• hesh@quokk.au
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    5 hours ago

    As an American I appreciate how they included both metric (Joules) and imperial (hours running a microwave) measurements

    • towerful@programming.dev
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      4 hours ago

      I only know how long bald eagles burn for.
      How do I convert microwave hours to bald eagle burn time (in number of football games including all dead ball times and the halftime shows)?

      • bdonvr@thelemmy.club
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        1 hour ago

        (in number of football games including all dead ball times and the halftime shows)

        Wait are we talking mid-day NFL, primetime (SNF/MNF/TNF/Playoffs), or Superbowl? Or are you talking CFB, and if so is it one of the big conference games or is it only showing on ESPN+?

  • yucandu@lemmy.world
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    2 hours ago

    Who the hell measures energy in joules?

    That’s a little under 1kWh. Or playing your gaming PC for 3 hours.

  • justsomeguy@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    Truly every time period of human civilization had something in it that would make future generations shake their heads in disbelief.

    “How could they use gigawatthours for crypto farms and useless AI applications while fully aware of a climate crisis caused by fossil fuels?”, a student might ask his history teacher some day. “Because they were dumb as fuck.”, the teacher might answer.

  • ramenshaman@lemmy.world
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    4 hours ago

    3.4 megajoules = 944 watt hours

    Microwaves are typically rated at 1200-1500 watts, sometimes more. Do they actually use that much? I’m not sure, stuff typically uses less than the rated power on the label.

    • yucandu@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      That’s watts, not watt hours though, so it’s like microwaving something for a little under an hour, which is unrelatable for most people.

      But take your 300 watt gaming PC, play on it for 3 hours, suddenly you’re at 900 watt hours and that’s probably easier to picture for most people.

      • hperrin@lemmy.ca
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        1 hour ago

        Except when you do that, you only get 3 hours of boring lame video games, rather than 5 whole seconds of thrilling slop.

    • spongebue@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      Thank you for the conversion. We have a common unit for electrical energy already, and megajoules is not it. Trying to make it sound like a bigger number by changing the unit only muddies the waters and honestly makes me slightly less sympathetic to the issue.

      • TrickDacy@lemmy.worldM
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        1 hour ago

        The way a headline was phrased makes you change your mind about objective truth…? This isn’t a family feud where you’re being asked to take sides. It’s still climate change even if someone tries to trick you into thinking it’s slightly worse than it actually is.

        • Cort@lemmy.world
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          23 minutes ago

          Not speaking for the sponge, but I know it gives me pause to consider what else they may be manipulating, and also why they’re manipulating it

          • TrickDacy@lemmy.worldM
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            20 minutes ago

            Would any manipulation at all justify caring less about climate change? We know from a million sources that ai takes a ton of electricity

      • eleijeep@piefed.social
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        3 hours ago

        Seriously?

        Joules are the SI unit for energy measurement. 1 Joule = 1 Watt second, so 3600 Joules = 1 Watt Hour

        They teach this in middle school.

        • spongebue@lemmy.world
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          3 hours ago

          Ok, but when it comes to electrical energy nobody uses “watt seconds” in the real world. Devices use hundreds of watts, and run for minutes and hours. Dividing by 3.6 million isn’t exactly easy mental math to get the unit (kWh) we all see on our electric bills.

          • eleijeep@piefed.social
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            40 minutes ago

            nobody uses “watt seconds”

            Joules. They don’t say watt seconds because they say joules.

            • spongebue@lemmy.world
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              6 minutes ago

              But they don’t use that either in the context of real-world electricity usage. Maybe in the middle school classroom setting, when you can make up the numbers you work with, but when I’m trying to quantify how much energy something uses at home I multiply how many watts it uses by now many hours it’s running. Divide that by 1000 for kilowatt-hours, and multiply by $.11 to know the cost to do it at home. If I need to do a multiplication/division of 3.6 million when nobody else is, something’s not right.

              Similarly, a meter is a standard unit for length, but we don’t use it when measuring the distance to different galaxies because light-years are more practical at that scale. If you start using meters you’d get some funny looks, just as I’m feeling for joules instead of kilowatt-hours. But you know, “almost a kilowatt-hour” makes for a pretty boring headline.

        • ramenshaman@lemmy.world
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          3 hours ago

          Yeah, that’s true, but joules typically isn’t used today. When people talk about energy consumption it’s almost always in watts or watt-hours. I’ve seen/heard people use joules less than 5 times since college.