Skip to content

Comment on Beer and Icecream Dietparent

Comments

That's intentional. Couldn't help but notice that "/jokes/" appears in the URL.

It may be intentional but the math is solid so it is worth pointing out. If you aren't aware that 1 food Calorie is actually 1000 calories then it is quite confusing.

While the temperature normalization process my actually take 6,216 calories "from fat", the "latent" calories in the ice cream isn't 1200 of those same unit calories. It's 1.2 million of them. So your net isn't a 5000 calorie reduction - it's a ~1.19 million gain.

I think the joke itself is the theory presented, not the fact that the author has no clue what so ever about energy in food being counted in thousands of calories. This is a very common misconception in the USA, where they insist on using the notion of Calories (note the capitalization), confusing them with calories, instead of going metric like the rest of the world by saying kcal to avoid being one thousand times off.

This is the point of the joke; except they screwed it up. They should have used Calorie whenever they meant kcal and not done so much math for the reader so that it would be true rather than false which it is because of the sure aforementioned reasons. good joke, bad delivery.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.