From: Alfio Puglisi (puglisi@arcetri.astro.it)
Date: Thu Mar 06 2003 - 13:17:59 MST
On Thu, 6 Mar 2003, Adrian Tymes wrote:
>> controlled.
>>
>> Total consumption should be around 5 watts.
>
>Data point: as mentioned elsewhere, the RDA for an
>adult male is 2200 calories. This is about 9.2
>kilojoules, or enough power to run a 5 watt device for
>just over half an hour. Say you only run this when
>awake, and then only about half the time (with the
>rest spent in "sleep mode", with negligible power
>requirements, while not actively being used); that's
>still 8 hours per day, or about 16 times your RDA of
>calories, to run - without accounting for what the
>rest of your body needs.
Your calculation seems quite wrong: it's easy to push 150 watts on
exercise bicycles, and I can sustain 300 watts for a short while.
Daily calorie intake for a professional cyclist (during a long, 3-weeks
race) is around 7,000 calories, but we are speaking about people
capable of generating 400-500 watts for hours.
I suspect you got caught in the (big) "Cal" and (small) "cal" trap: both
are calories, but the former is 1,000 times as big. Of course, the RDA
are expressed in (big) Calories.
Ciao,
Alfio
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