Oh, just trying to put an upper bound on what kind of power generation is possible from a human body.

I did lug one of those small $100 Goal Zero solar kits with me on a 10-day hike. After each day, it didn't really give me enough to maintain a charge on my 2200mAh Nexus 5, but it did give maybe half a charge on my 1500mAh iPhone 5s, which was enough to keep taking pictures.

Not that I'd be willing to pedal for 15 minutes to charge a phone after hiking 10 miles in the mountains. But there might be some circumstances where it would be worthwhile to have a hand-crank / pedal-crank generator for emergencies or whatever if it's impractical to regularly haul gas or batteries to the place.

Back to the financial comparison, "The Simple Science of Flight" book I was reading also had some estimates of the energy content of different foods you could feed a human power source.... peanut butter and oil were high on the energy/dollar list, meats and veggies were pretty low. Still, I do find it intriguing that a human is able to generate enough energy to power a half-decent smartphone nowadays, which likely wasn't the case when "The Matrix" first came out and enslaved humanity to generate power after the sun was blotted out.

Just for comparison's sake, the average cyclist might be able to produce ~200W of useful power (after metabolic losses), an athletic cyclist can sustain about ~400W.

So if you cycle for an hour to produce 0.2kWh of energy, that's about 2 cents of energy you can produce at the going rate of 10 cents per kWh on the grid.

Now, a large smartphone or tablet might have a 4000mAh battery. With a 5V charger, 200Wh of energy would give about 10 charges (before electrical losses, so practically maybe 3-4 charges). That's not too bad if you don't have an electrical power grid handy.

Yep, that sounds like some weird bitter irony:

Problem: We can't released all of the excess stored solar energy (compacted into fossil fuel over the millennia) fast enough!
Solution: Reduce the amount of solar energy the Earth receives now!

Way to rob the future to pay for the past.

Word! And speaking a someone with the exact same BS degree from Cornell as Bill Nye, I wouldn't hesitate to characterize my profession as "Digital Plumber"

Eh, it goes both ways. I was volunteering at the ASME coffee shop at the Cornell Sibley School of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering student lounge, when Bill Nye stopped by to say 'hi' on his way to give a talk in an auditorium.

Of course, we grew up in the Mr. Wizard generation, so the students studying in the lounge kinda glanced up at him, shrugged, and went back on to work with their problem sets.

I'm still sort of kicking myself for not trying to sell him a bagel or muffin, or even giving him one on the house. But whatever, the older I get, the more I realize I'm probably also an asshole.

apt-get -y install unattended-upgrades

That should automagically take care of security upgrades regularly.

Then you only have to worry about the regular upgrades... or not.

So believe it or not, we actually have a couple of decades' worth of data showing how technology is changing the workforce, painstakingly tracked by the BLS...
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...

Yes, computers took away your secretaries, and replaced them with truck drivers.

Yes, truck drivers ought to worry about self-driving trucks, or else they too will need to learn to become software developers or primary school teachers.