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)

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?

@anthropy @venite so many cursed units in one post. A trigger warning would have been nice.

@xerge @venite there was a thread here somewhere about kwh/day and how recursive we could get with that

@anthropy @xerge @venite - I like this post but I hate measuring energy in units of 3600 joules... it's like the revenge of the Babylonians... and then, yes, people talk about gigawatt-hours per year. 😒

@johncarlosbaez @anthropy @xerge I’ve been feeling a bit fractious. Might be remedied by going around the neighbourhood putting up stickers saying THE BABYLONIANS WERE RIGHT.

@venite @anthropy @xerge - as long as one *knows* one is being pro-Babylonian I don't mind. Base 60 is better in some ways than base 10.

@johncarlosbaez @venite @xerge yea exactly, as mentioned in https://mastodon.derg.nz/@anthropy/115056959564418716 I'd say generally speaking scientists are perfectly capable of picking the appropriate meaningful SI units for their papers and daily usages.

Watt-hours is just practical when you want to visualize how long an electrical device would run on a certain amount of energy, even if that of course is very different energy than burning fuel/food. The fact it's almost the same as calories makes it easy to draw analogies✨

@anthropy @venite @xerge - yes, being a scientist I'm perfectly capable of choosing the units I want, and thus have spent a lot of time converting publicly available power data in gigawatt-hours / year into SI units. It's tiresome, so it's nice to have a chance to complain about it, but it's no big deal in the grand scheme of things.