• Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee
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    22 hours ago

    this is a commonly repeated falsehood obvious joke

    And, if I have to explain the joke: it’s just E=mc² (the Einstein thing … well, the Einstein’s thing’s approximation), the energy (E) is the same for all mass (m) since the c is a constant.
    You get the same 21 billon kcal from 1g of apples as from 1g of plutonium.
    And since it’s usually well known humans do not devour mass into pure energy that might trigger ppls sense of humour.
    (Additionally the idea of eating metal to seek nutrition might be funny, but we do need some metals \m/.)

    Also “potential energy” phrasing is weird in that context.

    There are 2 different definitions of calorie.
    This “fun fact” mixes up the two definitions

    It’s not even two definitions, the kcal is absolutely the same, it’s just used to measure two different things (mass energy vs the sum of what an average human can extract via chemical processes). I see you def understand that, but it’s not a different definition of a calorie (in the same way as length vs width of an object isn’t a different definition of a metre).

    • 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de
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      22 hours ago

      It is a different definition, but it’s the same unit… it’s also more like saying “that ball of yarn is 10 metres” - the ball itself isn’t 10 metres long in any dimension, but the meaning is clear given the context, as it would if you said “it’s 0.05 metres”. By having two meanings distinguishable by context, it seems like two definitions to me.

      • Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee
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        10 hours ago

        (Different definition/pov of what is measured, yes, that is where the joke is.)

        Hehe, look at this falsehood - there is no way this things can talk!
        (However imho this is a more clear example of ‘two different definitions’ of the main concept/phrase intentionally mixed together for comedic effect, bcs words can explicitly have more than one meaning, and yes, usually you can tell from the context.)

        This pic is def:

        This “fun fact” mixes up the two definitions, making the statement meaningless.