200 Calories

What’s a calorie? Well, it is a unit of energy. If you take a gram of water and put some energy into it, you’ll raise its temperature (assuming it is away from its boiling point). If you succeed in raising the gram of water’s temperature by 1oC, you’ve put one calorie of energy into it.

But that’s not the calorie you probably have used in your everyday conversation. You’ve probably been talking about the Calorie. (Note the upper case C.) The Calorie, or the kilocalorie. It is 1000 times larger than the calorie of the previous paragraph. It’s the energy needed to raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by 1oC (assuming it’s not at its boiling point). That’s the Calorie you find discussed in the context of nutrition – the energy content of the food you eat.

Without further ado, let me show you what the Calories “look like”. Let’s take a reasonable number of them – 200. Each of the pictures below represents 200 Calories of a food, which you’d get from eating it. Mini peppers, gummy bears, and kiwi fruit:

peppers 200 calories gummy bears 200 calories kiwi fruit 200 calories

They are part of a series of rather beautiful photographs of lots of different foods, presented on a site called WiseGeek. Please go and have a look at the rest of thema.

-cvj

___________________________________________________________________________________

a I found this while browsing the rather nice wongaBlog, which has one of my favourite blog taglines: “like balloons, only with dancing”.

Bookmark the permalink.

7 Responses to 200 Calories

  1. Clifford says:

    That’s Fantastic!!! I can’t wait!

    (Thanks!)

    -cvj

  2. Bee says:

    Hey Clifford, what do you think of this? Best, B.

  3. Doug says:

    This may apply to your discussion of calories if biological entities are allowed to act as players exchanging calories as energy quanta from an energy economics perspective.

    I have been reading a classic from the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics [SIAM]: Tamer Basar and Geert Jan Olsder. ‘Dynamic Noncooperative Game Theory’, revised 1999 from 1982. The authors refer to this as a type of representation theory.

    Since this is mathematics, the language is similar, but not identical to representation theory used in physics.

    Some differences include using C* for cost-to-come and G* for cost-to-go.

    Similarities include index sets, infinite topological structured sets, mappings and functionals in discrete time.

    There is substitution for some of these items in continuous time such as time intervals, Borel sets, trajectory, action and informational topological spaces.

    Tme appears to be treated as a duality.
    There may or not be stochastic influences.
    The Isaacs condition for the Hamiltonian is used.

    Types of such games include:
    for discrete time –
    OL – open loop
    CLPS – closed loop perfect state information
    CLIS – CL imperfect state
    FB – feedback perfect
    FIS – feedback imperfect
    1DCLPS – one-step delayed CLPS
    1DOS – one-step delayed obsevation sharing
    for continuous time –
    OL
    CLPS
    eta-DCLPS – eta-delayed DCLPS
    MPS – memoryless perfect state
    FB

    If players are allowed to be entities capable of exchanging enegy quanta or longevity then this might considered enegy economics?

    The stochastic game may be consitent with the probablistic nature of QM.

    Is phyisics failing to use a valuable tool of representation theory from applied mathematics?

  4. Pyracantha says:

    FiberOne cereal looks like meal worms.

  5. Aaron F. says:

    Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm! Those look so gooooood… 🙂

  6. JoanH says:

    These are amazing pictures.

    My current favorite blog tag line is “Grumperina goes to local yarn shops and Home Depot.
    Always up to something.”

  7. Carol+crew says:

    Thank you – now much wiser food choices made in 2007!!! Thank you for the WiseGeek site.