Serious competition

Dear diary,
The day I feared arrived: I have a huge competitor in my quest to become master of this planet: the CERN. (I am really jealous of their apparatus, needless to say, and they have actual computing power, not a grid that crash every two days).

Their announcement does not need any comments:

Chemical warfare and swimming pools

Obviously, something went wrong in their plan to conquer the world!

Ice cream survival!

I promised you a detailed explanation of the Cal, cal problem, here it comes!

Is it impossible to survive out of icecreams?

Nope!

(But it depends for how long! And the next time you see a title with an interrogation mark, remember Betteridge's law of headline. You will therefore understand why I always want to burn the journalists who use such a technique. Soon, you will be like me and become angry every time you see a question mark in a title! Except for this one, because it is just to teach you that horrible truth, therefore helping me fighting that horrible literary disaster ((that feels strange to not have a nesting checker for the parentheses like in my favorite editor (vim (with the m for iMproved)(I just copied and paster to check))) the best way to help is to send me all your money (all your money are belong to us))).

On ice creams, beer, and calories

The problem comes from this site. They state that the calorific content of an ice cream (in term of energy for the human organism) is less than the energy needed to increase the temperature of the ice cream from 0C (frozen) to 37C (or, to use SI units 273.15K to 310.15K, even if the Celcius is really appropriate for this problem). Said otherwise, they claim that if you only eat ice creams, you will lose weight, and, if you continue, you will reach the ultimate goal of your life (do not forget me in your will).
 However, the demonstration uses these little strange units named (c/C)alories.


So, let's do the correct computation using Joules instead of Cal and cal!
The USDA source state that a typical portion of 66g of ice cream will give you 143 Cal i.e. 143 kcal * 4.184 kJ /kcal = 600 kJ (round up).

Let's suppose that you do not wait for the ice cream to melt a little before eating it (which I think you do not, but, for science's sake, let's suppose it). You first need to use some energy to bring your 66g of ice cream from the frozen state to the liquid state, both at 0C. The latent heat for fusion is 334 J/g for water; water is a good approximation for ice cream for such a computation. So, you need 334 J/g * 66 g = 22kJ of energy. Then, bringing your liquid cream to 37C will also require some energy. The specific heat capacity for liquid water is  4.1813 J(/g.K) (and it does not significantly vary with the water temperature). We therefore spend 66 g * 37 K * 4.1813 * J/(g.K) = 10 kJ to raise the ice cream to body temperature.

Let's do the balance: you eat 600 kJ of energy, and you spend 32 kJ of energy to bring it to body temperature. So you gain 568 kJ of energy!
Of course, if you mixed Cal and cal, you could have calculated a loss of 32kJ.
Once again, the conclusion is simple: let's destroy the Calorie and the calorie as units of energy!
Who would use such outdated and impractical units of energy in the age of other planet's exploration?

Oh, I forgot the essential: if you eat only ice creams, considering that there is virtually no C vitamin in it, you will die of scurvy (the first symptoms will appear about 3 month after the beginning of the experiment; I unfortunately have a lack of volunteers to check those claims, and it seems that animal experiments are of no use since a lot of them create their own C vitamin, because they do not lack the appropriate enzyme (another way to show how inefficient the human body is)).
You know what? YOU can help science by performing that experiment, at home, and letting us know when YOU get scurvy! (Just sign the paper that says that I did not gave you the idea, and the other one that says that if you are rich, all the money goes to me).

Bike slavery!

Some of you may have been contaminated by the "green" misconception of energy, which, if I may remind you, consist of working as hard as possible to stop the power plants that reject the less CO2 and require the less material to build... in order to save the climate of the CO2 man-made rejects.
Maybe they consider that power plants are not man-made.

Anyway, some people may have considered that it is a good idea to create our energy out of biking apparatus. So, the question is simple:

How may biking slaves do I need to create my energy?

I consider myself as an average cyclist (I mean that I can climb a pass like the Galibier, but it will take more than an hour). On a gym bike, I am able to develop 250W during an hour i.e. 250 J/s * 3600 s = 0.9MJ

Unfortunately, energy units are typically given in Cal which corresponds to a kcal (more of that later), and 1 cal = 4.184J
Therefore 0.9MJ = 215 kcal or Cal.


Here, people will say that I am a fat lazy sloth on my bike: my rest energy loss is of the order of 60 kcal/h, more than 10 of those used for thinking... and hard thinking hardly consumes more energy (which is kind of sad in a way: we would need less workout, less heating during the winter, and scientists
would need to constantly use a heatsink hat).
Anyway, following me on the Galibier should show that I am a decent cyclist, so, there must be a problem somewhere!
The gym's bike shows a loss of energy of more than 1000 Cal, is my previous computation false? Nope! Or is this another example of incomprehensible US units (anybody: how many cubic feet in a gallon? Fast please!)? Neither!
To solve that, we have to look at the energy efficiency: during my biking, I sweat more than a kg of water! I spent 4.184 MJ (1000 kcal) of energy on my bike, but the muscular efficiency is of the order of 20%.




From Wikipedia: "For an overall efficiency of 20%, one watt of mechanical power is equivalent to 4.3 kcal (18 kJ) per hour".
Therefore 4.184MJ / 18kJ = 232.4. From that efficiency, 232.4W of power during an hour made me lose 4.184MJ. (The bike system takes the average muscular efficiency in its computation, but I wonder how that efficiency varies with people, age, etc.).

Comparison with professional cyclists

As a darkside scientist, I am not a professional cyclist. Being fit is just extremely useful for fleeing away from explosions when you made a mistake in a chemical experiment. Professional cyclists can spend almost twice my amount of energy at an equivalent mass. (Actually, I would like a better estimate: I took this one by looking at the "tour de france" estimation of power during pass climbing, it seems that some cyclists almost reach 500W during almost 10 minutes! The problem, in the following, will be with the possibility to use drugs to maintain that level of spending for a 7h day. The question of the efficiency of 20% is still applicable here, but we will not deal with the price of the food since pasta are quite cheap).

Application for our secret lair (on skullcrusher mountain)

Scientists often hear people asking them about the use of doing physics (out of the taxpayer money), but never about the use of paying sports player (from both taxpayer and consumer money!). Greece was very happy to have the Olympic games in 2004, all the money spent in infrastructure helped creating some problems a few years later (I am too lazy to actually look at the effective cost of it, but if we believe this paper, it did not helped).
So, let's find an economical use of our professional cyclists (since scientists are more and more asked to have an economical impact). Since a cyclist is good at pedal, let him make electricity. But is it efficient?

Let's suppose that we use several cyclists to turn a nice alternator, much more efficient than the usual bikes' ones (at 60% http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternator). For this example, we  will suppose a 75% efficiency.
Our professional cyclist will develop 400W of mechanical power, i.e. 300W of electrical power. Since we use "tour de France" cyclists, they will work 35h week, for one month (4 weeks) without holidays (remember, they are slaves for our lair). Therefore, one cyclist produces 300W*35h *4 = 42kW.h (42 is the answer!).
A one person apartment, with AC, needs about 500 kW.h of electricity per month. Therefore, a dozen professional cyclists is necessary for the lair.
Fortunately, we do not have to pay a minimal income for slaves!

Conclusion

A professional cyclist is not autonomous concerning his electrical energy generation: he is therefore of no use at all.

Conclusion 2

We need much more "tours de France" to improve the energy efficiency of cyclists (and athletes in general), as well as their average power. I suggest to legalize doping techniques for that! 

Conclusion 3

Our beloved CERN - LHC has an electrical energy consumption of 1000 GWh (http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/embedded-systems/powering-the-large-hadron-collider) i.e. 1E9 kWh. This is an equivalent of 2 millions cyclists working all the year (LHC will therefore greatly help reducing unemployment: I told you physicists had a real use for society!).
Considering that a "tour de France" is about 200 cyclist-months, and that the LHC needs 2E6 cyclist-years i.e. 2.4E7 cyclist-month, we need 120 000 "tour de France" to run the LHC.

Test of our power

Dear journal,

The test of this morning went well above our expectations.
The little meteor sent to Earth did actually reached its impact objective.
The effect at Earth were more intense than expected (as viewed here: http://zyalt.livejournal.com/722930.html)
The NE to SW trajectory, and the estimated speed of 30 km/s, prevented the space agencies to believe in a man-made event.

Operation "when you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail" can continue.
(step 1: testing different asteroids (with chondrites, metals, ...) with different sizes to improve our trajectory/effect model
step 2: leverage on it)