Tag Archives: Funny

Adele and Hello - Math and a Carbon Footprint Analysis

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This is my first post-startup-launch post. (If you haven't yet, check out my website and sign up for more information!)

I mentioned I wasn't going to post about the environment as much anymore, but I can't stop. I honestly started this just to show how fun math can be in looking at the number of views on Adele's Hello on youtube. It ended up with me being curious what the environmental impact was.

So today I looked at the youtube video of this song. For your convenience, here it is so you can listen to it while reading this post. Apparently it's blowing up, with an insane number of views per day.

It has 309,000,000 views and has been up for all of 20 days. Let's use some basic math to figure out how popular this song is!

Let's first see how many seconds there are in a day.

And over 20 days:

With 309,000,000 views in that time, we end up with 178 views initiated per second, on average, for 20 days, nonstop.

But, hold up, it takes 6 minutes for this song to complete. So that means, on average, there are:

Let's round that up to 65,000. On average, at any given time, there are 65,000 people watching the Adele Hello video on youtube. There are 15 million views per day. That's just one video on one source. In eight whole day, as many people listen to the song, on just youtube, as watch the superbowl.

If this clip keeps up (which is unlikely), she will surpass Gangam Style, with over 2 billion views, in less than 150 days. And medical stocks will go up, cause I worry that listening to this song too frequently may drive people into depression.

"But Jay," you say, "what about the energy and environment component?!?"

Adele, impacting your heart, and impacting the environment

Adele, impacting your heart, and impacting the environment

Let's figure out Adele's carbon footprint from youtube! Let's assume that Google's hosting emissions are negligible. Let's just focus on the energy used for a laptop. Let's say that it is 50W (this is conservative).

From a prior post, we know that a 100W lightbulb uses ~1kg of coal per day. So a laptop will use about 0.5kg per day. How much CO2 is this?

This is basic chem! Let's get really basic. Coal is mostly made up of carbon. So when it is burnt, every carbon molecule breaks off and bonds with O2. So we assume that all 0.5kg of carbon becomes CO2. You need to add that weight of the O2. C weighs 12 AMU (atomic mass units, pretty much the mass of a single molecule) and O2 weighs 32 AMU.

So we need to multiply the weight of coal, which is pure carbon, by the proportional increase of mass of CO2, cause each carbon atom gains O2 weight (12+32=44)

for a 50 watt computer running all the time.

Also this song is 6 minutes, or 1/10th an hour, and an hour is 1/24th a day, so this song takes 1/240th of a day.

Don't forget, though, that we have 15,000,000 views per day!

Or, you know, ~125 tons of CO2 per day. Just from Youtube and Adele. This is the generation rate of about 2000 Americans.

And why this analysis overestimates Youtube's and Adele's contribution to CO2 emissions

Most people are multi-tasking while listening to Adele (ie those 50 watts they are using are also going towards whatever else they do while listening to Adele, such as reaching for tissues to blot their tears), so you have to take a fraction of this number  🙂

Second, much of the power use in the US is now coming from natural gas, which is more efficient than coal, so you can cut down this number.

Third, tissues take a whole lot of energy to make. I'm betting that the raw number of tissues used while listening to Adele will increase the CO2 footprint.

How many times did you restart the song while reading this blog, BTW?

Thanks for reading!

- Jason Munster

Why Giant Houses Always Use More Energy

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Big houses use more energy to heat and cool, for reasons you might not suspect. Houses lose heat to the outside. Nearly all houses are drafty in some form or another, and they need to be somewhat drafty, as we will soon find out.

When energy prices skyrocketed in the 70s due to price gouging and market manipulation of oil (thanks, OPEC), there was a big movement to make it so houses didn't leak air (and leak their heat energy in the process). The idea is that for every bit of air you heat and then let out into the environment, you have just wasted energy. So the process of sealing houses began.

OPEC oil embargoes of '73 and '79. The prices of energy spiked worldwide.

Some groups bragged that they could build houses that only exchanged 1% of their air per hour with the outside. In other words, it would take 4 full days to lose all the heat or AC energy of a house to the outdoors. Excellent, right?

It was excellent in terms of energy savings. But anyone with a flatulent spouse/significant other can tell you that being stuck in a place that is producing unhealthy fumes is dangerous if you don't vent it. It turns out that a lot of basic human activity, like cooking and heating, produce things that are bad for humans and need to be vented.

Much more importantly for advanced cultures*, cooking (it boils water, yo) and breathing and sweating make the air inside a house humid. Humidity in a house causes mold that can make you ill or, in extreme cases, kill you. One of the most effective ways to remove all this humidity is to let the air exchange with the outside.

So here we have a problem. We need to seal our houses well in order to save energy on heating and cooling, yet we also need to allow loss of all this heated and cooled air so we don't sweat ourselves out and cause bad mold to grow.

And we arrive to the crux of the matter. A good exchange rate is .6, or that 60% of a houses air is exchanges per hour. Sounds like a lot? It kind of is. But it's what is healthy for normal technology (we aren't all going to install CO and CO2 scrubbers and dehumidifiers in our houses). So in 24 hours, we have

hours exchanges per day. Of your entire house volume.

So. You have to exchange air in your house. About 15 times per day. Otherwise you might start falling ill. If you have a gigantic house that is 2x larger than you need, then you will use 2x as much energy to keep the place heated and cooled as you need to. So, in short, living in a giant house is a bad thing for energy conservation (take notice, Al Gore**)

Next week we will suspend our assumption that all houses have decent exchange rates, and discuss why this is a huuuuge policy gap.

You don't really need to live in a place like this, do you?

Thanks for reading!

- Jason Munster

*Developing countries still use coal. By 2020 there will be up to an estimated 400,000 deaths per year in China from indoor air pollution associated with burning coal for heat and cooking in poor rural homes (160,000 median estimate). Obviously this is more pressing than mold.

**I was going to rip Al Gore a new one for having had a huge electricity bill just after making An Inconvenient Truth, but it turns out that in 2007, before it was cheaper or easier, he elected to power his home, in TN, with solar and wind power almost exclusively, jacking up the price to a level higher than most Americans pay. So yeah, he did have a much higher electricity bill than the average American, but he only used about 4x the electricity, apparently. Which is still a lot. Except that he and Tipper both also work out of their houses. And now they have solar panels all over it. So it's not that bad. Though it is still huge.

 

Deadhorse 1

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It was  below 0C in August in my first two days here.

The North Slope of Alaska is flat and has lots of lakes and running water

The North Slope of Alaska is flat and has lots of lakes and running water

Deadhorse, Prudhoe Bay, AK, is different from most other places. Deadhorse is practically devoid of women, and has zero children. I asked a friend who works here on the oil rigs what dating was like: "The same as working everywhere in Alaska. Get in line and wait your turn."

Deadhorse is a dry town. You can't buy alcohol here. If someone working here is found with alcohol, they are fired or kicked out. The workers here will occasionally buy cool-aid, throw some champagne yeast in, and brew their own awful alcohol that way.

There are no hotels here. Instead there are Man-Camps. There are no restaurants in Deadhorse, and no place to buy real food to cook. You eat at a mancamp. There was an outbreak of the flu here a few weeks back, and an entire camp was quarantined. From then on, every camp requires that you use hand sanitizer upon entrance, and you use disposable plastic gloves on top of that when you get your food. All the hangar facilities here also have hand sanitizer everywhere.

This is not a town, it's a construction site.

This is not a town, it's a construction site.

There is no pavement. Dirt roads lead everywhere. You get dust and mud on your boots (you don't wear shoes). Upon entering a camp, you rub your shoes on some aggressive mud-and-dust removing blocks. After that you are required to put fabric booties over your boots. You are not allowed to walk around in camps in sandals or barefoot. Everyone has big manly boots with fabric booties over them.

Bears roam freely through town. I wanted to take a picture of one, but I have been assured that a grizzly does not look majestic while rummaging through a dumpster, emerging with an ice cream wrapper stuck to its head.

The only passenger vehicle used here is a 4WD king cab diesel pickup. All trucks have heating blocks in them, because it is so cold in the winter that the oil in the engine would turn to a gel if left unheated. In every single parking lot there are dozens upon dozens of plugs for these trucks to keep warm during the forever night of an Arctic winter.

Every truck needs to be plugged in during the winter, or it won't start again.

Every truck needs to be plugged in during the winter, or it won't start again.

 

Because of the bears, we are required to keep our keys in the trucks and the trucks unlocked. If someone is walking along, they need the safety of a heavy truck to dive into immediately, and be able to drive off.

No one is worried about theft here. We don't get keys to our hotel rooms. They are left unlocked when we leave. There is no black market here, so what would someone do with something they stole? We freely leave most of our possessions out, knowing that no one will touch them.

8/7-Research

Our plane has arrived. We had to make repairs to the cooling of the Laser Pressure Vessel (it is an airplane, so as it flies higher, the ambient air pressure decreases. A pressure vessel holds the instrument at one pressure to keep everything precise) on the methane detection instrument.

 

I forgot my boots at lab. My advisor is flying out on 8/8. He is putting them in his luggage. That's right, my advisor thinks nothing of carrying my hiking boots across the country for field work. He's pretty cool that way. Would your PhD advisor do that?

8-10

We flew!

8-11

We had some heat control issues with the laser system, and two of our three instrument overheated.

That's all for now. Thanks for reading!

- Jason Munster