[Gllug] [OT] Technobabble

[Anthony Newman]

Nix wrote:
> 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...
> 


Given that the mean kettle consumes around 2200J/s, probably has around 
a litre of water within which it puts through a temperature change of 
~90 degrees Celsius at $average_tea_drinking_interval... The thing we 
have no idea about is the overall plant efficiency of the kit that 
brings the juice to our door.


What does a tonne of carbon dioxide look like anyway *shrug*. Unless 
they mean a tonne of carbon as carbon dioxide, which would look like 2.3 
tonnes of see-through stuff you can't breath but plants like. Argh! I 
blame the hippies.


Ant
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