[Gllug] [OT] Technobabble

Nix nix at esperi.org.uk
Tue Nov 15 22:59:10 UTC 2005


On Tue, 15 Nov 2005, John Winters wrote:
> An add from BP says (of carbon footprints), "The average UK household
> footprint is 10 tonnes each year.  That's like 100,000 people all putting
> the kettle on at the same time."  I've spent a while trying to work out
> what they meant to say, but it eludes me.

Attempted translation:

`The average household consumes services for which 10 tonnes of CO2 must be
burned each year. If this were produced entirely by electricity production,
it would be...'

... and then my translator fails too, because `putting the kettle on'
doesn't specify a time, an amount of water or anything, although it does
imply heating-to-boiling. We can guess that the amount of CO2 is
approximately that produced when generating enough electricity to boil
100,000l of water, but without knowing how much water people typically
put in their kettles, or vaguely what temperature it's assumed to be
when it comes out of the tap, well, the error bars on this analogy
are *huge*.

Wonderfully craply put, though. It *sounds* like it should mean
something, but...

-- 
`Holy Google, pray for us sinners now and in the hour of our job interview.'
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