Month: October 2016

Women who replaced an afternoon diet drink with water lost more weight and had better insulin sensitivity.

The study involved 81 overweight and obese women with type 2 diabetes who were all self-reported habitual consumers of diet drinks. Scientists asked them either to substitute water for diet drinks, or to continue drinking diet drinks five times a week after their lunch for 24 weeks.

Both groups of women were allowed to drink water at other times but were not allowed to have diet drinks at any other time. The two groups were also asked not to drink anything while eating their lunch and not to add low calorie sweeteners to drinks such as tea or coffee. The results are published in the journal Diabetes, Obesity, and Metabolism.

“Many obese people trying to lose weight believe that low calorie or diet drinks can help them to lose weight,” says Ian Macdonald, professor of metabolic physiology at the University of Nottingham. “This study shows that while they can still lose weight, they may not be losing as much as they would if they drank water in place of diet drinks.

“Our results also question whether consuming diet drinks is the most effective way for people with diabetes to manage their condition. But since the consumption of diet soda is higher among people with diabetes, the potential implications of our study needs further and larger scale research.”

Just a 5% weight loss can dramatically improve health

The women followed a diet plan and their post-lunch drink option for 24 weeks with the goal of losing 7-10 percent of their body weight at a rate of 0.5 to 1 kilogram (about 1 to 2 pounds) a week. They also followed an exercise plan that gradually increased during the trial to achieve 60 minutes of moderate activity five days a week.

Body weight was measured at the start, at 12 weeks, and at 24 weeks. Waist circumference was also measured and BMI calculated at the same intervals. Fasting blood samples were collected also at the start, 12, and 24 weeks to check diabetes indicators.

“Our results are very interesting. They show that the women drinking water after their main meal at lunch time over 24 weeks lost on average 1.16 kilograms more than the women who drank diet drinks after their meal,” Hamid Farshchi from the University of Nottingham’s School of Life Sciences.

“We think that by drinking water instead of sweet-tasting diet drinks, the women may be adhering better to the weight loss diet because artificial sweeteners may increase desire for sweetened and more energy dense foods.

“We also found that the women who drank water achieved a better improvement in insulin sensitivity.”

Source: University of Nottingham

The post For weight loss: Replace diet drinks with water? appeared first on Futurity.

via Futurity.org
For weight loss: Replace diet drinks with water?

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“Aren’t all stormtroopers technically death troopers?” Your boy from far, far away is back with his reaction video to the final Rogue One: A Star Wars Story trailer. Watch as he slowly loses his temper at the inept Empire.

via The Awesomer
Kylo Ren Reacts to Rogue One 2

via The Truth About Guns
Judge Dismisses Suit Against Sandy Hook Gun Maker

The frivolous lawsuit filed by a minority of Sandy Hook Elementary school parents against Bushmaster and Remington Arms has been dismissed.

A Superior Court judge has thrown out the lawsuit against the gun maker brought by the families of the Sandy Hook tragedy.

In a 54-page decision filed Friday afternoon, Judge Barbara Bellis granted a motion to strike the entire lawsuit brought against the gun maker,Remington Outdoor Company, the dealer, Camfour Inc. and the company that owned the gun store, Riverview Sales where A___ L___’*s mother bought the assault rifle.

The judge ruled the lawsuit does not satisfy the exception to federal law preventing lawsuits against gun manufacturers for the actions of gun owners under either the federal Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) or the Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act (CUTPA).

“Although PLCAA provides a narrow exception under which plaintiffs may maintain an action for negligent entrustment of a firearm, the allegations in the present case do not fit within the common-law tort of negligent entrustment under well-established Connecticut law,” the judge wrote. “A plaintiff under CUTPA must allege some kind of consumer, competitor, or other commcercial relationship with a defendant, and the plaintiffs here have alleged no such relationship.”

We commented on the sad absurdity of this case back in February.

The exploitative lawsuit filed by Koshoff, Sterling, and Mesner-Hage is based on the theory of “negligent entrustment.” The plaintiff’s argument is that the Freedom Group, which owns Bushmaster Firearms, the manufacturer of the XM15-E2S, marketed their guns in such a way as to encourage violent crazy people to buy them. Of course, the Sandy Hook murderer didn’t buy the carbine he used in his attack. He murdered his own mother to gain access to it.

But hey, reality be damned; lawyers wanna get paid.

Further, these shysters are arguing that AR-15s—the most common rifle sold in the United States year after year, used in more than a half-dozen kinds of formal shooting competitions, for informal target shooting, home defense, hunting, and simply for fun—is a “weapon of war” that no civilian should have.

The semi-automatic AR-15s sold to U.S. civilians, of course, are not used in combat by any known military on earth.

Militaries instead use selective-fire M16s and M4s, which American civilians have not been able to buy from manufacturers at any price since the Hughes Amendment passed as part of the Firearm Owners Protection Act in 1986.

The vultures of Koskoff Koskoff and Bieder are arguing that the most common rifle sold in the United States, which is, as a subset of rifles is one of the least likely instruments of murder in the nation, should be banned. Put bluntly, these attorneys appear to be hoping to find a way to sue gun companies out of existence, and get rich in the process.

The judge has a very simple choice in this case.

She can allow the continuance of an obviously frivolous lawsuit filed by unscrupulous attorneys, and set the stage for every company in the world to be sued out of their existence due to their choice of advertising, or she can throw this case out.

Let’s hope Bridgeport Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis is not among the world’s crazy people.

Clearly, Judge Barbara Bellis did not buy the argument made by lead attorney for the plaintiffs, Joshua Koskoff, who argued that the American people are “notoriously incompetent,” and unfit to own guns in common use.

* * *

Like this vile attorney, Hillary Clinton thinks that the American people are both inherently violent and stupid.

If a mentally ill 20-year-old murders his mother, steals her car keys, and plows the most popular car sold in the United States into a bus stop killing dozens, should the families of the victims be able to sue Toyota for manufacturing an “assault vehicle?”

While we’d all feel a great deal of sympathy for the families of the victims, we’d also instinctively know that a lawsuit from a twisted family attorney and “traffic safety” zealots claiming that it was “criminally negligent” to manufacture a vehicle that could go more than posted speed limit of 45 MPH in the area was absurd.

Yet that is precisely the argument being made by Democrat frontrunner Hillary Clinton, as she supports the lawsuit filed by a small group of crime victims, who are attempting to claim that gun manufacturers are criminally negligent in manufacturing a rifle that has been sold in the United States for more than five decades, and which is the most popular rifle purchased year in and year out due to it’s light weight, low recoil, accuracy, and inexpensive, intermediate-caliber ammunition.

Mrs. Clinton’s views on the right to bear arms are the most radical ever from a presidential candidate in the history of the United States.

Senator Russ Feingold just admitted on a hidden camera that if she is elected, Clinton will likely attempt to exceed her authority as President and use executive orders to attack the Constitution.

Clinton wants gun manufacturers sued out of existence, and gut the right to bear arms in the process.

Think of this when you vote less than a month from now.

 

* Bearing Arms does not publish the names of mass or spree killers.

The post BREAKING: Frivolous Lawsuit Over Sandy Hook Deaths Dismissed appeared first on Bearing Arms.

via Bearing Arms
BREAKING: Frivolous Lawsuit Over Sandy Hook Deaths Dismissed

What is your ultimate shooting range pistol? “This pistol is really accurate,” we hear stated. “A tack driver for sure,” someone will say. Or, perhaps, we’ll hear that a pistol has poor accuracy. Despite these subjective claims, we rarely see actual numerical data to back them up. On the opposite side, we’ll also hear attempts […]

Read More …

The post Exclusive: Testing the World’s Most Accurate Pistols – Part I appeared first on The Firearm Blog.

via The Firearm Blog
Exclusive: Testing the World’s Most Accurate Pistols – Part I

This blog updates Stephane Combaudon’s blog on MySQL performance tuning, and covers MySQL 5.7 performance tuning immediately after installation.

A few years ago, Stephane Combaudon wrote a blog post on Ten MySQL performance tuning settings after installation that covers the (now) older versions of MySQL: 5.1, 5.5 and 5.6. In this post, I will look into what to tune in MySQL 5.7 (with a focus on InnoDB).

The good news is that MySQL 5.7 has significantly better default values. Morgan Tocker created a page with a complete list of features in MySQL 5.7, and is a great reference point. For example, the following variables are set:

• innodb_file_per_table=ON
• innodb_stats_on_metadata = OFF
• innodb_buffer_pool_instances = 8 (or 1 if innodb_buffer_pool_size < 1GB)
• query_cache_type = 0; query_cache_size = 0; (disabling mutex)

In MySQL 5.7, there are only four really important variables that need to be changed. However, there are other InnoDB and global MySQL variables that might need to be tuned for a specific workload and hardware.

To start, add the following settings to my.cnf under the [mysqld] section. You will need to restart MySQL:

[mysqld]
# other variables here
innodb_buffer_pool_size = 1G # (adjust value here, 50%-70% of total RAM)
innodb_log_file_size = 256M
innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 1 # may change to 2 or 0
innodb_flush_method = O_DIRECT

Description:

Variable	Value
innodb_buffer_pool_size	Start with 50% 70% of total RAM. Does not need to be larger than the database size
innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit	1   (Default) 0/2 (more performance, less reliability)
innodb_log_file_size	128M – 2G (does not need to be larger than buffer pool)
innodb_flush_method	O_DIRECT (avoid double buffering)

 

What is next?

Those are a good starting point for any new installation. There are a number of other variables that can increase MySQL performance for some workloads. Usually, I would setup a MySQL monitoring/graphing tool (for example, the Percona Monitoring and Management platform) and then check the MySQL dashboard to perform further tuning.

What can we tune further based on the graphs?

InnoDB buffer pool size. Look at the graphs:

As we can see, we can probably benefit from increasing the InnoDB buffer pool size a bit to ~10G, as we have RAM available and the number of free pages is small compared to the total buffer pool.

InnoDB log file size. Look at the graph:

As we can see here, InnoDB usually writes 2.26 GB of data per hour, which exceeds the total size of the log files (2G). We can now increase the

innodb_log_file_size

 variable and restart MySQL. Alternatively, use “show engine InnoDB status” to calculate a good InnoDB log file size.

Other variables

There are a number of other InnoDB variables that can be further tuned:

innodb_autoinc_lock_mode

Setting innodb_autoinc_lock_mode =2 (interleaved mode) can remove the need for table-level AUTO-INC lock (and can increase performance when multi-row insert statements are used to insert values into tables with auto_increment primary key). This requires

binlog_format=ROW

  or

MIXED

  (and ROW is the default in MySQL 5.7).

innodb_io_capacity and innodb_io_capacity_max

This is a more advanced tuning, and only make sense when you are performing a lot of writes all the time (it does not apply to reads, i.e. SELECTs). If you really need to tune it, the best method is knowing how many IOPS the system can do. For example, if the server has one SSD drive, we can set

innodb_io_capacity_max=6000

 and

innodb_io_capacity=3000

 (50% of the max). It is a good idea to run the sysbench or any other benchmark tool to benchmark the disk throughput.

But do we need to worry about this setting? Look at the graph of buffer pool’s “dirty pages“:

In this case, the total amount of dirty pages is high, and it looks like InnoDB can’t keep up with flushing them. If we have a fast disk subsystem (i.e., SSD), we might benefit from increasing

innodb_io_capacity

 and innodb_io_capacity_max.

Conclusion or TL;DR version

The new MySQL 5.7 defaults are much better for general purpose workloads. At the same time, we still need to configure InnoDB variables to take advantages of the amount of RAM on the box. After installation, follow these steps:

1. Add InnoDB variables to my.cnf (as described above) and restart MySQL
2. Install a monitoring system, (e.g., Percona Monitoring and Management platform)
3. Look at the graphs and determine if MySQL needs to be tuned further

via Planet MySQL
MySQL 5.7 Performance Tuning Immediately After Installation

via TechCrunch
Nuheara’s earbuds/hearing aids are open for general pre-order

Netflix Voltron lions and assembled figure and new Joes, including a female Cobra officer.
via Super Punch
New Voltron and GI Joe toys available for preorder

via Lifehacker
Build Your Endurance Anywhere With These Cycling, Running, and Stair Climbing Workouts

An anonymous Slashdot reader writes:During Sunday night’s debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, moderators asked a question based on WikiLeaks documents released Friday — to which both candidates responded. The leaked emails had included excerpts from Hillary’s paid speeches to Wall Street in which she reportedly said "You need both a public and a private position on certain issues."
Clinton said she had been describing the 2012 movie Lincoln, and that Lincoln’s use of different arguments for different groups of people was "a great display of presidential leadership." Then, citing intelligence reports, she said "Putin and the Russian government are directing the attacks — the hacking on American accounts to influence our election…for Donald Trump." Click through for a complete transcript of Clinton’s remarks — and Trump’s response.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

via Slashdot
Clinton Responds To WikiLeaks During Debate, And Blames Russian Hackers