Siddesu called it "the easiest way to lose weight".

If it's so easy, how come 95% fail it?

I have a regime that would allow you to live to 100, but it is so difficult to keep that it's not possible for you to stick to it. Is it your fault, or the regime's? Of course it is the regime's.

The human endurance is part of the equation. Ignoring it is precisely the failure of science this article complains about.

Shachar

Demonlapin is correct: if you are doing proper chest compressions, there is a high likelihood you will crack the ribs of most adults over 40 (almost guaranteed if a woman over 60), and a reasonable likelihood of doing it to younger adults.

But, if you got out of the training that you should only do CPR if the AED doesn't work, you misheard the instructor. You shouldn't attempt to use an AED until after the first round of CPR has been performed (though not taught by the ARC at this point to lay rescuers, some schools of thought suggest that no initial rescue breaths are required for the first round if an AED is known to be available or professionals will be on the scene in less than 4 minutes from witnessed collapse). The AED should not be used until at least one round of chest compressions has been attempted. There are multiple reasons for this, which I won't go into. That you need to continue CPR if it can't shock the patient, or if the patient doesn't respond to the first shock, is, of course important. And that you should STOP doing CPR if the person does respond, hopefully that is a given, 'cause it does hurt when done properly!

Trained personnel? If they were capable of reading the instructions that were in the case, or listening to the directions spoken by the machine, that covers about 95% of what training is really required for a normal adult.

I am a certified First Aid/CPR/AED instructor for the American Red Cross. The level of training required to use an AED if you are calm, cool, and collected (and no cross-chest nipple piercings are involved) is less than is necessary to assemble a table from Ikea. That said, when you need to use one, calm, cool, and collected are frequently out the window, which is why training is recommended. Almost anything you can do wrong, the machine will let you know that something is wrong so you can correct it. Many kits even come with a razor to deal with the overly hirsute. Oh, and I was involved with building an internal pacemaker capable of phoning home to the doctor (though you had to hold the phone up to your chest, it couldn't reach out and grab it) back when they still required DSPs.

The AEDs automatically analyze heart rhythms (or lack thereof) and notify the operator to push a button if a shock is required. They will provide a shock for two different rhythms- V-fib (Ventricular Fibrillation) and V-Tach (Ventricular Tachychardia). They will not shock for asystole (no electrical heart signals detected at all, and must be avoided so you don't try using an AED to jump start your car or do some tiny welding) and PEA (pulseless electrical activity- the wiring is working, but the engine is dead).

Long story longer: Heart Attacks are NONE of these cases. AEDs WILL NOT PRODUCE A SHOCK for a heart attack, which is simply the blockage of blood to the heart, usually caused by a clot breaking loose. Heart attacks can result in cardiac arrest, which does result in one of the four cases above, but an AED will do nothing for a simple heart attack. TFA correctly describes that he had a cardiac arrest (sudden dropping to the ground), but incorrectly says he flat-lined (asystole, AED wouldn't have helped in that case) and that he had a heart attack (if he only had a heart attack, he could have walked off the court and hopefully gotten a quick ride to a hospital).

Any more info needed? I strongly encourage you and everyone to take a First Aid/CPR/AED class from whatever qualified source is available (Red Cross, Heart Association, etc). The chance that you will ever need to perform CPR is pretty low, but I have had to deal with a choking in a restaurant, a compound fracture at a swimming pool, a petite mal siezure on a subway, and other situations that are far more likely.

You keep trying to seperate the habits (human behavior) from the results.

Of course 95% revert to their old habits. Why is that a reason to discard them from your working set? If you have a regime that would save lives if it people would stick to it, but 95% fail to do so, why not see it as part of the problem?

Scott Adams talks about it. Fats are bad, but if you eat certain fats you are less likely to eat other stuff, which, as an aggregate, is even worse. This means that fats are actually not that bad.

Good science needs to factor the human aspect of things into the equation. Simply ignoring it just guarantees failure.

Shachar

The difficult part isn't losing weight. The difficult part is keeping it off.

And for that, neight science nor anything else has any solution. About 5% of the people who successfully lose weight manage to keep that weight from coming back with compound interest.

Shachar

Forgot to add:
The second point above might seem petty. After all, that's why D distinguishes between structs and classes, right?

Then please consider the following:
void func(lazy bool e);

void otherfunc()
{
SomeStruct s;

func(s.isTrue());
}

Since func receives a delegate, s is allocated on the heap (despite this not being immediately obvious to people not versed in D). As a result, s's destructor is not going to get called. Ever.

Shachar

Due to compiler bug, the following:

Up until recently, s's destructors would not be called.

In the language definition proper:
auto s = new SomeStruct;

The destructor is never going to be called, even when s's memory is reaped by the GC.

Shachar

By "one platform" I did not mean it was unsupported. I meant it was unused.

You don't find many uses of Objective-C outside of the Apple echo system.

Shachar

When doing low level system programming, there aren't that many viable choices out there. C, C++, possibly ObjectiveC (not familiar enough with it to tell for sure). That's about it. Of those, ObjectiveC is, pretty much, a one platform language. C++ is used quite extensively, but it is way too complex, resulting in most C++ programmers not knowing what the 1@#$@!# they are doing. Also, some C++ features are not suitable for some low level scenarios. For example, you probably wouldn't want your kernel code to throw exceptions, or do iostream formatting, in kernel code.

C, on the other hand, is a very simple language. It has no expensive features (though, to be honest, that mostly means that if you need something expensive, you'll need to do it yourself). As such, it is without competition for what it offers. The most it loses in market/mind share is through scenarios that used to require low level system programming but no longer do.

As for D....

D advertises itself as supporting this mode. My employer chose to develop a low-level high performance low latency system in D. I've been programming it for the past half year. I'm not overjoyed. I don't hate D, but my personal opinion is that we'de have been better off going with C++ (though, to be honest, I love C++ like few of my peers do).

I have two main gripes with it on that front. D has a horrid GC (though no GC provides the latency requirements we need), and though it claims you can do without it, you really can't. At least, not without giving up on much of the language features and almost all of the standard library. When comparing to C++'s ability to use custom allocators with the standard library, D's phobos seems deathly pale.

D also claims to support RAII semantics. I happilly went about implementing a reference counting pointer, only to find out that there are cases where you cannot use a struct with a destructor, and there are cases where you theoreticaly can use one, but in practice find that the compiler will not call your destructor. All in all, RAII is an untested unutilized option in D.

Shachar

The D syntax may be more readable than C++, but to claim that it is simpler is just farcical. The number of language constructs, their specialization and their focus is staggering. For a language that set up to simplify matters, it has done anything but.

When you do:
A a;
a.something;

"something" might be a member. It might be a property. It might be a method with no arguments (which gets called). It might be a function defined outside the class with a special property. It might be any of the above on a member of A, specially defined (subtyping). I will not be surprised to hear I missed something.

How is that simple?

Shachar

You're missing a ton of background, but this is increasingly getting off topic.

If you like to know why that would not work (as well as some good reasons why Israel cannot do that, at least not in the literal way you wrote it), email me (your email is not public).

Shachar

Personally, I don't think it is as big a part in solving that problem as you seem to think. My personal take on this is that it is a very convenient straw man to use ("we're only doing this to help the poor Palestinians", with no limitation on what "this" is). History suggests that very few Muslim and Arab leaders care much about the actual Palestinians. Should that problem magically (because no other option seems likely at this point) disappear, Muslims will just pick (manufacture?) another one.

Regardless, I'm curious. How do you get peaceful resolution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict? I'd like you to try to limit your suggestions to things that had not been tried before (as those, obviously, do not work).

Also, saying that solving one problem is a key factor in solving another means that if the first is impossible, so is the other.

Shachar

AFAIK, in Iran Jews do have the right to practice their religion. They are also represented in government.

Don't get me wrong. They are legally defined as second class citizens, their government position is reserved, and they are precluded from participating in the general elections (which are not exactly free either), and their situation is, in most ways, worse than those of the Muslim Persian. Still, in your narrow metrics, Iran is such a country.

I know there are also Jews in Yemen, and I think also in Turky. I don't know the details, but sketchy memory says that they do have at least some freedom of practicing religion. There are also Jews in Egypt, and there they are, at least according to the dry letter of the law, free to practice.

Now, had that been an "and" list, I'm not sure I'd be able to come up with as long a list.

Shachar

Didn't they do just that if the person you were texting moved from an iPhone to Android?

Shachar

And down they go again. Looks like China has decided that it is time to play a pretty damned nasty card.