this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
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If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
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If you really think about it. All any appliance does is turn energy into heat.
Saying that all appliances turn energy to heat is true, but saying that all appliances do is turn energy in to heat is not. While heat is still a byproduct, lots of appliances make things move as well.
For heat pumps, the thing they're moving is heat.
They’re really moving refrigerant. It’s just that the refrigerant keeps changing temperature (heating up at one end of the journey and cooling down at the other end).
More specifically, we force it to undergo phase changes under different pressures, and in doing so it absorbs/releases latent heat in the air. It's converting latent heat to sensible heat.
And what is that movent? Eventually decays into heat.
I understand that, and called it out in my comment. Heat being a byproduct of movement does not mean that a device that creates movement "only" creates heat. That's like saying all drink dispensers only dispense piss, because what does it eventually turn in to?
Why stop at appliances? By that logic, humans are nothing more than self-propelled heaters. The whole universe is nothing but shifting pockets of heat like the ripples of a pond bouncing back and forth until they all disappear.
Such nihilism.
I read somewhere that when engineers are designing home heating/ cooling systems, they factor in the number of humans in a home as 100 watts each. I think dogs are 50 watts.
Are we not?
We also have the ability to think sometimes
Overrated apparently
There was a paper floating around about a decade ago. Basically it was asserting that biological life is the natural outcome of entropy itself. Bc living beings are especially good at increasing entropy over time. Not sure if it was credible but a fun idea nontheless
False. My water filter pitcher does not turn energy into heat.
(Ok, fine, it uses gravity to move the water through a filter, which technically converts some of the potential energy of the water into heat through friction, but that’s not something the pitcher does, that’s something the earth does that the pitcher uses to its advantage.)
Not an appliance, that's a tool.
I would say it falls under definition 2b here:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/appliance
Oooh I love debating semantics. Is a sieve an appliance? A slotted spoon? They both work in the same way as your water filter.
Common usage of the quantifier kitchen appliances indicates use of electricity. I would describe my electric coffee grinder as a small appliance, but not my mortar and pestle.
Yes, kitchen appliance usually means powered by gas or electricity, but if something is powered by gravity, it’s still an outside power source. So that’s what I would say the difference is.
A mortar and pestle is powered by your own movement. A filter pitcher is powered by gravity. So I would say that it’s an appliance because of that. A sieve and a slotted spoon are a harder delineation, since they both are partially powered by gravity. I would say that because they have no moving parts, they are not machines, and so may not be considered appliances, but that’s only my own thoughts, not a dictionary definition requirement. Topologically, a sieve and a filter pitcher are basically the same thing. So that’s a conundrum.