I’m so hungry I could eat a whole cow.

I think the expression typically cites a horse, but I don’t know anyone who actually eats horsemeat, so this version seems a little more reasonable.

Have you ever heard that expression and wondered, jeez, how many calories would that be? I have, and I’ll take it a step further, what could you do with all that energy?

You’ve probably heard the number 2000 kcal floated around as the minimum daily amount of energy a person needs to function properly. In reality, that number depends on a number of factors, and the average requirement for a full-grown adult is probably closer to 2500 kcal. The typical American consumes over 3700, and you can find the full breakdown of calorie consumption per capita by country here.

But what does that number mean? What do our bodies do with all that energy? Most of it is …more →

I recently saw the total number of hours I spent playing a particular online video game between the ages of twelve and fifteen. It was a number I’d hoped never to see, and it was somewhere close to 1600.

I made some money playing that video game. I was good at it. I won’t tell you how much it was, but I’ve done the math and it comes out to somewhere around the minimum wage at the time I played, so I can’t feel too bad about the time wasted. A lot of people spend that sort of time working for that kind of money at some point. I was paid to play video games, eat ball park hot dogs and watch comedy central presents before I was even old enough to get a real summer job.

Still, that’s sixty-six days gone, more than a fifth of a year. Assuming I make …more →