This time it’s a piece of javascript to compute ideal body weight in a variety of ways, the most interesting of which claims to tell you what other people like you consider their ideal body weight. Very “slick” little system, if you care about such things.
I’m always on the lookout for crazy new technology, so when I found this “ideal weight calculator”:http://www.halls.md/ideal-weight/body.htm, I was overjoyed by how many different algorithms seemed to be present. When I looked at the source and found that the author was using javascript, I was again very excited. This meant I could look at (and possibly learn) his algorithms!
And so here they are: “javascript source for calculating ideal weight”:http://www.halls.md/ideal-weight/body2.js.
But read the copyright message with me and bask in the author’s sheer genius! Clearly he (or maybe she? No idea, don’t care) considers the algorithms to be proprietary and will MESS YOU UP if you steal them! So I guess I won’t bother to learn them. Hell, merely looking at them is probably illegal.
So aside from the author’s painful arrogance and stupidity, what can we learn about him from this script? Simple – he thinks he’s some sort of omniscient deity (don’t mess with me lest I strike ye down, mortal! And I will know if you try: “you won’t get away with copying this code”), and yet he doesn’t have even the tiniest iota of smarts when it comes to securing what he claims is “truly my unique creation and algorithms”.
O, Great and Wonderful Physican (yes, that’s right kids, he points out to all us lesser mortals that he’s a god damn physician!), I beseech thee! A bit of simple and kind advice for you: if you want an algorithm to be protected, don’t publish it on the web. In un-obfuscated javascript no less. Obfuscation isn’t bulletproof, not by a long shot, but it’s better than nothing.
And really, go for a server-side approach if you’re as paranoid as you seem to be. Once you use javascript, everybody who visits your site has copied it. This is not because they’re all thieves, but because of a little thing called the browser cache. Not only that, but anybody can view your proprietary algorithm and rewrite it. Copyright it all you want, a rewritten version of the algorithm is going to be COMPLETELY LEGAL! Copyrights only protect exact (or very nearly exact) duplication. You need a patent to protect an algorithm. For a basic description of the algorithm, read below. I was gonna rewrite it in javascript, but it’s really quite worthless, so explaining it should piss off our good doctor well enough.
The good news is that his script is so mundane and, dare I say it, not unique – most of the script is other people’s work on pretty standard formulas. Why, you ask, is this good news? Because he doesn’t actually need to worry about people stealing it!
His “secret formula” is well worth discussion, however:
You go to the site. You put in your height and weight. His script uses a very standard formula to calculate BMI. His “people’s choice” code then cuts BMI down by 40% or 50% (gender determines this) and then adds a gender-specific value (11.5 for men, 11 + age x 0.03 for women). Then reversing the very standard BMI calculation gives you what other people supposedly consider to be an ideal weight!
That’s right, a simple algorithm that tells you what other people just like you consider ideal! But because of the simplicity of the script, it gets worse – say you’re a 440 pound, 5’6″ adult male. According to this brilliant physician, the average person that height, weight, age, and gender think that 291 pounds is their ideal weight! That’s right, little ones. If you’re extremely obese, your beliefs of what is and isn’t an ideal weight become so skewed that you think being slightly less obese (but still very obese) is “ideal”. Funnier still, of course, is that as your weight changes, so will your ideal. So once our example 440lb guy gets down to 400, he thinks his ideal is 271lbs. Doesn’t matter if it takes him a month or fifteen years to drop 40lbs, his new ideal is still going to be 271.
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE! When you’re not an adult, the script tells you that your peers consider your desired weight to be something that is based entirely on height and weight! So the average 440 pound, 5’6″, 18-year-old male longs to weigh 131 pounds. The moment he’s older than 18.5 (no idea where the doc pulled these numbers from), he longs to weigh 291. Yup. One day he goes to sleep hoping to be in a healthy weight range, then he wakes up thinking he was wrong, and should in fact weigh more than twice his original goal.
Arrogance, stupidity, bad programming, and then weird assumptions followed by even more stupidity. This is possibly my best Awesome Software Discovery yet!