I propose replacing calories with watt-hours.
- Almost same value (1 kilocalorie / Calorie is ~1.1 watt-hours)
- more intuitive for people who use electricity
- never the confusion between calories (science), Calories (food, which is technically kilocalories), kilocalories, and 'kilo Calories' (which is technically megacalories)
- you get to feel more like a robot with your 2.5kwh power consumption a day which may feel like validation to some creatures on this fediverse
- become powered by cake
A Snickers is about 570Wh, which is like eating a very sizable ebike battery's entire charge in one go.
A Big Mac slightly tops that with about 650Wh. A slice of pizza is about half that with 340Wh.
Meanwhile, fruits like apples/bananas are in the ~100-130 watt-hour oversized twice laptop battery ballpark, and a cup of greek yogurt is about the same, so a big cup of fruit-filled yogurt is still less calories than a big mac or snickers!
A full english breakfast can be over 1kWh! Quickcharge ⚡⚡
to the people posting "but joules!": https://mastodon.derg.nz/@anthropy/115056587923610070
As much as you're right, it's also less intuitive in daily life. Knowing an egg or slice of bread is about 80-90Wh means I can go 'omg a big laptop battery worth power', 324kJoules is very arbitrary there if you don't use it much.
This is also a half-joking post, like, I'm not going to argue to replace anything currently used in science because as far as I can tell most sane scientists use the correct SI units for research papers
@[email protected] maybe, but I unironically can relate more to an egg or slice of bread being about a large laptop battery worth energy (90wh), than whatever '78kcal' is :laughcry:
@anthropy you know, in cycling we track kJ and more or less say 1 kJ = 1 kcal, because the efficiency of human is 25%, cancelling out the 1:4 ratio :D
But now you need to figure out if you want to track Wh as energy spent Vs energy used, basically.
If you count food in Wh, and you ride an hour at 120W, you spent either 120 Wh or 30 Wh depending on what thing you are tracking :D
@anthropy damn, it does make it sounds super insignificant! And not "this thing will potentially break my intrained wrists"
That also just shows how fucky energy is in general. Such a huge amount of it stored in food and such a big requirement for life, and them some appliances use so little, and a tiny fraction in kinetic form is necessary for life altering experiences.
@Primo definitely. I also think surface area with guns is a large part in that, if you'd only use 0.6Wh to propel a tank shell, it would reach a measily 75km/h, and to extrapolate further:
if you'd use it to propel a bike with a person (90kg) it would reach about 25km/h.
A car 6.3km/h.
And so a car you could probably easily stop by hand, there's barely any collision happening, it would just take a few seconds to bring it to a halt, whereas the person on a bike would probably still hurt.
@anthropy yeah! I think penetration calculations go back to pressure, though not sure whether they go into (mega)pascal or psi.
My hunch is the latter. Well, when diving into the science various modes of failure come into play too, but that paper went way over my head.
The bike crash would probably injure me. Stopping the car sounds unlikely until I remember that pushing them wasn't too hard actually.
@Primo yea, that's another thing I guess, cars seem so big and bad until you realize they only have to move mostly horizontally.
I regularly drag around multiple literal metric tonnes around the datacenter, sitting on a little pallet jack with 4 little non-suspension wheels, with no motor or assistance, which is entirely fine .. until you hit a tiny bump or have to push it up a slope haha
@anthropy Context is important for units. We don't usually use food energy as a source of electrical power (eg, eating and using a bicycle generator), so IMHO it's a little awkward to shop and plan my diet in Wh. On the flip side, I don't really use kcal for anything other than comparing foods, so I guess why not?
It is interesting to look at it purely from an energy standpoint, though.
@anthropy I'm fully behind joules for everything non-human. I tolerate other people using kWh because industry. Personal calculations are always joules or a multiple of.
Taking the NHS daily 2500 kcal and 2000 kcal for men and women respectively as 2.9 kWh and 2.3 kWh makes me feel useless. Even a small machine can use that per hour and keep it running constantly. Takes me all day to that and most of it is merely existing as a lifeform (existence-form?). Only a small amount of that is actually useful work. Someone please calculate human CoP of manual tasks. I don't think I'd manage an A+++ rating when they put the sticker on me.
I want a human-diet-only unit so that I can turn a blind eye to my comparative rubbishness by it not being so obvious.
I'm now 110 % behind different units so that I may back up 10 % and still be completely behind them.
@anthropy
or... we can use Calories for electrical devices. 🥴
anyway, why to worry?
in a few years the robot overlords will decide what is better. 🤖
@anthropy Or go the other way around, make snickers bars the unit of energy the way "library of Congress" is used as unit of data /s
"My car quite energy efficient, it goes 3km on one Snickers bar worth of energy"
Extending the concept for those of us in the proletariat, a pint (sorry, ~0.94 liter!) of ale is in the neighborhood of 200 Wh.
All that energy and so little _power_! By drinking a single beer I ought to be able to fly but the darned mitochondria are not properly adapted to deliver on demand.
Eye-popping: by this measure it needs 22 pints of ale to make our Chevy Bolt travel ~ 1.5 km.
[Good news: I messed up the conversion. It's only ~3 pints per km.]
For this example it was about 300W, although fixed wing.
Rotorcraft more, because wing is smaller? [Although, thinking about it, does that necessarily follow? Hmm.]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacCready_Gossamer_Albatross?wprov=sfla1
@Doug_Bostrom @anthropy I guess 1020 program alert?
I was genuinely confused in the thread for a bit (because I was too stupid to do the kcal to Ws or J to kWh conversion for far longer than I would like to admit...)
You aren't you when you're hungry. That's why there's SNICKERS Full Size Chocolate Bars. Packed with roasted peanuts, nougat, caramel and milk chocolate, SNICKERS Candy handles your hunger so you can handle things that don't relate to hunger at all.
@anthropy But there's still the question though of calorie-to-electricity conversion efficiency... (disclaimer I am *not* a bioengineer nor a physics researcher or anything like that who would possibly know anything about anything like that.) (But still as a layman I do wonder.)
Counter-counter-point: What if we start measuring food-energy levels using Horsepower...
"My Snickers bar has 0.76 Horsepower!" *Munch-munch!*
@anthropy it also makes you appreciate:
* how efficient our technology is, relative to…
* how expensive our bodies are to run!
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