GinohnNews

G: This past weekend was the Festival of Lights craft fair at the Greenbelt Community center, so I spent most of my time there. I staffed the booth and did a demo on Saturday, and Sunday I spent time in my studio for the "Artful Afternoon" portion of the weekend. I did well at the sale and only bought one thing at the fair.

Sunday night I went to Kevin's to work on a dvd. I videotaped people dancing to Jonathan Coulton songs at the last dance night, and Kevin made it into a fancy movie for me. He also put the segments on youtube. Look here. Fun!

I spent last night making up a cover for the dvd I'm going to send to JoCo. John helped me.

I forgot about reporting for jury duty Monday morning. I looked at my calendar that afternoon and went, "D'OH!" I was a bit scared at first because it says all sorts of nasty things can happen to those who do not report. But I called them and now I have to go in next Monday. I hope I don't forget again.

It snowed today! All day! YAY!.

J: As our oil culture runs out of oil, various crackpots, scam artists, and well-intentioned but confused people are turning to alternative sources of energy that just aren't going to cut it. If more people understood the game of energy and the laws of thermodynamics, they might be able to easily dismiss some of these "new energy" ideas. Some examples that come to mind are the compressed air car, energy from salt water, making oil from trash, and "zero-point" energy concepts.

Thermodynamics is like a long, evil game of tic tac toe, with three main rules:

1. You can't win.
2. You can't break even.
3. You can't get out of the game.

What do these rules mean? Let's play the game of energy with a simple electric battery.

• You can't win: If you store energy in a battery, you can't get more energy out.
• You can't break even: If you store energy in a battery, some energy escapes before you use it. The amount of energy you use from the battery to, say, run an electric motor, is always less than the energy it took to charge the battery.
• You can't get out of the game: In our universe, all sources of potential energy have the same rules applied; all storage sources can be thought of as "batteries." Some batteries are bigger or older, or translate energy differently (through heat, sound, light, motion, etc.) but no source can escape the first two rules. Energy is always in one of two modes: potential (i.e. stored in a battery), or kinetic (i.e. on it's way to another battery). Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only translated to other forms and modes; and the translation is never perfectly efficient, so some of that energy escapes to do its own thing.

"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play." True, Joshua, but unfortunately there is also another, lesser known rule, sometimes referred to as the "zeroth" rule:

0. We must play the game.

Everything in our universe plays the energy game, and everything must follow the rules. This is why there will never be a perpetual motion machine (despite numerous patents which claim otherwise). If you think something is missing or that maybe science is wrong about the game, you will have a seriously hard time proving your claim. As Einstein once said, "Thermodynamics is the only physical theory of universal content which, within the framework of the applicability of its basic concepts, I am convinced will never be overthrown." So far, no one has beaten the game, or gotten out of it.

The reason why oil and nuclear materials and geothermal sources act as such great batteries is that they have taken millions and billions of years to store energy. It's going to be difficult to replace such sources and get the same capacity. Ethanol, for example, comes from plants converting solar energy to sugars, but over a span of months — not millions of years — at less than a kilowatt per square meter of plants.

Now we'll play the game of energy with some of the kookier ideas for alternative energy sources:

Burning sea water
Several months ago there was this inventor who claimed to have found a new energy source. He pointed a radio transmitter at a beaker of salt water, turned the transmitter on and lit the surface of the water. It burned. Real flames, and a real energy source, but at what cost? Here's what was happening: The radio waves were separating hydrogen and oxygen out of the salt water, and less efficiently than the common method of sticking two live electric wires in salt water. The process is called electrolysis. The energy required to do that (through radiant electromagnetic waves) was much more than the energy he got back from burning the hydrogen at the surface of the water. Burning essentially bound some of the hydrogen atoms back to oxygen atoms, releasing heat and light less than the amount of radiant energy aimed at the water (only some of which happened to split the water molecules in the first place). There was no extra potential energy being stored or released, and the radio transmitter had to be run from another energy source (a wall outlet) to keep the whole system going. Practically all of the energy out—heat and light—was coming from the wall outlet, and less efficiently than if you plugged a light bulb in the outlet instead, because some energy escapes during each translation— from electrical to radio to electrolysis to fire. You can't win.

Compressed air engines
Engines that run off of compressed air really work, but they are highly inefficient and rely on other energy sources to compress the air, wasting more energy along the way. I'm pretty sure that the guy selling air cars to gullible governments and investors is either deluded or a con man. I've heard promises of an air car for over a decade now. An electric car is probably more efficient, because the energy doesn't have to be transformed as many times along the way, from electricity to a compressor to a high pressure container to pistons. And, just as with electric cars, the energy has to come from somewhere to begin with. You can't break even.

Gas from trash
A few years ago some guys were running from city to city showing off an amazing machine that ground up and compressed waste into oil, using pressure and heat. This is certainly possible to do (after all, that's the way the Earth made oil) but you can't run such a machine and produce a surplus of oil from garbage, with enough left over to continue running the machine. Again, you can't break even. Granted, in this case the machine is stocked with new fuel (the garbage) but the energy required to turn it into oil makes the method ridiculously silly. Nonetheless, these guys did better than break even, monetarily speaking. They made off with a few huge grants. Amazing trash compactors are still being sold to governments. They run on diesel and produce a little oil, and leave lots of waste behind too. A more efficient way to get energy out of garbage is to let it rot and capture the methane.

Zero point or vacuum energy
This type of energy (a very weak but demonstrable form of energy that produces the weird Casimir force) is a big hit in the new-age perpetual machine field, because crackpots think it is a way to circumvent the laws of thermodynamics and get "free" energy. It isn't. Like machines that run off of other forces — gravity and magnetism — the forces that impel or attract cannot switch on command without an introduction of extra energy, and these machines quickly succumb to friction. You can't get out of the game.

As long as we're all playing the energy game, we should keep the rules in mind and eliminate claims that seem to violate the rules. In the meantime, we can hope some genius figures out how to build Mr. Fusion, because we must play the game.