Stick to Your Diet for at Least a Year for Potentially Lasting Weight Loss
If you’ve ever dieted before, you know how hard it is to keep the weight off for good. New research suggests that if you maintain your weight loss for at least 52 weeks, it’ll be easier to maintain that weight in the long run.
Researchers at the University of Copenhagen put 20 obese people on an 8-week low-calorie diet. After that period, they put the participants on a 52-week weight maintenance track, which included meetings with a dietician and diet tracking. The researchers measured the participants’ levels of hormones associated with hunger, including ghrelin, which increases hunger, and GLP-1 and peptide YY, which suppress or regulate hunger. They took these measurements before the diet, shortly after, and at 52 weeks.
After weight loss, the participants’ appetite-regulating hormone levels increased by 40% and rose even more to 65% at week 52. The hunger-inducing ghrelin levels, on the other hand, increased 23% after the weight loss. (Dieting can make you feel hungrier!) But after sticking to the maintenance plan for the rest of the year, those hunger-related hormone levels fell back to their before-weight-loss levels.
In other words, the diet and long-term focus helped the participants adapt and overcome the surge in hunger that dieting usually causes. They got over the “critical point” for rebounding after weight loss.
It’s a small study, but if you’re looking to lose weight, this might be more inspiration for you to stick to your diet plan longer. You don’t necessarily need to deprive yourself, either. Just eat more vegetables.
Successful weight loss maintenance includes long-term increased meal responses of GLP-1 and PYY 3-36 | International Journal of Obesity via The Independent
Photo by Nogwater.
via Lifehacker
Stick to Your Diet for at Least a Year for Potentially Lasting Weight Loss
The Liberal Argument for Gun Control: Animated
We all laugh about how ridiculous the gun control talking points are and that, if challenged, they buckle under the pressure of having to provide actual facts to back their arguments, but this video really […]
The post The Liberal Argument for Gun Control: Animated appeared first on Bearing Arms.
via Bearing Arms
The Liberal Argument for Gun Control: Animated
Howard Stern Knocks Out Anti-Gun Producer With the Truth
Howard Stern put one gun-control nut in his place, but it wasn’t a caller, it was his longtime producer Gary Dell’Abate! Bababooey, as listeners may know him, got into it with the famous shock jock […]
The post Howard Stern Knocks Out Anti-Gun Producer With the Truth appeared first on Bearing Arms.
via Bearing Arms
Howard Stern Knocks Out Anti-Gun Producer With the Truth
Watch Stephen Strange Become Doctor Strange in the First Trailer
Here it is, the first trailer for Doctor Strange. We see the accident that ends his medical career and hear him get a rousing pep talk from Tilda Swinton’s Ancient One. Life just gets better and better for him, doesn’t it?
We’ll obviously have more information once we have time to comb through every frame, but for now we’ll just say it’s not totally shocking that so much of this trailer comes from the beginning of the movie, since they just finished filming a week and a half ago. Once you know that, the fact that any of the effects were ready for this trailer is even more impressive.
via Gizmodo
Watch Stephen Strange Become Doctor Strange in the First Trailer
Dilbert 2016-04-12
10 Hidden Secrets in Star Wars: The Force Awakens
As one of the most beloved franchises of all time, The Force Awakens was scrutinized to a degree usually reserved for Pynchon novels by grad students (a treatment Rogue One is already getting as well). As a result, there’s a lot we now know about even the most minute details from the film, and Screen Rant points out ten of the best in a new video.
Much like Jesse Pinkman from Breaking Bad, Poe Dameron was originally supposed to die early on in The Force Awakens. Oscar Isaacs managed to convince JJ Abrams to have the character stick around—and become a fan-favorite, as well as the source of a great deal of slash fiction. Likewise, Luke and Maz both had expanded roles in earlier drafts of the film, but their screen time was cut so that audiences could feel more attachment to the new heroes.
What shocked me—shocked me even more than learning that Kylo Ren’s weird helmet ashtray might be the remains of his victims—was realizing there’s a pretty glaring inconsistency in the film: C3PO’s arm! For most of the film, 3PO has a new matte red arm that’s pretty easy to notice against an all-gold body. It doesn’t look so hot. And in his final scene, the droid’s gold arm is restored. As it turns out, C3PO’s actor—Anthony Daniels—was no fan of the red arm either, and he and Abrams struck this exact compromise.
Watch below for even more interesting tidbits about the film’s backstory. Or don’t, if you’re some kind of traitor.
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via Gizmodo
10 Hidden Secrets in Star Wars: The Force Awakens
What to Look for in OS X Crash Reporter When Diagnosing a Crash
Crash reports are nearly impossible for most of us to understand, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make sense of them. Over on MacIssues, they point to a few things to look for in those crash reports on OS X so you can actually figure out the problem.
Obviously, there’s no single way to diagnose a problem, but there are some key words to look for. For example, “Abort” is a good term to search for to see why a crash happened, and from there you can pinpoint what the issue might be. Perhaps more important is the “Application Specific Information” section of a crash report, which is where you’ll get a slightly more specific diagnosis. In the MacIssues example, they found that a cache file was the culprit behind the crash, so it was pretty easy to troubleshoot the problem from there. If you have a program on OS X that’s crashing a lot and you simply can’t wait for the developer to respond to troubleshooting emails, being able to read that crash report is a useful skill. Head over to MacIssues for a nice overview of what you’ll want to look for.
Using the OS X crash reporter to diagnose a program failure | MacIssues
via Lifehacker
What to Look for in OS X Crash Reporter When Diagnosing a Crash
Review: Hardcore Henry is the crazy cyborg beatdown movie you always wanted
Funny, bloody action flick pits a killing machine against a telekinetic Russian gangster.
via Ars Technica
Review: Hardcore Henry is the crazy cyborg beatdown movie you always wanted
Artificial Intelligence Sheds New Light on the Origins of the Bible
Twenty six hundred years ago, a band of Judahite soldiers kept watch on their kingdom’s southern border in the final days before Jerusalem was sacked by Nebuchadnezzar. They left behind numerous inscriptions—and now, a groundbreaking digital analysis has revealed how many writers penned them. The research and innovative technology behind it stand to teach us about the origins of the Bible itself.
“It’s well understood that the Bible was not composed in real time but was probably written and edited later,” Arie Shaus, a mathematician at Tel Aviv University told Gizmodo. “The question is, when exactly?”
Shaus is one of several mathematicians and archaeologists trying to broach that question in a radical manner: by using machine learning tools to determine how many people were literate in ancient times. Their first major analysis, which appears today in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, suggests that the ability to read and write was widespread throughout the Kingdom of Judah, setting the stage for the compilation of Biblical texts.
Although parts of this conclusion remain controversial, the technology behind the study could revolutionize our understanding of literacy and education in Biblical times.
Most scholars agree that the earliest Biblical texts—including the Book of Joshua, Judges, and the two Books of Kings—took shape during what’s known as the late First Temple Period, before Jerusalem fell to the Babylonian king in 586 BCE. But the circumstances surrounding the writing of these texts, including when they were first penned and by how many authors, remain unclear. Curiously enough, texts that have nothing to do with the Bible may shed light on the matter.
For instance, during this time period people wrote a wide variety of information down on ceramic pottery shards called ostraca. “These texts are very mundane in nature,” Shaus said, citing military commands and supply orders as some of the more popular topics of discussion.
Aside from how much wine Judahite soldiers required, however, there’s another layer of information we can extract from ostraca: how many people knew how to write. That’s exactly what Shaus and his colleagues did, analyzing a group of 16 well-preserved ceramic shards from a remote military fortress located near the southern border of Judah. Most of these ostraca date to around 600 BCE, practically the eve of the kingdom’s fall.
The first step of this analysis involved the researchers using novel image processing tools to restore characters that had been partially rubbed away. They then developed machine learning algorithms that could compare and contrast the shape of the ancient Hebrew characters in order to identify statistically distinct handwritings. In principle, this is similar to the algorithms tech companies use for digital signature detection.
“Handwriting analysis is a big area that’s seen a lot of research in recent years,” Shaus said. “Nevertheless, we had to develop our own tools and this was quite challenging. The medium is very deteriorated and so is the writing.”
Eventually, the team devised a handwriting recognition tool that worked beautifully on modern Hebrew, and they decided to put it to the test on ancient inscriptions. All in all, their analysis revealed at least six different authors behind the 16 ostraca. Examining the contents of the text itself, the researchers concluded that these authors spanned the entire military chain of command. “The commander down to the lowest water master could all communicate in writing,” Shaus said. “This was an extremely surprising result.”
It’s a result that the researchers say points to a “proliferation of literacy” throughout Judahite society by 600 BCE, implying that the educational infrastructure to support Bible writing almost certainly existed.
But not everyone is comfortable with all aspects of this conclusion.
“This is a highly innovative and important study,” Christopher Rollston, an expert on archaeology and Bible studies at George Washington University told Gizmodo, noting that there’s ample archaeological evidence portions of the Bible were written as early as 800 BCE. But who was really able to write at that time?
“I think that literacy was confined to elites, basically scribes, high military officials, and priests,” Rollston said, adding that by the late First Temple Period, it’s possible reading and writing had spread to more of this upper class.
Perhaps the most important aspect of Shaus’ work is the introduction of sophisticated image recognition technology to the study of ancient texts. The Tel Aviv research group is keen to share their tools for reconstructing letters and deciphering handwriting with other archaeologists. By applying these methods more broadly, we might be able to hone in on when, where, and by whom history’s most enduring book was first written down.
“We’re bringing new evidence to the game,” Shaus said. “Now, we’ll see what else comes out.”
via Gizmodo
Artificial Intelligence Sheds New Light on the Origins of the Bible