The World's Strongest Men Poop A Lot, And Other Facts
Welcome to What We Learned This Week, a digest of the most curiously important facts from the past few days. This week: The crap powerlifters have to deal with, replacing your computer with a phone and the powerlessness of millennials.
Picking Up Heavy Things And Putting Them Down Is Full Of Shit
One of the laws of the universe is that you cannot create something from nothing. As such, in order increase the amount of muscle in your body, you must give your body the material to build that muscle with. If you want to build, and more importantly maintain, a lot of muscle you need to be eating a lot.
I think everyone is vaguely familiar with this — specifically the interesting tidbit that Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson eats some 5,000 calories per day to maintain his screen-friendly hulking mass. But this week, Mel's resident swole expert, Oliver Lee Bateman, covers the other, less appealing, side of consuming 12,000 calories per day required to be the strongest human on earth: the bowel movements.
As it turns out, that 12,000 calories of steak, white rice and smoothies eventually must make its way through the body, and just the sheer volume of it often results in a litany of digestive issues for powerlifters trying to compete at the absolute highest levels of the sport.
[Mel]
A Phone And A Keyboard Cannot Replace A Laptop
This has been said a million times already by tech people who make far more money than I do but: Your phone is, actually, a computer. Or, at least, it has the processing power within the realm of your average personal computer.
We might consider our phones and our computers entirely separate things — one is for wasting time on and making you depressed, the other is for being actually productive — but Motherboard's Ashwin Rodrigues has an interesting idea: What if you just… paired you phone to a Bluetooth keyboard? Would you even need a computer anymore?
Apart from the social stigma associated with being just way ahead of your time, Rodrigues found that it almost works! Almost. Using a keyboard to hammer away at emails or writing away in documents is almost certainly the same as the desktop experience. The only difference is that if you enjoy using shortcuts to any degree, or do any sort of multi-tasking in general, your phone isn't quite up to the task. Switching out of the thing you're currently doing requires you to physically pick up your phone and do the thing, and the added luxury of being able to peck away with a real keyboard comes with the drawback of having to carry that thing around.
The real question here, I think, isn't so much if a phone will replace a laptop, but rather why hasn't the tablet just replaced both?
[Vice]
Millennials Aren't As Powerful As You Think
If there's one thing that everyone loves to never shut up about, it's millennials. Which is great! Let's never stop talking about the generation that has trillions of dollars in student loan debt, was thrust into a job market after a major recession and now, will certainly live to see the beginning of the extinction of the human race from this planet.
This week, New York Times Magazine editor Willy Staley added to the millennial discourse with an interesting new concept: the duality of millennials.
On the one hand, their sheer size compared to previous generations has businesses scrambling to figure out how to cater to them as boomers eventually die off and Gen X'ers, well, who really cares about them anyway? This, you might imagine, depicts millennials as having the ability to move markets and, regrettably, the ability to "kill" things they don't like or more accurately can't afford.
On the other, you have an entire generation that has a considerable wealth gap compared to previous generations, and are more or less at the whims of geopolitical and economic forces like none other.
What we have here is a potent combination of a financially insecure cohort of folks who are but at the whims of marketers taking increasingly uncomfortable steps to extract whatever value is there after rent, health insurance and student loan payments.
