"a single braking event of a small car can dissipate over 0.12 kWh worth of energy"

i am begging people to use joules

[excerpt from a video about engineering of brakes]

"that amount of energy is sufficient to charge 10 completely drained iPhone batteries"

this is literally the electrical engineering equivalent of measuring things in football fields. what is it about americans and using real units

even if your goal is to make things comprehensible in comparison to mundane events, you could use "can bring to a boil X ml [or cups if you wish] of water"!

water's heat capacity is 4200 J/kg/K, it's a very convenient number even if you are doing mental math

@whitequark@mastodon.social I don't mind the idea of comparisons to mundane events - It's the author's job to make things meaningful to their audience, and people aren't born with a contextualizing knowledge of what ~40,000J gets them or should mean. I don't get upset because doing so would strike me as the the sort of intellectual elitism that turns people well... anti-intellectual.

But that said - I also get really annoyed at the common choice of examples. For example: Football fields and the iPhones here: Pitches vary (American: understood to be 100 yards, but in actuality 120. Canadian: 150 yards. Don't even bring in the soccer/football confusion). iPhone models and batteries vary (iPhone 1: 1400 mAh. iPhone 17: 3692 mAh); Why are these people using such misleading, dated, geolocked examples?

Your water example is far superior; while it might vary by altitude, it's the same through time almost the same for the vast majority of humans. For those it's not accurate for, the difference is a stark and known part of their living conditions.

@NullNowhere my point is exactly the latter one: while there's nothing inherent about joules that makes them intuitively graspable, the jump from "J" to "something well known" is shorter, especially in a global context

@whitequark@mastodon.social I don't mind the idea of comparisons to mundane events - It's the author's job to make things meaningful to their audience, and people aren't born with a contextualizing knowledge of what ~40,000J gets them or should mean. I don't get upset because doing so would strike me as the the sort of intellectual elitism that turns people well... anti-intellectual.

But that said - I also get really annoyed at the common choice of examples. For example: Football fields and the iPhones here: Pitches vary (American: understood to be 100 yards, but in actuality 120. Canadian: 150 yards. Don't even bring in the soccer/football confusion). iPhone models and batteries vary (iPhone 1: 1400 mAh. iPhone 17: 3692 mAh); Why are these people using such misleading, dated, geolocked examples?

Your water example is far superior; while it might vary by altitude, it's the same through time almost the same for the vast majority of humans. For those it's not accurate for, the difference is a stark and known part of their living conditions.

@NullNowhere @whitequark American football fields are also *narrow* compared to soccer and even Canadian football fields.