> The most impressive think that stuck with me is that humans are incredibly efficient, from an energy perspective, in anything we do, compared to machines.

Humans are efficient, but not across the board. Trivial counterexample: walking is incredibly energy inefficient vs a bicycle or other wheeled conveyances whose primary dissipater is rolling resistance.

"Every time we delegate a task to a machine, we are using several orders of magnitude of energy to do the same thing."

Might this just be selection bias? I mean, if humans can't do a task efficiently, we're not going to do the comparison with a machine.

Some actions we do seem (to me) very inefficient when compared with machines. For example: grating carrots and brushing teeth.

If you live in most places in the US other than the urban heart of a few very large cities you have to take a huge hit to your ability to get places in a reasonable time frame without a car. I have hope some more cities other than NYC are improving the situation, but as it is the closest I got to using public transit for a commute was when I was going to one of our other offices in a different downtown area I would drive my car to the park n ride to take the train the rest of the way. The train saves time and sanity because traffic downtown is a nightmare, but that drive takes 5 minutes, and it would add 20+ minutes if I had to walk to the closest bus stop so I could take the bus up to the train station.

If you're comparing raw calories to output, yes. Even gasoline has a caloric value, but humans can't drink gasoline. Growing and preparing food for human consumption uses a lot more energy than pumping and refining gasoline, so at the end of the day, human efficiency gains are not that impressive.

Unfortunately, humans want houses and cars and vacations and such, which makes them very expensive. ;)

A trained powerlifter probably exerts a few kW on a heavy lift, but only for a second or two.

Can you still touch your toes? I doubt Robert could... hopefully your own practice leaves you more balanced.

I'm sure he could have generated way more total energy if he wasn't trying to get get that max power.

1HP sustained is not insane for a horse. A human OTOH is a very different matter.

Spend 30 minutes charging a battery and you should have enough energy to turn any flavour of pop-tart into carbon flavour.

Even without a battery, I could easily imagine designing an efficient single slice toaster that could handily brown a pop tart on a 300W budget.

That actually could toast a few batches of Pop-Tarts.

If you like then "golden," perhaps the entire box.

At low effort (i.e. active recovery can-do-this-all-day-every-day) levels, it's quite efficient. That assumes that you're fine with whatever let's say ~120w continuous can get you, which is what the m5 max 16'' mbp peaks at (in my case) during inference (ds4-flash)... so I guess it's quite usable, actually :)

Imagine the work(out)station of the future.

</s> (or not)

Yes, Fifteen million merits, one of my favorite episodes.

> power a modest sound system

please don't inflict your music on everyone around you.

Some of the bottle style ones claim to go up to 6W, they would also be easier to double or triple up. They are not nearly as nice and efficient as the hub dynamos though

As an average male who is ~175lbs and untrained at cycling, this is hugely validating for my terrible idea; 140 watts is the max charging speed for 16" M5 MacBooks. I can finally stop thinking for myself and have my computer do it all for me, powered by my big beefy legs.

That's solid. If my memory is correct, and my teachers were correct (both of these are suspect) back in high school, a human should be able to momentarily exert about 1 horsepower at maximum effort. We did an experiment on how much power we could output at maximum effort. We tested it by sprinting up some number of flights of stairs, and timing it. As I recall we did conclude that in round numbers the hypothesis was correct.

But that was 35 years ago and it was a high school physics experiment meant to be entertaining more than precise.

I'm still sour they had only one toast in, in a two slot toaster