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I am beginning to feel the same way about people using non-SI units as I do about people using non-standards-compliant browsers and non-unicode character encodi

I am beginning to feel the same way about people using non-SI units as I do about people using non-standards-compliant browsers and non-unicode character encodings. Calorie? What the hell is a calorie? I always have to look it up. Oh, it's 4.2J. Except when it's 4.2KJ. So one KCal could be 4.2KJ or maybe 4.2MJ. The article is using the small calories. Other comments here are using large ones. Man, I love it when there's a 3-order-of-magnitude context-dependent variation in the base unit of measurement! See this? Look at the date: http://www.fao.org/docrep/meeting/009/ae906e/ae906e17.htm http://www.fao.org/docrep/meeting/009/ae906e/ae906e17.htm 1971. I wasn't even born. I should have never even learned the damn word. Oh but no, people have to have their "customs". Well, customs are the enemy of progress! Why is this article using Calories at all? They are deprecated and have been for almost 40 years. I know many Americans derive a perverse enjoyment persisting against all logic in their use of obsolete and inefficient forms of measurement, on the sole and often mistaken grounds that they are somehow more "American", but the Calorie is French anyway. There's the real "Calorie Delusion"! The delusion is that there's even such a thing as Calories. Joules, baby. It's all about the Joules.

tedunangst 17y ago
Why do you have to look up what a calorie is? 25% of something works the same way regardless of units. The words more and less retain their meaning regardless of units. The article could have used playstation3-hours and nothing would change.
- lutorm 17y ago
  Except that the energy need of a human is not 2500 ps3-hours/day, it's 2500 kcal per day. The article does actually use absolute numbers in quite a few places, and there the units do matter.
lutorm 17y ago
Yay, a fellow SI nazi! :) I remember being helplessly confused when I moved to the US before I figured out that what the Americans call a "calorie" is actually a kcal. A cal is the scientific unit, normally used with the k prefix, and in Sweden food labels (and even our school home economics textbook) use kcal (and KJ). I'm kind of used to the US using weird-ass units by now, but the fact that they just decided to drop the prefix on some unit (presumably because they didn't want to subject the public to learning that k means thousands) is too much.

tedunangst 17y ago

Why do you have to look up what a calorie is? 25% of something works the same way regardless of units. The words more and less retain their meaning regardless of units. The article could have used playstation3-hours and nothing would change.

lutorm 17y ago
Except that the energy need of a human is not 2500 ps3-hours/day, it's 2500 kcal per day. The article does actually use absolute numbers in quite a few places, and there the units do matter.

lutorm 17y ago

Yay, a fellow SI nazi! :) I remember being helplessly confused when I moved to the US before I figured out that what the Americans call a "calorie" is actually a kcal. A cal is the scientific unit, normally used with the k prefix, and in Sweden food labels (and even our school home economics textbook) use kcal (and KJ). I'm kind of used to the US using weird-ass units by now, but the fact that they just decided to drop the prefix on some unit (presumably because they didn't want to subject the public to learning that k means thousands) is too much.