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 ⚡⚡

@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"

@anthropy

Counter proposal, how about the power utilities start using snickers-bar-equivalents (SBE) when they send me the monthly efficiency reports. Or maybe let me choose my snack of choice?

(Not that I believe little actions to reduce energy usage on my part are going to save the glaciers or whatever, but it would be hilarious.)

@anthropy

"Well look at that, your laundry machine consumed the equivalent of ### snickers bars last month! Maybe you should try doing your laundry at 2am to save a few bucks?"

@anthropy My favorite one: Americans using food calories (kcal), not realizing that it's a metric unit and that they should be using BTUs instead. And a BTU isn't far from a kJ anyway.

Though they did manage to invent the gallon-equivalent as well, maybe we should use that for food. 1 gallon of gasoline is all the food you need for 2 weeks. (oh, and please measure the energy consumption of cars in Newtons)

@anthropy Just use Joules. Who thought it as good idea to introduce Wh?

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

@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

@juliank @anthropy Not unlike MWt (thermal output) and MW (electrical output) when talking about thermal power plants.

@pavel @anthropy the power banks labeled 21,000 mAh 🙄
literally useless

@anthropy the electrical analogy is remarkable.

@f4grx @anthropy it's crazy how efficient biology is at extracting energy from food

@IrrationalMethod @anthropy well https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2022-01-27/nuclear-fusion-physics-plasma-heat-lasers-sustainable-energy/100777364

@jaztrophysicist @IrrationalMethod @anthropy

how much was this in footballfields of snickers?

@ElGrossKotzo @jaztrophysicist @anthropy

American Snickers or British Empire Snickers?