>> ^conan:

incredibly stupid tabloid science. i'm amazed that there're still people who can differentiate between cause and correlation. fat parents are having fat kids, is it genetics? no, it's because whatever the reason for your bad eating habits, you pass them down to your kids. what to you expect from your kids when you only eat junk? they'll eat it too. either because they mimic you or because you're the one who feeds them! congratulations, now you have perfect excuses: what once were "heavy bones" now are "hunger hormones" and genetics. this "documentation" didn't provide any hard facts, just hormones with names in quotation marks and similar snake oil stuff.
Step 1: stop doing sports, eat more junk and surprise! you'll become overweight. Step 2: catch up on exercising and change your diet and surprise again! your weight will drop. it's common sense. and this comes from someone who's still perfecting step 1... ;-)


I think you're misunderstanding the point of it. Everything you say is correct to a degree. I didn't hear them say that the sole cause of obesity is hormonal, not once. I'd be surprised if you watched it all the way through. The way you feed your children and the habits you give them is absolutely the root cause, at least I would say so. Then society/culture, marketing, advertising fast food. The cheapest foods are junk, that also plays a part.

But what they're saying here, is that the reason some people end up getting wildy overweight and not just a bit chunky is because there isn't the same hormone to tell them they're full. The amount some fat people eat would make a regular sized person sick, in just one meal.

I don't believe obesity is genetic either, I am one of those people who inherited my mothers shitty eating habits, was overweight as a child and now have to suffer the consequences of that. However my sister was fed the same way, offered the same things, but was always skinny because she ate like a bird (one years she would only eat bread rolls, haha). My children are two very different types, too. My daughter can eat more than the average adult, you know that old saying, hollow legs? But she puts weight on if I let her eat the wrong things or every time she feels hungry, so over the years I've had to very much restrict her. Now she tends to make the right choices so hopefully that will go through to adult life with her and I've not passed down the same bad habits, however she would eat every half hour if she listened to her belly. My son is just the opposite. If he's not hungry I could offer him his favourite anything and he'd turn it down. Lucky bugger!

Then there's the thing where my sister all of a sudden in her late teens became overweight. That didn't make much sense. But her eating habits had very much changed. The bit in this doc where they were testing identical twins where one was overweight and one wasn't was fascinating and tied things up much neater.


>> ^snoozedoctor:

Getting fat is like filling a bathtub with water. If you run the spigot faster than the drain, it fills up. Now THAT is heavy science. Burn more calories than you eat = weight loss.


You're talking about how to lose weight, a science we all understand This is talking about the reasons some of us gain. It's always pissed me off when bigger people rather than just admit they stuff their faces, try and pass it off as big bones (eh?) or genetics. I'm even rather cynical of people who say they love their weight and being big is beautiful and they want to be like that. I think rather they know how bloody difficult dieting is, not just the losing weight but keeping it off, also I think those people, and bless them for it, accept that they don't want to go through the endless bullshit of dieting and gaining and embrace it. Or they've got some chubby chasers paying them top dollar to watch them eat and balloon to 400 lbs. Food is very very addictive once you've learnt the pleasures of it, just like a drug. It's very hard for anyone who doesn't have a weight issue to understand it, especially since you've been listening to people make endless excuses for it over the years. I think that's what is putting the blinkers on you now when you watch anything with alternative reasons for obesity, you just see it as an excuse.

This is exciting, because what they're saying is if they can recreate these hormones they will be able to find a way of replacing them, which will make the whole dieting process much much easier.

incredibly stupid tabloid science. i'm amazed that there're still people who can differentiate between cause and correlation. fat parents are having fat kids, is it genetics? no, it's because whatever the reason for your bad eating habits, you pass them down to your kids. what to you expect from your kids when you only eat junk? they'll eat it too. either because they mimic you or because you're the one who feeds them! congratulations, now you have perfect excuses: what once were "heavy bones" now are "hunger hormones" and genetics. this "documentation" didn't provide any hard facts, just hormones with names in quotation marks and similar snake oil stuff.

Step 1: stop doing sports, eat more junk and surprise! you'll become overweight. Step 2: catch up on exercising and change your diet and surprise again! your weight will drop. it's common sense. and this comes from someone who's still perfecting step 1... ;-)

>> ^Deano:

I've just started Richard Morgan's The Cold Commands (which I think is sci-fi/fantasy with gay characters but I'm not entirely sure) and then I'm going to reread American Tabloid by James Ellroy as I stopped and forgot all about it and I want to read the entire trilogy eventually.


You, sir, have excellent taste in books. Ellroy and Morgan are both awesome, especially the Dudley Smith and Takeshi Kovacs books respectively.

As for me, my last few were Iain Banks Transition, the Atheists Guide to Christmas and Paul Kimmage's Engage (true account of a tetraplegic rugby player, fascinating story and insight into coping with such a horrific accident).

I'm currently reading Milligan's Meaning of Life: An autobiography of sorts by Spike Milligan. It's really just a collection of Milligans other writings but it's great fun.

I've just started Richard Morgan's The Cold Commands (which I think is sci-fi/fantasy with gay characters but I'm not entirely sure) and then I'm going to reread American Tabloid by James Ellroy as I stopped and forgot all about it and I want to read the entire trilogy eventually.

You're a good egg, AC. Thanks.

In reply to this comment by alien_concept:
*promote

I'm disappointed in him for saying that the show should have pulled punches. He could easily have said, "I'm a huge fan of Jon's show and deeply appreciate what he does for the cause of rationality in politics. But Jon is a public figure and the show takes swings at everyone. I'm not Family Guy. If I personally were taking Jon to task about what he did during the strike, I would have been much more measured. But 'measured' isn't one of the buzzwords around our offices."

Instead, at 3:22, he says, "The gag that we did on Family Guy was coming from the right place, but was probably so over the line in its ruthlessness that it probably could have been more measured in its execution. How about that?" Lame.>> ^gwiz665:

Seth is not Family Guy. Saying whatever he wants on the show is one thing. They don't seem to pull any punches there, but for him to go out and smear someone in person, takes it to another level, and really he's too smart for that.
Moreover, the context of where he was here. In an interview with basically tabloid news, the host trying his best to egg him on to say something he might later regret.

Seth is not Family Guy. Saying whatever he wants on the show is one thing. They don't seem to pull any punches there, but for him to go out and smear someone in person, takes it to another level, and really he's too smart for that.

Moreover, the context of where he was here. In an interview with basically tabloid news, the host trying his best to egg him on to say something he might later regret.
>> ^messenger:

I guess I don't know enough about the context, or I'm not connecting the dots. Care to help?>> ^gwiz665:
Consider the context.
>> ^messenger:
Weak sauce from MacFarlane. I'm with Morgan on this one 100%. Since when does Family Guy have to apologize for crossing the line? Is there any other reason to watch that show besides seeing how much too far they take a joke? They make an art out of it. I'm disappointed MacFarlane is that afraid of Stewart, and of his publicist too, apparently.

I'm a bit surprised at the general level of debate about Jobs. I don't really care about whether he was nice to people or not. I don't measure him on that basis, and I couldn't hope to know the truth of it.

To me, that whole discussion smacks of tabloid driven fantasy. You know, the whole pretence that we might actually know what celebrities are like. Oh, Angelina Jolie's a bitch, Steve Jobs was an arsehole, Tom Cruise is craaaaaaazy!

For me, the debate seems to have been about canonising a 'genius' or demonising a capitalist pig. Neither of these comes close to capturing how I think he should be remembered.

I confess, I'm not an Apple fan. I'm not an early adapter, I'm not into gadgets and I tend to wait until something is proven before I buy in. I'm not blown away by Apple products, but I did buy an Ipod when the dust settled and they seemed like a useful product. I still have it, and it's been worth the purchase. I don't see anything worthy of a genius tag on an Apple product, but they are beautifully designed, intuitive products.

Similarly, I don't think of him as an evil capitalist any more than any other business owner, and no less. Like any other manufactured product, Apple uses cheap Asian labour, but that doesn't offend me greatly. They appear to control the supply chain, and they have differentiated their products, managed supply, and achieved margins that are higher than their competitors - this is good business, and I respect it.

I don't believe he's 'changed' anyone's life dramatically - certainly not my own. I think he was a very smart guy who delivered very good products to a generation of people with high disposable incomes and an interest in technology. Well played.

I will never know what he was like as a person, and I'm ok with that.

>> ^cosmovitelli:

Piers Morgan is a shit stirring mercenary tabloid c t.
With any luck he'll be summoned back to the UK to answer for going through peoples bins and voicemails for the last 20 years along with the Murdoch monsters.
And then hung.
In case that's not clear, I don't really like him.


He's got a hell of an investigative crew though. Seth was genuinely amazed he found this crap out.

Piers Morgan is a shit stirring mercenary tabloid c**t.
With any luck he'll be summoned back to the UK to answer for going through peoples bins and voicemails for the last 20 years along with the Murdoch monsters.
And then hung.

In case that's not clear, I don't really like him.

>> ^xxovercastxx:

>> ^possom:
What amuses me is that "hacking cell phones" has turned out to be "guessing voicemail passwords". I bet most of their information was gained by entering 1234 or 1111 into people's voicemail. Hacking? Stupid cell phone users for sure.

There are only 9999 possibilities and, since voicemail generally doesn't employ any sort of tarpitting or other brute force protections, I'm sure one could write a script to try voicemail passwords pretty rapidly. You don't even have to try them in succession since voicemail systems can handle multiple simultaneous connections.
Why find some clever backdoor or exploit when you can brute force the thing in a matter of an hour?


These guys aren't that smart. The majority of people aren't that smart and so, yes, entering default pins is characterised as "hacking". However it's done it still means an offence under the RIP Act. Of course it would be interesting if they did secure some hacker's services to brute force passwords. Nothing would surprise me from hereon in.

Story goes that some guy in the early days of phone use alerted a tabloid to this problem who surprisingly did not get back to him or run a story based on the tip. What happened is that the practice rapidly spread through Fleet Street. Another little scam journalists would do is hand new phones to crime victims they had access to so they could "stay in touch". The phones either had the default pin or changed to one the journalist knew.

That bloke is sort of famous now. Just this morning, a lonely article in some regional Austrian tabloid'ish newspaper was the only info about it. By now, he has been featured on the first page over at every single one of the major German news outlets.

Fucking brilliant, public mockery ftw
In reply to this comment by gwiz665:
Lol. That's just lovely. In reply to this comment by radx:
Austria offically recognized colanders as religious headgear. A pastafarian went all the way: his ID.

This was a bad interview due to Paul McMullen talking over everyone. Badly controlled interview. Tabloids are not journalistic, they are pop-culture trash gossip.

@NinjaInHeat maybe you're right, but then again i genuinely do think that people wouldn't want that stuff at the expense of personal privacy and/or the law. People like to see the rich and famous recieve some misfortune and they may be intereted in cheryl cole's intimacies, people like "good" stories, yeah. Maybe i'm being too optimistic, but i feel they wouldn't want it at the expense of just about anything.

I feel that it's flawed to say "well the demand is there, so people obviously want it", yeah sure they want it, but they never said they wanted the tabloids to break the law for it. The tabloids took that step for themselves because they want to sell more than their rival, so it's not really the people that are at fault it's the papers themselves for wanting to beat the competition at any cost surely?

It's a bit like saying "well, you like cheap clothes, so we provided you with cheap clothes. oh sure we have kids working in sweatshops but the demand for clothes is there so blame yourselves!" I don't want my clothes made at the expense of others, but how do i distinguish? And am i then to blame for heinous practices because i like cheap clothes? I think that's a pretty good analogy.

Honestly I don't know the first thing about celebrity gossip but I imagine it's actually quite the opposite; the dedicated tabloids would probably be much more interested in some truly trashy piece of gossip to report, and like it or not, a piece about celebrity yeast infections would probably sell way better than one covering hairstyles.

Remember the whole Gizmodo iPhone debacle? Same thing. Sure Gizmodo were to blame for being completely unprofessional, but they were simply the manifestation of the Apple fanboy hoards. We can't expect the media to practice professionalism and work ethic when we don't demand it as consumers but simply frown when they go 'over the line' (and even when they do, and we frown, we still manage to make it worth their while).

>> ^dannym3141:

>> ^NinjaInHeat:
I must say I sympathize with the so called "journalist". He is doing a very poor job of defending himself and I in no way support the point he's trying to make, but he does touch on something I agree with; this whole voyeurism industry is filth by definition, what's incredible here isn't the lengths that these reporters would go to to push out more trash news, it's that there's such an overwhelming demand for this garbage.
I would much rather hear actors directing heat on these issues straight at the audiences (which of course they won't). It's much easier blaming the celebrity media, but they are simply a manifestation of the mindless consumer horde.

In a way, sure, but i don't think the public would be happy with them hacking people's private shit to get that gossip. Well, they're clearly not because i haven't heard a single person standing up for them yet, though i'm sure there's reprehensible people who would somewhere in britain.
I don't think i've ever heard someone say "i get the paper for the celebrity gossip". And whilst i know there are celebrity gossip magazines out there that sell, i'd venture a guess that it's "cheryl cole's got a new hairstyle" that they're interested in rather than "cheryl cole's booked in for a yeast infection at local clinic, phone transcript inside".