The first part of the article triggers me. Heat in the physical sense is thermal energy. Like with other forms of energy, you need an energy difference to actually have it perform work, or you need to invest work to create an energy difference (in a heat engine or a heat pump, respectively). Just like you would letting a weight fall to the ground and lifting it back up. And cooling is removing heat, so ice cubes are actually cooling your drink.

In a pan, low specific heat capacity is not that desirable. That’s why people use big honking chunks of cast iron to prepare food: so adding the cold food doesn’t lower the temperature too much. But the metal also gets you good heat conductivity to quickly get the heat from the stovetop to where it’s needed.

Conversely the handle is made from materials that have low conductivity so heat gets conducted more slowly towards your skin. The higher capacity helps but isn’t that crucial: air has fairly low heat capacity but you can stick your hand into an oven at 100C without getting burned. Unlike boiling water, which has quite a high heat capacity.

The refrigerant should have a high heat capacity to move as much heat as possible for a given temperature difference. Most systems employ a liquid-gas phase change somewhere in the cycle to transfer even more heat energy in the form of latent heat. R134a, a common refrigerant, has a heat capacity about 3/4 of that of water.

One more thing: even if the electrical energy is completely nonrenewable, heat pumps still offer an environmental advantage. Gas power plants are fairly efficient, around 40% of the extractable heat energy gets converted to electricity. With a COP of 2.5, a heat pump would produce as much output as burning the gas in a perfectly efficient furnace. If the COP is larger, the heat pump is more efficient than burning the gas directly, and modern heat pumps usually exceed 2.5 except in the coldest days of winter. Add to that the existence of dual-cycle power plants with 60% efficiency, and the losses of a conventional furnace, and heat pumps may win even on days where the COP is slightly less than 2.

They’re sofa parasites!

Dude, 13000 deaths are approximately 28% of the total traffic death toll for 2021. Even if I take the data for 2014, with the all-time low of 1.17 fatalities per 100m mi driven, that 28% is more than the 0.12 total fatalities in Germany (1.9 per bn km, 2018). Maybe the government could start fixing driver’s ed and make sure vehicles are actually road safe.

With 43 kcal/100ml you need about 4.6 liters or 5 qts to satisfy your caloric needs (2000kcal/day). If you even out the intake over the whole day, alcohol levels should be low enough to keep you functioning. Beer also contains a bit of protein and low levels of sodium, potassium and magnesium.

Long term, you’ll get scurvy after a few months due to lack of vitamin C and liver cirrhosis from the sustained alcohol use.

You know that CO2 concentration is at 421 ppm, (0.0421%) up from 280 ppm in 1850? That change is negligible compared to the 21% oxygen. Standing in a crowd or being inside causes a much higher variation of the oxygen concentration. Even moving up 2 meters changes the amount of oxygen molecules per volume by more than that.

Even then, you’re going to get NOx. The atmosphere is 70% nitrogen and with high enough temperatures, some will always react with the available oxygen.

Isn’t that the same for Reddit or Lemmy? The content creators and mods don’t see a penny either. Operationally, a social network probably requires a lot more compute power and somewhat more bandwidth compared to a site that serves mostly static content. But I don’t see why small donations shouldn’t cover that. The cost per user seems moderate, otherwise few people could afford to run an instance with 1000s of users without charging them.