Comment on Power is not energy: why the difference matters [Technology Connections]
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 month agoI never took chemistry, and I didn’t take a real physics course until college, though we had survey courses like “physical science” throughout school.
I don’t recall if we talked about watt hours specifically, but joules were certainly mentioned, though I doubt most people remember it. Most of the emphasis was on things like friction equations (given an ideal pulley and an incline with slope…), not real world things like understanding your electricity bill.
That said, I think most people intuitively understand the difference between instantaneous consumption and total consumption over a time period. They know playing games will drain their phone or laptop battery way faster than browsing the web, for example. They just tend to not stop and think about it and they simplify things in the wrong way (power rating on device), though a total energy estimate does work (e.g. when comparing refrigerators).
boonhet@lemm.ee 1 month ago
In our case, we had the pulleys and stuff too, but we had different modules and the later ones showed how they connect to eachother, so you start up with optics, mechanics (as in movement, not car parts lol), thermodynamics and electricity in middle school, then you get all of the same with a lot of new information in high school and also very basic nuclear physics, like atom models, electron levels and stuff. Essentially first you learn about power and energy in the context of movement and thermodynamics, and then later also electricity (at which point you’ll understand how heat at the power station converts to electrical energy at your home car charger converts to movement of your electric car, or similar with fuel and internal combustion engine car - of course the efficiencies are simplified greatly).
Of course you heard a lot of bored classmates go “But why do I have to learn this, I’ll never need it in real life”, but at least electrical bills are so much easier to predict when you know how power and energy relate.
I’m very happy with how the education system in my country works and how it prepared me for university (which I just didn’t have the attention span for) and life. It’s the reason I’m OK with paying a fair bit higher tax than I would in some other countries. Our income tax is at 22%, but a bunch is hidden from regular peoples’ view by making it part of the employer’s tax burden, meaning if I pay myself a decent salary, the tax rate is ~43% or if I pay myself less than I need to live I can make it 31-33% and get a visit from the taxman asking why I’m paying myself so little and paying the rest out in dividends. Luckily the economics course in high school included our tax system in addition to macroeconomics concepts, so I can navigate all this fairly easily. Not sure if that one was mandatory nationwide, or just part of my own school’s curriculum, because we basically had 3 types of subjects: Absolutely mandatory (like 60% of total course load), school specialty curriculum (like 20-30% of total) and then the rest was up to you to choose what you wanted to learn.
However, now they’re talking about making universities charge tuition from everyone as well as all kinds of cuts in other sectors WHILE raising taxes, despite the fact that we barely even use debt as a nation so if all that happens, I’ll find some creative ways to reduce my taxes or pay them in another country.
Okay, long ADHD rant about our education system aside, I do agree with you that most people will probably intuitively understand the differences. But man do I feel like some countries’ curriculums have been half-assed. It’s entirely possible to give young people an understanding of the universe from astronomical scales down to microscopical AND teach them things like tax systems, energy consumption calculations and other things that can be used in real life.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Yeah, we had all that stuff too. This was many years ago, but I remember the electricity section being fairly basic, as in mostly covering how volts and amps interact (i.e. high voltage, low amps is way worse than low voltage, high amps, in terms of safety). And that’s really about it. Maybe we covered other stuff, but it really wasn’t important to go further, probably because I went to school before EVs and whatnot were commonplace.
I think my education was quite good. I was very much prepare for the university I went to, but that kind of meant we skipped some important stuff. For example:
We didn’t really learn economics or taxes in high school. I mean, we discussed basic supply and demand, but that was more in the context of history than anything actually applicable to life (i.e. Great Depression’s impacts on supply and demand). I learned the vast majority of what I know about economics, investing, and taxes on my own because I’m interested in it. It just didn’t seem to make the cut for high school, where we learned a wide variety of other stuff, like biology, math, history, English, etc. A basic high school day was broken up into 6 periods, usually consisting of:
I did two years at the high school and two years at the local community college so I could get a 2-year college degree at the same time as my high school diploma. That was pretty rad, but I wonder if maybe I got super compressed education since I had about half the class time as my peers (about 3 hours/day vs 6), but we had more reading at home, which I think made up for it (I’d spend 3-4 hours/day studying vs 1-2 hours from regular high school).
However, at the end of it, there were some gaps:
I don’t think that was a failure per se, it just wasn’t deemed important since the whole point of high school was to prepare you for college, and anything that didn’t help with that seemed to get dropped. I think this is unfortunate, and that high school should have you ready to make a decent wage outside of school (i.e. finish w/ marketable skills, like the German system does).
Yeah, we were pretty similar, except we didn’t have “school school specialty curriculum” since I went to public school, and public schools are standardized in what they teach. So we had something like 70-80% as mandatory curriculum, which prepares you for college, and 20-30% electives, which hopefully prepare you for life. I did shop (make stuff out of wood), home ec (cooking), drawing (nearly failed, I suck at art), and visual communications (graphic design, photography, etc survey course).
boonhet@lemm.ee 1 month ago
I actually also went before EVs were commonplace, I was more referring to the fact that you got the knowledge to instinctively make that connection (and probably nowadays they have exercises on the subject too).
I went as, I believe, the second or third year of an experimental new system under which schools offered different specialty tracks that were up to the schools themselves to design. We had like a science-focused track, an art focused one, and then one that was basically “cool shit we threw together” that included stuff like psychology and law (first all kinds of basic legal concepts, which in of itself was a really big course, and then a second course focusing mostly on Estonian contract law, as that is hugely important, as well as some looks into stuff like employment law, consumer protection law, etc. This probably was not too common in schools in our country either, we just had a really awesome principal that was a former lawyer and took it upon herself to teach all this.
As of the 2024/2025 school year, the system is abolished and now the student gets to pick more of the electives, instead of the school tracks. So more freedom of choice, which I reckon is a good thing. The mandatory basics are still really solid.