dhampyresa

Yanno, I'd like it if when I manage to gather the energy to Do Things these days it could be things that don't make me angry(er).

I was recently listening to The Trouble With Calories, the latest episode of Maintenance Phase, a podcast that describes itself as "Michael Hobbes and Aubrey Gordon debunk the junk science behind health and wellness fads".

I'm going to quote directly from the transcript (at first link above), emphasis mine:

Aubrey: My ineffective response to the calories in, calories out stuff, I've run through a few of them, but one of the earliest ones was people would be like, "It's calories in, calories out." And often, they'll say, "It's the first law of thermodynamics."
[...]
Aubrey: The law of conservation, the idea that energy can't be created or destroyed in a closed system.
[...]
Aubrey: The response that I came up with early on to this stuff, which I don't recommend was I would be like, "Oh, yeah, well, the first law of thermodynamics only applies to closed system."

Michael: [laughs] You tried to out Bill Nye then. That's good,

Aubrey: I tried. It's link. So ineffective.

Michael: [laughs] The reason why that's ineffective, Aubrey is because you're assuming that they know or give a shit about thermodynamics.

[laughter]

Michael: People who bring up thermodynamics right after calories in, calories out don't know shit about thermodynamics, I guarantee. [laughs]

Aubrey: I'm sure you're right. Because if you do, you know what a closed system is, right? Which is nothing gets in, nothing comes out. Our bodies are not closed systems. You're constantly eating food, breathing air, you're in an environment.

1) Actually, the first law of thermodynamics DOES apply to open systems, as you would know if you just fucking looked at the section titled "First law of thermodynamics for open systems" on the wikipedia page "First law of thermodynamics". SUCH SCIENCE VERY KNOWLEDGE MUCH RESEARCH WOW

Like. I'm not asking them to be able to define entropy or enthalpy or use it to prove Bernoulli's principle, but I feel like if you're going to sell yourself as a science podcast looking at the wikipedia page is not too much to fucking ask?!

The equation is ∆U₀ = Q − W − ∑^m_i=1 ∆U_i "where ΔU0 denotes the change of internal energy of the system, and ΔUi denotes the change of internal energy of the ith of the m surrounding subsystems that are in open contact with the system, due to transfer between the system and that ith surrounding subsystem, and Q denotes the internal energy transferred as heat from the heat reservoir of the surroundings to the system, and W denotes the energy transferred from the system to the surrounding subsystems that are in adiabatic connection with it." (still from Wikipedia, although I did type out the equation myself instead of using an image embed). An adiabatic connection is one where neither energy nor mass is transferred. (Mass is a form of energy, cf E=mc².)

To put it in the simplest possible terms I can: Input (in all forms, be it mass, energy, pressure etc) + Beginning state (in all forms) = Output (in all forms) + end state.
A very simplified illustration: Imagine a half-filled bathtub. If you turn on the tap, the water in the tub increases. If you pull the plug, it decreases. If you do both, whether it increases, decreases or remains constant depends on how much water comes in and how much is going out.

2) The simple fact that the saying is "calories in, calories out" means we are not talking about a closed system! You say it yourself "[a closed system] is nothing gets in, nothing comes out".

Your argument is both wrong and, even if it were true, not responding to what people are saying! What the fuck are you even doing?!

In conclusion: don't fucking tell me I "don't know shit about thermodynamics" when you can't even be fucked to look at a wikipedia page.

I will now proceed to be mad about this for the next ten thousand years