Re: [privacy] Medical firms sue to access Rx information

[der Mouse <mouse () Rodents Montreal QC CA>]

[This doesn't have much to do with privacy any longer; perhaps it
should move somewhere else?]

> The laws of thermodynamics make pulling hydrogen from water impractical.  

> More energy goes in than comes out.

The latter is true.  The former is not.

Cracking water into hydrogen and oxygen is not done because it's an
energy win.  It's done in order to convert energy that's available in a
less useful form into some other more useful form.

To pick one simple example, let's suppose that we're using sunlight as
the energy source to crack water.  We can't save up sunlight from large
areas over long times and then use it in small bursts to drive a car.
But we *can* crack water gradually, over long periods and large areas,
bottle up the hydrogen, and use *that* in small bursts to drive a car.
(We'd need to bottle up the oxygen too, except that the atmosphere's so
full of oxygen that it makes a trivial transport medium for it.)

The research in this area is all about reducing the losses in
converting the incoming energy into the chemical energy inherent in
unburnt hydrogen, and improving the ways the hydrogen is stored,
transported, and burnt (improving in terms of not only energy
efficiency but safety, convenience, and other practical ways).

Similar remarks apply to using wind power, say.

Of course, chemical energy storage (such as hydrogen) is not suitable
for every need.  Much energy use doesn't need storage; that's why we
have an electrical grid - to average out use that's highly bursty at
the small scale over large areas to get a demand smooth enough to
satisfy with generators having relatively constant output, and to put
economy-of-scale to work (since a few big generators can satisfy the
demand more cheaply in almost all respects that lots of little
generators).

Fossil fuels are really just instances of the same thing, but with a
time delay - a very long time delay, on human timescales - between
converting sunlight into chemical energy and then using that chemical
energy to, say, drive a car.  (Almost all of the forms of energy
available to us can be traced fairly drectly to sunlight.  The one
exception is nuclear energy, which is a long-term form of storage for
energy from novas and supernovas.)

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