Citizen: *goes to college, accumulates at least tens of thousands of dollars in debt, almost burns out*
HR interviewer: You’ve got the education, but we’re not sure you have the knowledge and experience necessary for this line of work.
Citizen: I also…. Know how, to…. use Excel(?)
Interviewer: *trying to hide massive work-boner while noticeably sweating* Go on….
Lmaoooooo true. Reblogging for those looking to add marketable skills to their applications
This is being reblogged on my main. Learning Excel, even at my basic level (I don’t know how to do most of the above), has made me far more employable as well. I’m probably the biggest Luddite on this site too. If I can learn it you can too.
Thesecond law of thermodynamics implies that there is a directionality to the flow of energy - that it will always move from a point of higher potential to a point of lower potential - and that as energy flows through a process, it becomes harder for us to use it - i.e., it is more difficult to convert into work.
This is something we know on an intuitive level - we know devices that do work produce heat. A motor shaft spinning will heat the air around it. But we know this only goes one way - heating the air won’t make the shaft spin. The upshot is that it is very easy to convert work to heat. Converting heat to work is much harder. In fact, if we want to convert heat to work, we need a special class of device to do it. This is called a heat engine.
The particulars of individual heat engines can vary quite a bit, but they usually involve the manipulation of some sort of fluid (referred to as the working fluid) through a repeating cycle. That said, all heat engines operate in the same basic way on a fundamental level. They take in heat from a high temperature source and convert some of it to work. The rest they expel to a lower temperature sink.
A couple of things to note about this diagram and heat sinks in general:
1.The work out is a net term - that is, the heat engine requires some work input to operate. The net work out is the difference between the work put into the device and the work it produces.
2.The first law of thermodynamics tells us that energy is conserved throughout this process, meaning that the net work out and the waste heat out must sum to the heat in. Or, put another way, you can figure out the net work out by looking at the difference between the heat in and the heat out.
“Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music.” —Betrand Russell
