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Saturday, August 23, 2014

Squirt


Walked to the store this evening and picked up a couple of bottles of Squirt, the favorite drink of sourpusses everywhere. It's a mile to the store and a mile back, so I burned roughly 200 Calories on this little jaunt.
A large person might burn 2000 Calories a day, and since a large person like me might weigh 100 kilograms, and since we are mostly water, and since one Calorie will heat one liter of water one degree Celsius (one calorie, with a little 'c', will heat one cc of water one degree Celsius), that 2000 Calories could heat that 100 kilogram body by 20 degrees Celsius, or 36 degrees Fahrenheit, which kind of explains why we are most comfortable when the ambient temperature is lower than our body temperature, but not too low.
    If you could convert all the energy contained in that bottle of Squirt into heat, and confined it to that bottle, how much would the temperature of that bottle of Squirt go up? 240 Calories is 240,000 calories, so we could easily raise the temperature from it's icy cold, but not frozen, starting temperature to boiling, but we wouldn't be able to turn the whole thing into steam. I knew that the heat of vaporization was large, but I didn't realize just how large it is. I also didn't realize how much energy is in sugar.

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