Switching From Sitting To Standing At Your Desk 312
Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "Chris Bowlby reports at BBC that medical research has been building up for a while now, suggesting constant sitting is harming our health — potentially causing cardiovascular problems or vulnerability to diabetes. Advocates of sit-stand desks say more standing would benefit not only health, but also workers' energy and creativity. Some big organizations and companies are beginning to look seriously at reducing 'prolonged sitting' among office workers. 'It's becoming more well known that long periods of sedentary behavior has an adverse effect on health,' says GE engineer Jonathan McGregor, 'so we're looking at bringing in standing desks.' The whole concept of sitting as the norm in workplaces is a recent innovation, points out Jeremy Myerson, professor of design at the Royal College of Art. 'If you look at the late 19th Century,' he says, Victorian clerks could stand at their desks and 'moved around a lot more'. 'It's possible to look back at the industrial office of the past 100 years or so as some kind of weird aberration in a 1,000-year continuum of work where we've always moved around.' What changed things in the 20th Century was 'Taylorism' — time and motion studies applied to office work. 'It's much easier to supervise and control people when they're sitting down,' says Myerson. What might finally change things is if the evidence becomes overwhelming, the health costs rise, and stopping employees from sitting too much becomes part of an employer's legal duty of care. 'If what we are creating are environments where people are not going to be terribly healthy and are suffering from diseases like cardiovascular disease and diabetes,' says Prof Alexi Marmot, a specialist on workplace design, 'it's highly unlikely the organization benefits in any way.'"
I'm not going to stand for this (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I'm not going to stand for this (Score:5, Funny)
As we put them on one guy said "What's the difference? These are just regular old shoes," but it turned out they were actually orthopedic shoes, and so he said "Well then, I stand corrected."
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Lying down instead of standing? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I'm not going to stand for this (Score:4, Insightful)
Not with my knees.
You're right. I'm guessing these office workers have never been waitresses or had a job requiring 8 hours of standing because if they had they would appreciate being able to sit instead of standing. Standing prolonged hours causes varicose veins and can cause knee and joint pain. Sitting just causes a fat butt. Solution is to get up and walk around every so often. Most of these office workers have regular scheduled breaks, they need to use their breaks to get up and be active.
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I have a break program on my system at work. it tells me to take a break every hour. I get up and walk a few laps around the building. I find my energy levels are better, I'm given time to think about what I'm working on, and I feel a lot better overall.
Well (Score:2)
Your feet would get sore
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No. Tall chairs exist. We used them all the time at our benches in the research labs. Part of the time you stand, part of the time you sit. Whichever is comfortable and works with your current activity.
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Some progressive offices have desks that can be raised or lowered with a little motor, so you can sit and then stand when you feel like it.
Typically the guys in the office would sit all morning and stand for part of the afternoon.
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No. Tall chairs exist. We used them all the time at our benches in the research labs. Part of the time you stand, part of the time you sit. Whichever is comfortable and works with your current activity.
Personally I'd love this. I always prefer to sit "up high" anyway, like a tall "bar" or restaurant stool. Sitting all day long is definitely not healthy but at least with these it's easy to go back and forth.
Re:Well (Score:5, Informative)
Not sure how standing up would solve anything... (Score:4, Insightful)
...when the main problem isn't really sitting down, but being STILL in the same position hour after hour.
Re:Not sure how standing up would solve anything.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not sure how standing up would solve anything.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, standing at the register all day was rough on my body at 16... I can't imagine how my [ahem] slightly older frame would deal with it. Back then I was a "stock boy" and was much more comfortable doing the manual labor than the standing-in-one-place routine of register duty.
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I recall continual sore feet all summer from my walmart job at around 19 years old, I can't imagine what this would do to me now.
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We got standing desks a few weeks ago. I stand for a few hours in the morning and a few in the afternoon but sit for lunch. I find that it works best to shift slowly from foot to foot and rock back and forth a bit. I also switch up my stance between wide and narrow and even stand on one leg now and again. You might thing that sounds distracting but I feel more focused while working than I do sitting down.
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And the links to your peer-reviewed studies are... where?
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http://www.npr.org/2011/04/25/... [npr.org]
Its a talk with an expert, and if you want actual studies, you can go to pubmed or jama.
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...when the main problem isn't really sitting down, but being STILL in the same position hour after hour.
This is why it's not a "standing desk" but a "sit-stand desk". The idea is that you alternate between sitting and standing, changing position every hour or two.
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You could install a threadmill behind your desk.
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Re:Not sure how standing up would solve anything.. (Score:4, Funny)
No, some parallel programming :)
Re:Not sure how standing up would solve anything.. (Score:4, Insightful)
I think we need to let go of the idea that jobs must be done from 9 - 5. Let people telecommute and get their work done whenever is best for them. A person can go biking, then sit in a park and do work one day; take a walk to starbucks and work from there the next; then spend the day playing with their kids and do their work at night, sitting in their bed. I don't understand why, despite the fact that technology makes this possible (and the fact that most hourly jobs can now be replaced with computers and/or machines, or are outsourced) we switched to treating salaried jobs the same as hourly jobs, where you get paid because you are there at your designated time rather than because you get your work done.
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I agree to some extent about the 9 - 5 thing being in many ways bad.
I do exactly what you describe a few days a week.
The problem is that this makes it very hard to properly communicate with other people in your job setting. Nobody knows reliably when other people will be available, whether its for a meeting, or just to get some little bit of information. It works great if you are on a self directed task that lasts for the whole "day" and nobody needs you for anything. It sucks if you need 3 or 4 people t
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The thing that helped the most? Dancing. We put on music and danced while we sorted and it was light years better than just standing still.
Walking yes, standing no. (Score:4, Insightful)
Doing some full stride walking every day is the bees-nees!
Standing isn't going to give you anything more than sore feet.
Re:Walking yes, standing no. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Walking yes, standing no. (Score:5, Funny)
We have an employee with a treadmill at his desk. He walks and types. Of course his emails usually read something like, "Hewmy Jammmmes, I gto taht TSp reprt dne!".
Its a new form of crypto...with different levels, depending on the level of difficulty the treadmill is set on:
HILL128 - Hilly Level 1
MNT512 - Mountains Level 5
DED1028 - Death Race Level 10
This would go over so well on IT (Score:2)
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"Fuckin' A!" [blogspot.com]
Re:This would go over so well on IT (Score:5, Interesting)
I do development and I work a standing desk (and for a couple of years did a walking desk when I worked at home). I'm actually vastly more comfortable not just at work now but in the rest of my life since switching:
- issues I had with sciatica went away
- I am in better shape/have more endurance & energy
- I sleep better
- I used to feel like shit if I went on a 10 hour coding binge (sluggish and exhausted) but now I just feel pretty much normal
It's only uncomfortable at first, but once you figure out good shoes to wear, good anti-fatigue mats to use and good posture it's much MUCH more comfortable (at least in my experience) and makes your non-work life better as well.
At my office we have 5 people in our engineering team (some IT, some developers) who use standing desks and a few more who are considering making the switch. The oldest stander is me (42) so it's not just something 20-somethings can do.
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Where is this? Because I want to stay far away.
I'm starting to think I need to look for an entirely new profession. First they stuck us in open-plan work environments where I'm utterly incapable of concentrating, now they want me to stand up all day? Go ask a supermarket cashier how comfortable that is. Pretty soon I'm going to be totally unable to produce anything at work.
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I used to work dsl support in a call center. I was in my early 30s and had recently had back injury just sitting all day irritated it. My co-workers thought it was funny seeing me pace around my little cubical like a caged lion at first. I would put my foot up on the divider and stretch, do squats, and a bunch of other things. They transfered a girl to the team that did some kind of pilates and soon the entire team was doing desk exercises. Occasionally they would refer to us as team yoga, all I can say is
victorian clerks.. (Score:2, Interesting)
had to move around.
they had no choice, really. they had to ferry around small slips of paper and cards.
they had a boss who sat behind a desk in a comfy chair though, smoking a cigar while his secretary ferried him scotch.
my reasoning is actually that all desktop work chairs just suck ass. a 10 dollar one piece plastic chair beats all of them - your ass doesn't sweat, you can lean on them, they don't roll out under you - they don't roll around their axis(this one is particularly annoying because WHO THE FUCK
Re:victorian clerks.. (Score:4, Interesting)
The whole hierarchy of office chairs has always baffled me. You have three general classifications of chairs (and they're usually labelled as such at the store): Executive, Manager, and Secretary. The Secretary chair always sucks. It's the cheapest model, doesn't usually have arms, has thin or no padding, and it's flimsy. The Manager chair is the most comfortable. It's ergonomic, has adjustable armrests, lumber support, etc. The Executive chair, which should be the most luxurious, is almost always the most uncomfortable but it's always covered in slippery leather. Other than that, it's straight-backed, never high enough for the desk, and heavy.
It makes no sense that the degree of comfortableness that you are allowed to have is actually a class system in a modern office. I get that a business owner wants to control costs and expensive chairs are expensive. But wouldn't you want your employees to be as comfortable and healthy as your budget will allow? Why is a secretary less deserving of arm rests or lumber support than a manager?
Re:victorian clerks.. (Score:5, Informative)
I think you're over thinking this. Executive, Manager, and Secretary are just the names for styles of chairs, not some kind of hierarchy or (current) intended use.
Secretary chairs, I believe, are not named for the person currently known as an administrative assistant, but for the piece of furniture called a secretary. A secretary is a tall cabinet, the lower part is drawers, the upper part has glassed doors to display knick-knacks, china, whatever, and in between is a fold-down panel that makes a desk. This piece of furniture would be prominent in a house. When a person wanted to write a letter, etc, they would drag a small, lightweight stool to the secretary and fold down the desk.
In the days when most people worked in factories, the only person with a desk was the manager. Hence, a 'manager' chair is basically any desk chair.
The executive chair is mostly to show that the person sitting in it is important, hence the leather.
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The more you know.
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The Executive chair, which should be the most luxurious, is almost always the most uncomfortable but it's always covered in slippery leather.
Clearly, the Executive chair is just for show, since he'll be out at the golf course all day anyway.
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But, everyone aspired to be that cigar smoking boss, so everyone getting "comfy" chairs was progress, right?
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I inherited a cushioned rolling chair when I inherited my desk, and it was awful. It was heavy and bulky, which is a problem when you share a small office with three other people. And jesus christ was it uncomfortable. When I couldn't take it anymore, I found a simple wooden chair unused in storage somewhere, swapped it out, and never looked back. It's comfy, I can lean back, there are no arms to get in my way (who needs a chair with arms at a desk anyway?), and it's small enough to comfortable slide into m
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my reasoning is actually that all desktop work chairs just suck ass. a 10 dollar one piece plastic chair beats all of them - your ass doesn't sweat, you can lean on them, they don't roll out under you - they don't roll around their axis(this one is particularly annoying because WHO THE FUCK really needs a rotating chair?? that rotation and roller wheels are the worst fucking idea ever. I mea, who the fuck comes up with that idea and thinks it's a good choice for a worker who keeps constantly pushing on buttons on the desk and moving an object around the desk? ? fix problems for the 99% by removing the wheels, rotation and smelling cushion and let the hipsters have the stand up desks).
Well, I use my rotating and rolling chair all the time. Besides the value to sysadmins, which I have found to be significant, it's pretty much mandatory for anyone who has a filing cabinet right next to their desk. I also sweat in plastic chairs, maybe because I am fat. Still, it's true. Actually, I found this to be true way back when I was a child, when I was not fat. That didn't really happen until Jr. high.
The only office chair I know of which is worth one tenth of one shit is the Aeron. It's still one o
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It would be quite annoying if our chairs did not have these features.
Re:victorian clerks.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm 42 and I have been using a balance ball at my desk for 5 years. Love it; by its nature you are always doing small movements, posture is better, and my back problems have pretty much gone away. The pièce de résistance is that I can bounce on it to stay awake during boring conference calls.
The only times I have problems with it is when I am doing high-intensity focused work on the computer and start to lean and cheat support by leaning over desk and resting more of my arms on the desk.
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Pseudoscience at it's best. (Score:2)
There is zero real proof of this. Where is the 20 year study comparing the office workers to the shop workers? This is as bad as all those GNC studies on how their products make me healthier.
Re:Pseudoscience at it's best. (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.npr.org/2011/04/25/... [npr.org]
http://www.vichealth.vic.gov.a... [vic.gov.au]
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... [nih.gov]
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... [nih.gov]
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... [nih.gov]
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... [nih.gov]
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... [nih.gov]
Need more? I suggest :
http://goo.gl/CNwr5t [goo.gl]
It is indeed healthier simply to stand (Score:5, Informative)
And, it doesn't matter if you are moving much at all.
Sitting in almost all but perfectly designed, custom fit chairs has all kinds of direct physical effect on your body including circulatory and respiratory changes.
Here are only a very few of my sources:
Circulation in general: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2094039,
Blood pressure: http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/70/4/533.full.pdf
Back problems: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9383867
Cynic (Score:3)
>> Advocates of sit-stand desks
Sorry, I read that as "vendors of sit-stand desks"
Seriously, does anyone still work at a tech job crappy enough where they care if you sit, stand or bounce around on a pregnancy ball all day?
I'd love to give it a go (Score:2)
Classroom (Score:5, Insightful)
This should be extrapolated to the classroom. In particular, to boys in elementary and middle school.
Open both eyes, and quit squinting! (Score:3)
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Same here - standing gets very uncomfortable very quickly for me, but I can happily walk up hill and down dale until the cows come home.
I no longer smoke, but I still take fag breaks at work just to give me a reason to stretch my legs and have some mental downtime once every hour or two. Pacing around is great for thinking, but for doing I need to be sat down.
Important detail (Score:4, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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The guy behind me bought his own sit-stand desk a couple of weeks ago. There wasn't any company program, he just decided that his back was worth the $500 to him. He stood almost half the day for the first couple of days, now he sits the whole day again. I told him that if he felt better after a couple of weeks I'd buy one too, but of course, sitting down is exactly the same as sitting down!
Bad Example... (Score:2)
I switched from sitting to standing. (Score:5, Interesting)
I switched to a standing desk about 12 months ago. I'm a pretty fit and active guy, but I have a variety of knee and back problems from years of martial arts training. Particularly, I have patellofemoral arthritis ("theatre knee") that gets worse when I keep my knee bent at 90 degrees or less. On a friend's advice, I built a standing desk and gave it a whirl.
The first two to three months sucked a lot. I could only stand for 1-2 hours at a time before my knees or feet were too sore to continue. I had to adjust the ergonomics of my workspace, particularly the height of my monitor, to avoid neck irritation. However, my lower back felt great for the first time in years. I kept going.
Somewhere around the 90 day mark, all my aches and pains vanished. My feet stopped getting sore. My knees no longer hurt. My back feels better than it did when I was 20. My hip flexors are more mobile. I can now on my feet all day with no problem. Standing around at parties doesn't make my feet or back sore. I also lost 5 lbs with no effort because of the increase caloric expenditure.
I'd recommend a standing desk to anyone with the willpower to make it through the transition. It's well worth it, in my opinion.
Re:I switched from sitting to standing. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd recommend a standing desk to anyone with the willpower to make it through the transition.
And I'd recommend a sit-stand desk to anyone at all. Even if you don't stand all the time (I don't), being able to spend part of your day standing will make you feel better without discomfort, in fact being able to switch back and forth is more comfortable than sitting.
Not Okay. (Score:5, Funny)
Standing/Walking desk (Score:2)
When I switched from working in an office to working from home for a couple of years, I went to a standing desk and then to a treadmill/walking desk.
Took me about 3 days to get used to standing all the time - as in, able to do it without feeling too much pain in my feet at the end of the day.
The walking desk took about a week to get used to, at first I could only read emails etc. while walking, but after I got used to things I was able to do 4MPH indefinitely while doing basic stuff, and about 2.5MPH while
Weird chairs (Score:2)
Does anyone still use those radically uncomfortable Scandinavian chairs where you sit on your knees? Back in the Seventies, having one of these was synonymous with being the office crank.
Been doing it for a while, like this. (Score:2)
Switching From Sitting To Standing At Your Desk
I started doing that a few weeks ago, and the benefits have been enormous. My setup is nothing fancy, just some props and books to elevate my keyboard and trackball, like this:
http://bit.ly/1j6DFbN [bit.ly]
I got inspired by Marco Arment's DYI soda-can standing desk [pinterest.com]. I was struggling for a while thinking "what should I buy, how can do this". Arment's solution is so simple that inspired me to use whatever I had on my desk to put together a solution.
I'm thinking to build something similar with aluminum cans. Bu
I'm a coder who stands all day... (Score:4, Informative)
1) Make the switch the first day you get back from a longer holiday and are already out of your normal routine.
2) You *must* get a nice floor mat, preferably a dense memory foam mat designed for standing cubes. Working in your socks (if your employer will let you) while standing on said mat almost feels like a foot massage.
3) Another *must* - don't get a desk-height chair! At least, not for a while. You'll find yourself sitting way too often and never get adjusted to standing all day. Most of my fellow "standing" co-workers that have tall chairs sit at least 80% of the time.
4) It takes a couple weeks to get used to standing. Stick with it.
The problem is being at a desk all day (Score:2)
"'If you look at the late 19th Century,' he says, Victorian clerks could stand at their desks and 'moved around a lot more'. 'It's possible to look back at the industrial office of the past 100 years or so as some kind of weird aberration in a 1,000-year continuum of work where we've always moved around.'"
If you look at any time in the past million years of our history, I doubt you're going to find a time when people stayed nearly perfectly so still for so long, standing or sitting. We even sit still when w
Great for Code Reviews (Score:2)
We have these at my office. I love them. Health benefits aside, these are ideal for code reviews. People don't have to crouch or drag chairs into an (already too small) cube.
Other benefits include: nobody sneaks up on you, while you're standing, and it helps wake me up after lunch.
That being said though, most people use them in sit down mode and forget to raise them, most of the time. Still, it's wonderful to have the option.
2yrs in, and still standing. (Score:2)
As Always, Please Do It In Moderation (Score:2)
2 references (Score:2)
1) I'm not sure if this is the original source of this or not, but I started making an effort to move around more after seeing Sitting Is Killing You [howtogeek.com]. I just wish it were available in a more compact form than the giant infographic. (Update: seems to be from Medical Billing & Coding, but their copy is gone. Also, the copy at lifehack org/articles/lifestyle/why-sitting-is-killing-you.html has a higher google rank but those assholes cut off the last slide with the credits and references.)
2) A blog I read l
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Because most telecommuters are do-nothings, which is why they are just as "effective" at home as they are at work?
I'm only being slightly facetious here. In my experience, home is almost never a place conducive to doing good work, way too many distractions and way too disassociated from the normal work environment and its easy access to communication with co-workers.
I say this having been a telecommuter myself for a time (not by choice, but by circumstance) and finding it demoralizingly difficult to be eff
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Re:Weak (Score:5, Funny)
If our bodies are intelligently designed, it would be by Microsoft.
Weak? No, it is not. (Score:5, Interesting)
Even completely small things are unhealthy for the human body. The human body is absolute garbage, and it's yet more proof that "intelligent design" never happened.
I don't believe in intelligent design either, but you are reaching waaaay too far up your rear when building criticism against ID. Saying the human body is absolute garbage is as dumb as saying God created the world in 7 days.
A person can buy a Maserati, but i said person doesn't change the oil and let water and particulate go into the gas tank, the car will turn into garbage. The car wasn't garbage. The owner was a careless fool at best (and a f*tard at worst.)
Human bodies are actually quite resilient, tuned by evolution to be cursorial predators. Capable of keep going under cold or heat in ways most animals would die. And that was already a fact before we eve invented clothing. Put the mind next to the body (which is what makes us human) then we have clothing, and a whole new set of capabilities emerge. There are plenty of historical footnotes of soldiers going on long after their horses, donkeys and oxen died of exposure.
We can survive bacteria, viruses and parasites and wounds. We die of infections beyond a certain magnitude, similarly to most other Eukaryote organisms. If our bodies are garbage, so are the bodies of all Eukaryote organisms. I guess the only Eukaryote whose body is not garbage is Superman, but he is an illegal alien from Krypton so he doesn't matter.
Hmm, not really. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Capable of keep going under cold or heat in ways most animals would die"
Can't let you get away with that. My dog can go out when its below freezing quite happily. I need 2 layers of clothing plus a coat.
As for heat, yes , we're slightly better adapted due to being able to sweat but that comes with a price - huge water consumption. Not very useful in a desert. Mr Camel solved the problem far better.
"We can survive bacteria, viruses and parasites and wounds"
So can most animals otherwise the most complex life would still be a sponge. And to use my dog as an example again - he can happily drink water from streams and puddles that would put me on the toilet for 2 days.
Don't get me wrong, I don't believe in ID anymore than anyone with an IQ greater than their shoe size, but as far as comparisons to other animals goes, the human body in the raw is pretty feeble. Even compared to our nearest cousin chimpanzees we're pretty hopeless physically - our muscles and bones are much weaker and they can survive falls from heights that would easily kill a human.
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FWIW, the Genesis story clearly explains that humanity's fall into sin left us imperfect and subject to death. Arguing that we should be perfect is rewriting the story.
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Re:Hmm, not really. (Score:4, Funny)
In a discussion about ID/creation, how could you not?
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"Capable of keep going under cold or heat in ways most animals would die"
Can't let you get away with that. My dog can go out when its below freezing quite happily. I need 2 layers of clothing plus a coat.
That would be a fine counter-argument if I had said that we were capable of keep going under cold or heat in ways all animals would die.. But I didn't, so...
I mean, c'mon. The context is clear, beasts of burden, cattle, foodstuff and prey, most of the stuff we compare against from the POV of being (or close to being) apex predators. Of course there are animals with better resistance to certain temperatures. Huskies and Polar bears >> us in the cold. Camels >> us in desert-like conditions.
B
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"Of course there are animals with better resistance to certain temperatures"
ITYF that would be most animals. Take away our clothing and we get hypothermia below about 5C and in strong sunshine we'll get bad sunburn - even people with dark skin eventually. Meanwhile most animals & birds will happily go about their business unconcerned in the same enviroments.
TBH the human body is a prime example of how NOT to design an animal physically. The only thing apart from our brains we have going for us is opposa
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Except its not most, not its not even a majority. Most mammals can survive temperature variations and diseases that would kill us without clothing or modern medicine.
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Our evolutionary path abandoned stronger muscles and bones for increased dexterity, and yeah, millions of years of living in and falling out of trees has selected for chimps which are pretty damn good at surviving falling out of trees.. there's a real surprise.
Re:Weak? No, it is not. (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know, man. I'm a med student, and after taking gross anatomy (human dissection) and medical neuroscience, I'm convinced the human body is really poorly designed.
Our knees suck, our eyes suck compared to cephalopods' eyes, our heart does exactly the wrong thing during a heart attack (positive feedback loop to failure), our digestive tract is overly complex, our hepatobiliary system seems setup to fail... and don't even get me started on our embryologic development.
However, all this pales compared to our nervous system. It's a miracle that insane rat's nest of connections works at all. For example, most people know that the CNS is crossed (so left brain controls right side and vice versa). No good reason for that, but where it gets really batshit is that all the different modalities in the brain cross in different ways and in different places. So, for example, a lesion on one side of the spinal cord will cause loss of fine touch on that side of the body, but will cause a loss of pain/temperature sensation on the OPPOSITE side. Whatever.
About the only truly impressive system in our body from a conceptual/operational standpoint is our adaptive immune system. That's badass.
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I can't agree with your view on the digestive system. Yes it's complex, but there are many animals out there with far more complex digestive systems yet with very little tolerance to diet changes.
We can survive on only meat, only vegetables, we can consume dairy or cut it out of our diets completely. We're the only animals which eat rice and can digest it as well (feed rice to a cat to clear out it's digestive tract, it looks the same when it comes out as when it goes in).
It may be complex but there's very
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eh?
Assuming intelligent design for a moment, we were designed for stuff our ancestors were used to - running about and generally standing up.,
We were not ever designed to slouch in front of a TV/monitor with a little tool in our hands waggling it up and down (or side to side) pressing buttons.
So,much as I really don't care if ID is true or fantasy, citing proof of our sedentary lifestyles is not and argument against it.
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Humans can perform acrobatics that any animal on earth would envy.
X is better than Y does not mean that X is good. The human body has a number of flaws and even seemingly innocuous foods are unhealthy to eat. You can't exactly expect a mindless process to produce 'perfect' results, so it goes without saying that the human body could be improved drastically. All the bad qualities make the human body seem horrendously weak, which isn't the same as saying that other animals are better.
Too bad you haven't picked up on any of those traits.
You need to get out of the "X being better than Y means that X is good!" phase. If that was
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Only if you cherry pick data.
"Humans can perform acrobatics that any animal on earth would envy."
name 1.
"They can balance with the best of them. "
haha, no not even close.
" They have learned to ride the thermals as well as a vulture. "
nope. we learned to build machines to do that, and we developed science to figure it out.
"They have learned to think far beyond anything the animal kingdom can muster."
The animal kingdom can create thing that can think. Specifically, us.
And you ignore the issue with the skeleta
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Give me omnipotence and I'd be happy to take care of that for you.
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Nobody is stopping you from describing your perfect universe in fiction, right? You want omnipotence, buy pen and paper :P
And actually, depending on how one reads the book of genesis, mortality and decay were a conscious design choice, and this is the shareware version of the universe, if you will, temporary testing grounds. Fiction or not, within the fiction, it kind of makes sense.
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While we're at it, let's put just a bit more distance between the defecating and fornicating areas.
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Why do you need a stitting and a standing desk? just get an engineers or draftsman chair and sit at standing level when you need to.
Or go all out and buy the power up/down desks. I prefer the tall stool chair that way I can change it up as I need.
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$559 is actually on the low side for ergonomic office chairs. Ever priced an Aeron? A low end model is $899 on Amazon right now. I've been in many companies where these are standard equipment.
http://www.amazon.com/Aeron-Ch... [amazon.com]
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I am sitting in a $890 chair right now. any good company will do it. I'm thinking you haven't priced real office furniture as the standard desk I am at is $2300 and it's a no frills Steelcase.
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You should probably make an attempt to understand how science works.
HInt: it's not 'It seems obvious so don't bother to test it'