What other reason could there possibly be?

I don’t think we’re going to agree on any points whatsoever, I’m afraid.

I think their method is pointless, that introducing new formats that are indistinguishable from well established ones is actively harmful, that their reasoning is flawed and raises mainly irrelevant points, and their only valid point is that fractions with denominator 256 are stored exactly, but then if the whole point of converting your colours to floats is to do interesting transformations of the colour space that you can’t do with integers, that’s all gone as soon as you start manipulating the floats, and all your carefully designed exactness went down the pan. If you want exact, keep it to the integers 0-255.

Neither[-0.5/255) nor [0,0.5/255) are some sort of disadvantaged and discriminated against group of humans that need more representation and I don’t understand why on earth anyone would care even a tiny little bit if they were under represented nor why you would describe it as unfair.

The whole thing is really, genuinely deficient in benefits and has obvious drawbacks.

There’s a significant correlation between proportion of ultra-processed foods in diet and all-causes mortality. Don’t pretend there isn’t.

Even the industry funded group the other guy quoted me admitted that the larger scale scientific studies found that

ultra-processed foods are associated with increased incidences of chronic diseases such as obesity, heart disease and Type 2 diabetes

I don’t think you know what food science is.

Food science is about testing and developing new products. It’s not longitudinal or population health and disease studies. It doesn’t show anything about the correlation between ultra processed foods and all causes mortality because it simply doesn’t study mortality in any way whatsoever.

Claiming that the science is contentious is a standard industry tactic for dismissing it. Its what vaccine skeptics and climate change deniers do, and it’s what the tobacco industry did over lung cancer.

“Just let me slip it between your thighs, bro, I won’t go in your hole, I promise.”
“You promise?”
“Sure.”
“OK, just make it quick”

“Dude this is taking ages”
“I know a way I’ll finish faster. I’ll pull out, I promise”
“You promise?”

yyyy-mm-dd is an international standard. It’s better because it’s sortable.

There’s a right answer, and it’s yyyy-mm-dd.

That’s MMM d yyyy, not mm dd yyyy. It removes the ambiguity but also removes the sortability. yyyy-mm-dd for the win.

I like your style. I’ll start doing that, (unless a format is specified, because I’m no protocol breaker.)

This is the way.

They concede that the actual scientists found that

ultra-processed foods are associated with increased incidences of chronic diseases such as obesity, heart disease and Type 2 diabetes

And dismissed it all because there’s not a randomised controlled trail for ultra processed vs home cooked from ingredients foods, but their counterpoint to that, their main gotcha from that article, is it a randomised controlled trial? Does it measure obesity, heart disease and type 2 diabetes? No! Let’s see what it tests:

To answer this question, researchers in an USDA-funded study published in The Journal of Nutrition planned a seven-day, 2,000-calorie daily diet that was based on the recommendations in the Dietary Guidelines but with more than 80% of the foods coming from Nova’s ultra-processed food category. The results showed that this planned diet achieved a Healthy Eating Index (HEI) score of 86 out of 100 points. The HEI measures the diet quality and evaluates to what extent Americans are following the Dietary Guidelines. For reference, the current HEI for Americans is 59 on average, meaning many Americans are consuming a diet below what is considered desirable.

So if you use one set of guidelines to make a diet plan (no one actually eats it) and you deliberately pick foods that are processed but reasonably healthy according to those very same guidelines, you achieve a great score on what basis? Long term health outcomes? No. Short term health outcomes? No. What basis? Oh, the very same guidelines you used to cherry pick the foods? Why isn’t it 100%?! What an absurdly vacuous claim.

In their enlightenment and dismissing all the science, they’ve replaced it by calculating some points of disagreement with some older healthy eating advice? That’s IT!?!

You have swallowed a bunch of pseudoscience. You’re as bad as RFK.

It’s a fucking industry funded pseudoscience pseudoprogessional pseudoeducation body. Did you even think about where they’re coming from?

https://www.eatrightpro.org/about-us/who-we-are/advertising-and-sponsorship/meet-our-sponsors

Some highlights for you:

Danone North America
Eli Lilly and Company (weight loss drugs)
Gatorade Sports Science Institute
National Confectioners Association
National Dairy Council
National Honey Board
National Cattlemen’s Beef Association
Nestle Health Sciences
Quebec Maple Syrup Producers
Sodexo
Splenda®
Wonderful Pistachios

No wonder they’re dismissing all the science associating ultra processed food with all-causes mortality with a single diet plan!

Why on earth do you fall for this crap?

It’s not the processing, it’s the preservatives and other edible non-food junk they put in to make it last longer and keep customers coming back for more and more and more.

It’s called food science, and it works. It works very well indeed. Way too well for our health. You test for moreishness and you manufacture the ones the panel loves and wants more of. Result? Food that people really want more of. Its not magic and it’s not deliberately bad, it’s just that the inevitable result is the obesity epidemic.

I’m all out of entertaining things to say! Have a great week.

When you actually look in to the details of papers on this topic you’ll find that it’s actually not defined consistently across the literature.

This is such anti-science crap, and it’s exactly what various industries said all along about climate change and lung cancer studies.

When you dig into the reason why any specific “ultra processed” food is bad it boils down to:

No, no when you dig into the reason why ultra processed food is bad, it boils down to all-cause mortality. As in earlier death and shorter healthy lifespan.

You’re being overly literal. That you made it yourself with real ingredients is a good rule of thumb for not ultra-processed. You’re unlikely to have partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, mono and diglycerides of fatty acids or high fructose corn syrup lying around, and you won’t test your recipe repeatedly until humans want more of it than any of the competing products on the supermarket shelves.

Yeah, everything’s a chemical, but that’s not what people mean when they say there’s chemicals in the food. They mean there are edible non-food ingredients whose only purpose is to cheaply make it last longer on the shelf or be more moreish or reduce costs.

There’s a significant correlation between proportion of ultra-processed foods in diet and all-causes mortality. Don’t pretend there isn’t.

No, this is crap.

“Scientists can’t agree therefore it’s not true” has been bogus through smoking and lung cancer, fossil fuels and climate change, and now ultra-processed food (UPF) and all-causes mortality and obesity.

A good rule of thumb is that if you made it in your home from real ingredients it’s probably much healthier than if some company did food science on it until it human testers said “yeah I’d love more of that one”. It’s not a coincidence, it’s not even malice, it’s just they’re selecting for overeating.

The malice is when the food industry tries to get you to believe that their products are healthy, that there’s nothing to see or be concerned about with UPF, and the malice is also when they’re lobbying and suing governments the world over that tell you to avoid UPF.

Yeah, unpasteurised milk and other crap is bonkers anti-science nonsense, but so is dismissing the correlation between larger quantities of ultra-processed food and all-causes mortality. It’s real. Don’t spread their lies that it’s not.

Yes, indeed. If you’re randomly generating colours and you want to evenly cover the {0,1,…,255} integer space, then generate a random integer in that range directly, or truncate a random float in [0,256). Generating a random float in [0,1) and converting it afterwards, then complaining you’re not getting enough 0 or 255 is silly.

For the record, I have enjoyed our exchange a great deal and found it amusing throughout. Also it was a fun comic and title, thanks for posting it.