6 ms·
> Combined, the system produces eight kilowatt hours Can they start educating journalists about power and energy, in university or whatever internships they do
by stefan_ 5y ago
> Combined, the system produces eight kilowatt hours
Can they start educating journalists about power and energy, in university or whatever internships they do? It is really not that difficult.
- Ekaros 5y agoIf Engineers are teached humanities. Why not humanities are teached STEM... Like basics of math, physics, chemistry, engineering and son on... Would in general make our society better if everyone understood these things.
- notafraudster 5y agoHumanities degrees almost always require both 1-2 mathematics courses and 1-2 science courses, and they're almost always fulfilled with complementary electives e.g. "rocks for jocks" type material, the same way engineers fulfill their complementary electives with blowoff courses that cater to their preferences.
- mywittyname 5y agoMIT had a course called Physics for Future Presidents. Which is basically a primer of the major topics in science.
- ketzu 5y agoAren't those basic high school topics?
- Ekaros 5y agoThey should be. Maybe just need to apply standards to high schools and not allow graduation without certain sufficient baseline... Which currently clearly is too low in many countries.
- rjzzleep 5y agoLast time I interviewed someone in the US, they actually did do that in the first terms in the IT Bachelor because apparently there is no common standard across US high schools. But given how many of the investors in the UK actually study humanities at Oxford I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish there. Unless you really believe that studying humanities somehow makes you a more moral human being that then doesn't go on to destroy the world, which clearly isn't the case. And for reference Boris Johnson studied classics at Oxford, fucked a dead pig as part of a fraternity initiation ceremony and is now doing his best to dismantle public healthcare in the UK. So I don't think the "make our society better" statement holds any value. EDIT: comment below is right, it was David Cameron, not Boris Johnson. And he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics. So while the last paragraph is half correct and half mixed in with Boris Johnsons history, both of them have been working hard on selling off the NHS. Boris also hasn't started as many wars. So, I guess Boris is better on a relative scale?
- thedailymail 5y agoNitpicking, but wasn't it David Cameron who fucked a dead pig?
- MadeThisToReply 5y agoWhat wars did David Cameron start? You sure you're not thinking of Tony Blair? Incidentally, Cameron is far from the only UK politician to have studied PPE at Oxford. An alarmingly high number of our leaders are products of that one degree program at one university [0] - which suggests that this program deserves a lot more public scrutiny than it gets, given the shoddy results it seems to produce! [0] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/feb/23/ppe-oxford-university-degree-that-rules-britain https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/feb/23/ppe-oxford...
- throwaway210222 5y agoProbably because most are too dumb to pass it. Before you down-vote: ask what their high school STEM grades are?
- tremon 5y agoAre you suggesting engineers aren't taught the basics of reading, writing, perspective, and so on?
- dbetteridge 5y ago'taught', you can have 'teach' or 'teaches' but not 'teached' And in theory the basics of those should be covered in high-school.
- joeberon 5y agoEngineers are not taught humanities here in the UK, and I'm sure that's also true in many other countries
- ghaff 5y agoDepends what you mean by "taught humanities" I guess. For my engineering degree in the US, I certainly took non-engineering/science courses as part of a distribution requirement and took various other courses and did various other activities as well. Among other things, communications has been a key part of my career track.
- ben_w 5y agoLiterally zero of my degree modules (BEng Software Engineering, Aberystwyth) were non-software engineering. But the UK does all of education differently to the USA, or at least it did when I went thought it: mandatory up to the age of 16 where you got approximately a dozen GCSEs, then two years doing A-levels (3, 3.5, or 4), then you go up to university. The only mandatory requirement to do humanities was in the GCSEs.
- joeberon 5y agoDuring an engineering degree in the UK you will not be required (or even usually have the possibility) of doing a non-engineering module
- randac 5y agoI think the only module I took that was close to this, for CompSci in UK, was on technical writing.
- ericd 5y agoMIT requires it of everyone, but Economics fulfills the requirement (and it’s a popular route, since you get a bit of basic algebra homework instead of paper writing).
- jessriedel 5y agoBased on personal experience, I don't think it's a symmetric deficit. Just as an example: at lots (most?) colleges, you must take (or test out of) a foreign language to graduate, but it's fine to not take calculus. And in any case, a journalist covering a technical subject should have a basic understanding of units. It's really elementary stuff.
- jerf 5y agoPeople are taught the basics of STEM. At least here in the US. It just doesn't stick.
- gameswithgo 5y agoCould industry quit using power times time as a unit of energy and just use joules?
- koheripbal 5y agoThis would only make sense if all devices started listing power consumption in joules per hour, instead of watts.
- upofadown 5y agoWatts are joules per second. So power consumption would still be in Watts. A kWh, or in other words a 1000 Watts for an hour, is 1000 * 60 * 60 = 3600000 joules. So in practice people would use Mj (Megajoules) and save a syllable.
- bregma 5y agokWH is a more consumer-friendly unit since it's easier to calculate that a 100 Watt light bulb run for 10 hours consumes 1 kWH and you would just multiply by the cents-per-kilowatt-hour billing rate to find out how much it costs. If you were billed by the joule you'd need to divide by 3.6 times the rate. Or is it multiply by 3.6 divided by the rate? Do you subtract the 32 before or after?
- upofadown 5y agoAny consumer that knows that "k" means 1000 is going to know how to figure out how many seconds there are in an hour/day/year. There is endless confusion caused by the double use of time in kWh that this article is an example of. There is little doubt that using the base unit would be better.
- chithanh 5y agoWhat? If you were unaware, 1 J = 1 Ws Besides, considering the food industry in most countries will not even get rid of kcal where there exist zero reason to use that unit, I don't think so.
- ako 5y agoJust because you teach it, doesn't mean people remember or understand it. I had Latin in highschool, but wouldn't be able to translate a single Latin sentence today...
- joeberon 5y agoIndeed, and even educated people might not grasp it. I'm a doctor in quantum physics and honestly I find electronics almost always impossible to understand.
- giantg2 5y agoLack of understanding by journalists is pretty common across many topics. Many times they oversimplify, don't show the whole picture, and get things wrong. I see it quite often in a variety of stories.
- ldiracdelta 5y agoAnd when you don't see journalistic incompetence, you _may_ be suffering from Gell-Mann Amnesia, as Michael Crichton spoke about: https://web.archive.org/web/20070714204136/http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speech-whyspeculate.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070714204136/http://www.michae...
- ldiracdelta 5y ago""" Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know. That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia. """
- adriand 5y agoI was reading a book about nutrition recently and the author was relating the remarkable health benefits of herbs, even dried ones. She went on to state that were you to eat an entire cup of dried basil - not that you would - you’d get 2,113 grams of calcium. Yes that’s right, 2 kg of minerals in a fluffy cup of dried basil flakes! A miracle of nutrition indeed.
- andreareina 5y agoReminds me of a factoid that claimed spinach was 80% protein or some absurd number like that. Turned out that 80% of the calories you get from spinach come from protein, but of course 80% of a tiny number remains a tiny number.
- jacquesm 5y agoAssuming < 2 KG of basil went in I'm pretty curious about the transmutation effect here. Surely some scientist has looked into this.
- dotancohen 5y ago> you’d get 2,113 grams of calcium Perhaps the author was using the comma as the decimal separator? I know that the Norwegians do this.
- mywittyname 5y agoThat's a lot of sig-figs.
- MadeThisToReply 5y agoMost countries/languages use a comma as the decimal separator - it's the English-speaking world that's unusual for using a dot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#/media/File:DecimalSeparator.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#/media/File:...
- anonporridge 5y agoThe map you linked suggests that dots are standard in both China and India as well, which probably means that the majority of humans and economic energy use dots not commas.
- aspaceman 5y agoThey have to take the same elementary physics class we all took in high school. It's just too "hard" to actually care. They remember work and energy are things, but it's just not worth caring about to them.