The gyros are under computer control, and the vehicle leans into turns as you would expect a motorcycle to.

I started doing the 5/2 fasting.

The first two weeks are hell - hunger pangs, cold sweats. Then you get used to it. Metabolic pathways that have fallen into disuse start to work properly again. The pangs go away and you are aware of your hunger but not ruled by it.

I agree, people who eat too often have a broken hunger drive. They broke it, because when you eat to regulate your blood sugar, your body stops having to do it for you. If those parts of your metabolism don't get the exercise, they seize up. But the good news is that it only takes a few fast days to get them working again ; your liver is extremely good at adapting.

Instead of regulating your blood sugar by putting a twinkie into your face when you feel a hunger pang, your body starts to be able to regulate it on it's own again, and you are once again in charge of how often you eat.

The next thing to do is to break the little-and-often habit - since it usually involves opening a wrapper, because who cooks that often? Anything in a wrapper is probably high in sugar, because it prolongs the shelf life. Use those fast days to fantasize long and hard about the delicious home-cooked meal you're going to break your fast with, and it tastes all the better and feels like a real reward.

The difference is that heroin isn't relatively cheap, legal, easy to obtain, and necesary for continued life (addiction notwithstanding).

Sugar costs more than HFCS solely because of sugar import tarrifs in the USA that prevent domestic sugar growers from having to compete with foreign imports.

So protectionism for the Florida Sugar Cane League (yes, it sounds like a bunch of supervillains, but it's a real thing, can't make it up!), combined with subsidies for corn, serve to create one of the most lambasted industrial food ingredients of the 20/1st century, and make your Coca Cola taste *foul*. Sounds distinctly un-American to me...

* Socialism
** (diversion of taxpayers money from one social group to another)
** Oh, but wait, it's OK, because it's from a larger poorer group to a smaller richer one. As you were.
* Interfering with the blessed and glorious Free Market
* Interfering with the taste of America's Favourite Beverage

The cost would be lower, in the end, without the sugar tariffs, because the only thing that makes HFCS competitive is the high price of domestic USA sugar.

The main reason processed food is cheaper than fresh is shelf-life. Fresh food has a dramatically much higher wastage. While the stories about Twinkies that survive decades are not entirely true, they serve to illustrate the point.

Here's a thought... re-usable bottle... faucet.... just might work.

I started doing the 5/2 fasting thing... the first week or so is hell, because you get the cold sweats and jitters I associate with low blood sugar.

Then the enzyme pathways you've been neglecting like gluconeogenesis start to work properly again as they actually get some exercise, and you are able to go through a fast day without the cold sweats - you know you're not eating, but you don't have those same hunger pangs. And boy, does that first meal after you break your fast taste good.

I think our normal diet habits of having three squares a day and snacks in between has left us Westerners with rusted and dysfunctional metabolic machinery.

Potatoes have virtually no sugar, their carbs are in the form of starch. And celery has so little of any calorific nutrient in it that it's often considered that you actually burn more calories chewing it than you gain from digesting it. I would suggest that this kind of ignorance about the composition of even basic foodstuffs is part of what drives the trend to obesity.

The figures are more like 4-5% (in middle-aged men, the most obese group in America), and yes it has been associated with conditions that make obesity worse. On the other hand, treating it with CPAP in conjunction with a weight loss program had no significant effect on weight loss ... which is the number 1 most effective treatment for sleep apnea.

I agree, obesity is a disorder of a complex system, and therefore cannot be attributed to just one factor. But even so, the factors that a person can control remain the same - their diet and exercise habits. Focussing on the other factors is not productive when you cannot control them.

(non-Anonymous MD chips in)

They don't get fat. They were fat in the first place, if they had their stomach stapled. I've seen people who worked industriously to overcome their stomach stapling surgery to fit in as many calories as possible ; making sure they consumed only the lowest-bulk, highest-calorie foodstuffs, and wonder why they didn't lose weight. I mean, they had the surgery, and that's a miracle golden ticket to weight loss, right???

Mhhmmm, but it's the same air and water pretty much everywhere. Unless you live in a cotton candy cloud next to the gravy pond, it's not a factor in determining your weight relative to the next guy.

The two overwhelming factors that govern weight are....

* Dietary habit. Not just how much you eat, but what. Because "what" has a serious impact on "how much" - like those stomach stapler guys, it's much easier to eat too many calories if you ingest it in the form of low-bulk, highly processed foods. Yes, if you choose your car based on whether it has a beverage holder which will take a Big Gulp, you're one of these people. You can eat huge plates of vegetables and not gain weight, because they are mostly composed of that water you're talking about, and you can make them tasty with herbs and spices and ... canned tomatoes, makes any plate of veggies 100% more interesting. The other important habit is your shopping habit - just not buying those low-bulk calorie-dense foods and not having them around is very effective.

* Excercise habit. The simplest being to walk and not drive. This is why America is so far ahead in the fat stakes compared to Europe - many things are too far apart from each other to walk, in contrast to Europe which is a little more compressed. I visited Oregon and people looked at me funny because I annouced I was going to walk to places as far away as half a mile or so. Where do you have the least obesity? Places like New York, where everything is in practical walking distance. Once you get fat, it's like a trap - everything feels like too much effort to do, so you do less and less. Your knees end up too damaged to walk or gasp run.

All this is from experience (although I've not been what I'd call "fat" in a long time, I'll raise my hand to being overweight). My marriage ended last year, and feeling the need to make myself a little more attractive for the dating game, I dropped over 20 pounds in 6 months from cooking for myself instead of buying pre-made food, and getting off my butt and going for a run once or twice a week.

I completely get that people find this hard, because I do. For most people, weight is a psychological issue, beause as a species we're hardwired to get as much food as we can, so to maintain a proper diet we have to use our front brain instead of our lizard brain. But the excuses like "it's my metabolism" or "it's the water" do nothing to improve the condition, they're just the mental equivalent of more junk food - something that makes you feel better about the problem but gets in the way of resolving it. Hence the emphasis I place on the word "habit" - making decisions is tiring, but if it's just "what you do"... then not so much. Cooking decent healthy meals for my daughter twice a week (with enough for leftovers to keep me eating well the rest of the week), and hopping on the rower for a minimum of 10 minutes a day, is now "what I do".

I think the one accident it had during auto-drive was when someone rear-ended it at the traffic lights, which you can hardly blame on the autopilot.

The automated cars on the road right now are already safer than humans, statistically speaking, but the technology is too expensive.

History has taught us that technology gets smaller, better, and cheaper very quickly.

> Why mess with electronic voting?

Because it's much less heavy lifting to stuff the ballot box.

In addition, I suspect that you could also key the roadside lighting into the same car detection circuits. And it would only be a matter of time before some bright spark suggested turning them off completely - after all, the road markings are already illuminated.

Household gas is mostly methane or propane (for those without pipeline gas), and nowhere near enough pure for use in a fuel cell.

I've had pressed CDs fail - a long while ago now - with a kind of mottled effect that the word "bronzing" could describe. I get the sense they were pressed on a cheap process.

New CDs are more prone to physical damage - the data layer is right under the label laquer. Older ones sandwiched the data layer between multiple layers of plastic and I think it's these ones I've had fail.