A 40" waist makes you a bloater, however you look at it!

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.

I love people like this, because from the sound of it, this person is probably a big fatty.

2007-12-09 Reply Admin

Rimpy:
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.

OMG, this is not a WTF, it's a WTWTF! LOL! I guess what The Real TRWTWTF is, though.

Pingmaster · 2007-12-09 Reply Admin

Quietust:
npt:
40" circumference, or 12.7" diameter, assuming a cylindrical human. Not bad at all.

Except a human isn't cylindrical unless one is morbidly obese - the waist tends to be considerably flat in the front and back.

To be precise, when one becomes morbidly obese, they would assume more of an ovoid or egg-like shape, sometimes reaching spherical.. :)

2007-12-09 Reply Admin

The body fat calculator does say that it's using Imperial Centimeters, so perhaps the output is an imperial percentage...

Zemm · 2007-12-09 Reply Admin

I tried it and got 311% body fat! It appears they work in lbs and inches and they don't convert from kg and cm.

The same site for the BMI calculator reckons that the cm should be above 0. But I am 200 cm tall. So it won't let me put in 0m 200cm or 2m 0cm. It does appear to work at 1m 100cm though. Why don't they just ask for cm only instead of breaking it up?

2007-12-09 Reply Admin

It should be pretty obvious to all of us that the BMI system is very flawed (I was booted from air force selection for this reason), if you want an accurate body fat method I suggest the one developed by the US Navy:

http://www.bblex.de/en/calc/navy.php

From all accounts it is as accurate as you can get without using the expensive displacement method:

http://www.nhrc.navy.mil/programs/BodyFat/index.html

2007-12-10 Reply Admin

real_aardvark:
Well, if it's in Wikipedia, it must be scientifically correct, yes?

Should we dispose of any data that appears on Wikipedia because be definition it should be flawed :-)

I've never seen a fat aborigine, and I rather doubt there are any skinny Inuits.

You need to travel more ;-)

Awww shit. All that thinking it through, and all I really needed to say is that "the concept of BMI is utter bollocks."

It is if you apply it as the be all and end all instead of using it as a tool for guidance.

It's a fast and easy calculation which anyway with a measuring tape and calculator can apply. It's a quick way to see if your weight may start to become an issue.

Now if you are an athlete, or have a keen interest in your health, then it will give you a false reading but if that is you, you'd probably know how you're traveling anyway.

Not sure how BMI came into this as it was talking about body fat anyway.

2007-12-10 Reply Admin

If it is really about an upcoming certificate warning, then it really qualifies as a WTF. Educating users to simply ignore these warnings is a BadThing (tm) because all the encryption stuff is totally needless without proper authentication. I you don't want to buy a certificate that is trusted by mainstream browsers (I can understand this position since most a the CAs charge ridiculously high amounts of money even for simple domain validated certs) then you should explain at least the basic details instead of just stating that the next warning is meaningless. So I agree with your position that it's not completely irrational, but IMHO it encourages bad habits.

XIU · 2007-12-10 Reply Admin

real_aardvark:
XIU:
dcardani:
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.

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)
Well, if it's in Wikipedia, it must be scientifically correct, yes?

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.)

But this isn't a BMI calculator, it's a fat calculator, so the formula for BMI that I showed is correct (Wikipedia was just to first place to find it). But like we all can see, there is no easy formula for body fat.

2007-12-10 Reply Admin

<BLOCKQUOTE class="Quote"><div><i class="icon-quote"></i> <strong>Quietust:</strong></div><div><BLOCKQUOTE class="Quote"><div><i class="icon-quote"></i> <strong>npt:</strong></div><div>40" circumference, or 12.7" diameter, assuming a cylindrical human. Not bad at all.</div></BLOCKQUOTE>

Except a human isn't cylindrical unless one is morbidly obese - the waist tends to be considerably flat in the front and back.

No, 40" circumference is 25.4" diameter if round. But flatness makes it wider-yet-thinner: pirr is the maximal surface (and hence weight) that 2pir can contain, so the person is not as fat as the spherical approximation suggests.

BMI's are useful up to a point, but that point is quickly reached. I have a measured body fat percentage just under 4% (which, for example, makes me very cold in winter) yet a "slightly overweight" BMI, and I'm not even that muscular. The point being that anyone who is skinny but spends time in the gym will be "overweight" according to mr. Quetelet.

2007-12-10 Reply Admin

Quietust:
Except a human isn't cylindrical unless one is morbidly obese - the waist tends to be considerably flat in the front and back.

Well thanks for clearing that up, Poindexter. If you hadn't enlightened us, who knows how many ill-fitting pants might have been produced!

2007-12-10 Reply Admin

Regarding the "click Continue Anyway"; that's at least better than one 'solution' that I've seen in the wild: A "click ok"-program was started while the installation was running which clicked ok for EVERY MessageBox, even those from other applications.

2007-12-10 Reply Admin

JP_Br:
XIU:
dcardani:
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.

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)

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

UH, no...ur wrong here..real BMI is done using several methods not just height wieght proportions..one way is using instruments that pull out your fat at certain points on your body and they measure the number of inches your fat pulls from your skin.

2007-12-10 Reply Admin

I'm not really 50 pounds too heavy. I'm 10 inches too short.

real_aardvark · 2007-12-10 Reply Admin

XIU:
real_aardvark:
XIU:
dcardani:
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.

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)
Well, if it's in Wikipedia, it must be scientifically correct, yes? <snip>Jeez, I snipped myself.</snip> Awww shit. All that thinking it through, and all I really needed to say is that "the concept of BMI is utter bollocks."

But this isn't a BMI calculator, it's a fat calculator, so the formula for BMI that I showed is correct (Wikipedia was just to first place to find it). But like we all can see, there is no easy formula for body fat.

Riiiight. I just object to the meme, that's all. Whatever I think of BMI as a measure of anything, and frankly I still see it as a marketing tool, my point was simple.

There is (I submit) no point whatsoever in posting a response to a blog/whatever-the-failure this is that is a simple quotation of a url to Wikipedia, or indeed, to anything else. It's not like even the stupider habituees of this site, such as myself, couldn't look that up themselves. You kinda sorta shoulda add at least a single sentence of explication.

Since we seem to be dealing with mutual dislocation of rhetorical logic, here:

Yew jest might be a fat-boy if:

Your corduroys set fire to your thighs when you run down the street.
When you moon someone, they think they must be living on Mars.
You lean against a radiator and think "Mmmmm ... Donuts!"
Your girlfriend starts offering you advice on bra sizes.

But not if you take this BMI crap seriously.

2007-12-11 Reply Admin

Reuben:
The weight is using standard pounds and inches but is prompting for metric.

standard pounds and inches

Since when are pounds and inches a standard? this is exactly NON-standard

2007-12-11 Reply Admin

durnurd:
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?

There are also liver diets, so everybody with liver problems is concerned be they fat or slim people

2007-12-11 Reply Admin

Ben in Boston:
According to that calculator, you're once, twice, three times a fatty! :)

Had a friend in college with an interesting sense of humor. She, I, and a friend went to a restaurant, & a very rotund waitress asked, "Are there three of you?" My friend mumbled, "No, there are three of YOU."

More Fat than Human

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