17 ms·
Lose weight the slow and incredibly difficult way
- djmips 4y agoWhat about adding very low density material to the crust, in other words - go up?
- ouid 4y agono dice, you'd have to climb it, and that would be exercise.
- function_seven 4y agoNo need to climb. With the vast resources you have seized for this project, you can probably have a few of your laborers carry you up to the new ground plane in a palanquin.
- B1FF_PSUVM 4y agoJust build a plinth 364.3 km tall, and place the weight watcher there. With air and water, if we're being nice. (sqrt(190/170)-1) * earth radius
- perlgeek 4y agoKind of a meta comment, it's always interesting to see / hear that when a somewhat well-known author writes a new book, you see interviews with them cropping up on "all the usual" places, other outlets write about it etc. It's nice with something like "What if? 2", because Randall is an interesting podcast guest, and there are just so many different things to talk about. It's a bit more annoying in other cases, where within two month you hear the same author on 5 different podcasts, and the author says the same thing on each of them. Time to use the skip button. I guess that's simply how it works nowadays in publishing: writing the book is work, but then you also need to spend quite some time promoting it, in the hopes not only that it boosts sales, but also that the boosted sales put the book in some bestseller lists, boosting sales even further.
- fknorangesite 4y ago> nowadays When has it not worked like this?
- perlgeek 4y agoI guess I just wasn't aware of it in the past. Back when I listened to radio, I wouldn't often come across the author doing interviews, but then I only switched between 3 or maybe 4 different stations...
- VyseofArcadia 4y agoHm, I was going to say before podcasts, but then there's TV. So I was going to say before TV, but I bet it was like this on the radio. Let's go with the 19th century, when it would have been more difficult to read five of the same interview with someone in five different newspapers.
- VoodooJuJu 4y agoEven the Romans did this: https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/spectaclesintheromanworldsourcebook/chapter/marketing-and-advertising/ https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/spectaclesintheromanworldsour...
- toyg 4y agoJ.D. Salinger. Samuel Beckett. Anybody writing under pseudonym, a practice that used to be extremely common (Ellery Queen, etc).
- fknorangesite 4y agoDid you think I meant that every single author always goes on a press tour? If so, why?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- umeshunni 4y ago
- petercooper 4y agoI'm glad to hear there's a follow up book to What If? (How To was also good, of course) – it's one of the more entertaining, yet educational, audiobooks I've listened to (and it really does work well in audio form unlike much non-fiction, plus Wil Wheaton is the narrator).
- causi 4y agoPersonally I can't stand Wheaton's narration. He's an incredible presenter in video content but when he's doing narration he always does this voice that just drips arrogance.
- throwaway675309 4y agoI'm in the same boat as you, I don't think that he's doing it intentionally but I just don't believe he possesses a smooth enough modulation to enjoy listening for long periods of time as you would with an audiobook.
- causi 4y agoIt works when everyone in the book is a smug asshole, like his narration of the Interdependency books. You just have to suppress your desire to smack him in the mouth.
- refracture 4y agoHis humor goes over my head sometimes but he does such a good job of making it just digestible enough for the lay-person like me. Well done!
- jon-wood 4y agoHis ability to make what is actually quite complex science accessible is mind blowing. What If, How To, and now What If 2 are some of my eight year old son’s favourite books. I’m absolutely certain he doesn’t really grasp any of the maths, but he adores when things going terribly wrong as a result of those maths.
- xracy 4y agoCould you build a giant space straw that sucks out the molten core instead of peeling away layers, and otherwise leave the crust alone so you don't make volcanos everywhere?
- kadoban 4y agoI don't think the Earth is structurally sound enough for that to work, at least if you're hoping to make any kind of a hollow shell. If the goal is just to preferentially remove the dense stuff first, that would likely work. You'd still destroy every part of the biosphere though. The crust bits shifting into place as you remove everything below them would be catastrophic, off the scale earthquakes everywhere and extreme heating and volcanic activity.
- xracy 4y agoWhile it would be nice to maintain the earth's existing setup, given that the original plan didn't do this, I will take "more efficient" :)
- mattnewton 4y agoGood news: the crust is still technically there Bad news: a bunch of it collapsed in the middle and the resulting energy heated it to make more magma and the crust is unrecognizable
- lapetitejort 4y agoLets just hope it swirls in the right direction with the same iron consistency so that we can maintain our magnetic field, or else our distance ancestors (millions of years from now) might have trouble breathing.
- mattnewton 4y agoCosmic rays will finally give them all the super powers we need. I saw it once in a documentary called the fantastic 4
- bhaney 4y agoWeird to see this on Nautilus instead of Randall's site where he's put hundreds of other "What-If"s https://what-if.xkcd.com/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/
- fragmede 4y agoIt's publicity for his new book, What If 2. https://xkcd.com/what-if-2/ https://xkcd.com/what-if-2/
- causi 4y agoI thoroughly enjoyed What If 2. I was, however, quite disappointed he chose to mock the "balloon one atom thick" question instead of answering it.
- bombcar 4y agoThat's sad to hear, a big part of the fun was answering "stupid/impossible" questions by assuming whatever makes them impossible was actually possible.
- B1FF_PSUVM 4y agoWhat was the question? My search-fu is failing there ...
- causi 4y agoIf you inflated a normal party balloon until its skin was one atom thick, how large would the balloon have to be?
- B1FF_PSUVM 4y agoThanks, it looks pretty reasonable, except for rearranging the molecular bonds like atoms were shingles. Assuming that was possible, it might be just a matter of r-squared - supposing we started with a million-atom thick skin, stretching the radius by one thousand should do it.
- scythe 4y agoI assume that's why he didn't bother answering — you just take the volume of rubber, divide by the covalent radius of carbon, and plug into A = 4 pi r^2.
- janandonly 4y agoClever to print one chapter in the Nautilus magazine. It’s basically free advertisement for his new book.
- chinchilla2020 4y agoIf you change the mass of the earth then you have a new orbit problem to contend with too.
- olddustytrail 4y agoYou don't really. Stays the same.
- function_seven 4y agoHow very heliocentric of you. Some of us worry about the moon!
- olddustytrail 4y agoI don't think it changes that either, does it?
- jeffrallen 4y agoThat was.... highly unexpected.
- sixstringtheory 4y ago> You could’ve avoided all that work with a comparatively simple tunnel. Having just dug several holes 3' deep and 8" wide for a small project, that's definitely still work XD I'd actually be interested to read a What If on digging a tunnel to the other side of the earth. Oh... https://what-if.xkcd.com/135/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/135/
- 988747 4y agoI guess digging 10-15 meters of that tunnel towards the Earth core with a shovel would be enough for an average person to lose 20 pounds :)
- elil17 4y agoI hate all these click-bait articles. Losing weight is simple, it's just CICO. Calories In, Crust of the earth Out Edit: I feel like a lot of people are arguing about something that should be considered totally uncontroversial, basic physics. Before you get all worked up over this, please look up Yuri Gagarin. His weight loss journey absolutely proved that it is possible to lose 100% of your body weight through simple orbital mechanics and hundreds of people have followed in his footsteps and experienced similar results. There is not room for debate, this is a proven weight loss method and what the I'm suggesting is essentially a very similar thing, but one that could help a lot more people at once.
- Melatonic 4y agoSimple does not mean easy. In fact sometimes a simply difficult problem is the hardest.
- elil17 4y agoThat is absolutely true. I'm not trying to tell anyone this isn't a hard challenge. But I think we can all lose weight this way given enough effort.
- shadowpho 4y ago98% of people are unable to follow your "simple" idea. Hence, it's not simple by definition. Furthermore, it's not that simple. Lots of other factors affect metabolism, hunger and energy levels, all of which have huge effect on weight loss\gain.
- MuffinFlavored 4y agoIt's simple by definition but not easy to do. Cravings (fat, sugar, filling boredom with eating, depriving yourself from flavor of diet soda/soda) is easier said than done.
- elil17 4y agoIt's true, spending time eating can distract from the only real way to lose weight, which is by reducing the mass of the planet Earth. Stay focused, everyone! Together we can do it.
- torotonnato 4y agoEhhh too much work, suck out the nucleus with a long straw and spit it far enough
- OkayPhysicist 4y agoThe longest possible straw is only like 30 ft long.
- intrasight 4y agoYou'd lose about 10% if you ascended to the ISS. Sounds MUCH easier.
- Nition 4y ago> You didn’t actually need to remove mass from the Earth, you just needed to go under it. You could’ve avoided all that work with a comparatively simple tunnel. Or a really tall ladder.
- d-us-vb 4y agoHe just needs to learn the Soleus Pushup.
- screye 4y agoso meta. meta comment - it this the most memes an HN thread has tolerated ?
- otikik 4y agoI contest that our own bodies are part of Earth’s crust and thus a more efficient way to do this would be removing mass from our own bodies exclusively. Depending on your constitution, the simplest way to achieve this is cutting one or two of your legs off.
- aidenn0 4y agoThere's an old joke "Want to know how to lose 10lbs of ugly fat? Cut off your head!"
- impoppy 4y agoSo I wondered if I could lose some weight if I teleported on top of Everest and started searching for formulas. Apparently, this question is already answered and the answer is yes - I could lose half a pound. https://www.quora.com/On-top-of-Mount-Everest-is-the-force-of-gravity-stronger-or-weaker-than-on-the-sea-level-You-have-more-mass-underneath-you-but-youre-also-further-away-from-other-mass https://www.quora.com/On-top-of-Mount-Everest-is-the-force-o... So yeah, if you have resources to shave off that much of Earth surface, then you have resources to construct a high enough building to lose those 10 pounds which would have been a lot easier.
- rendall 4y ago> ...lose those 10 pounds which .. * 20 pounds
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- andai 4y agoI thought the question was how many kilograms of dirt would you have to physically carry into outer space (eg. up a really tall ladder) in order to burn 20 lbs (70,000 calories). If my calculations are correct: 1 (kilo)calorie is 4184 joules. So you need to burn 70,000 * 4184 = 292,880,000 joules. It takes 9.8 joules to lift 1kg by 1m. Using an "outer space" definition of 100km (100,000) meters, it takes 980,000 joules to lift 1kg of dirt to space. Dividing 292,888,000 joules (the amount of energy we want to burn) by 980,000 (the energy it takes to carry 1kg to space), we get about 299 kilos. You'd have to carry about 300 kg up a ladder to outer space to lose 20 lbs. (Subtract your body weight, of course!) (Accounting for the fat burned along the way is left as an exercise to the reader ;)
- psd1 4y agoAnyone can lose weight without giving up any of the things they love! _Here's how:_ 1. Live a full life 2. Get in a wooden box 3. Slough away all your soft tissue - you might like to use it for a worm farm 4. Welcome to the new-look you!
- serf 4y agoThis whole thread has taught me more about group-outrage and psychology than physics and weight-loss by a long shot.
- ropable 4y agoGreatest concentration of reading comprehension failures for a good long while.
- tsol 4y agoI notice there are certain arguments that come into popularity and suddenly you'll find people all over who love to interject it-- sometimes even when it's not related. The whole 'mother teresa was a terrible person' thing is another argument people love to throw around for some reason. Which, is not true btw[1]. [1]- https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xcw213/comment/io915d6/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xcw213/comme...
- mizzao 4y agoIf gravity increases for the initial part of going down, wouldn't it take a lot less energy to go up? Once you're up in the stratosphere, you would weigh noticeably less.
- newsclues 4y agoAbout 15 years ago I weighed about 235 pounds when I stop getting on scales. I was 200 at 18 and tried going to the gym to lose weight but I stopped because I bulked up with muscle I increased my weight rapidly. So I went back to being a lazy nerd. I started losing weight by buying a bike to get to work and doing yoga so that I could go hiking in the mountains. I started eating better, tried being vegan and other fad diets and slowly got down to 185-190 and was stuck, but was in pretty good shape with extra padding. I eventually realized I had an issue with gluten and when I cut that out, I dropped done to about 170, and am probably a perfect body fat. I’ve since lost about 10 pounds in the last year from food prices rising faster than my income and am frequently hungry and lightheaded. It took nutritional experience and exercise, but I feel physically and mentally so much better it’s like being a different person(to yourself and others).
- nextaccountic 4y agoI'm a little sad that this isn't (re)posted on https://what-if.xkcd.com/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/
- mckirk 4y agoWhen you see that art style, you know it's going to be good.