As I am wont to do, I pick up newspapers while travelling. It is not good for my mental health but what can I do — sometimes newspapers hold the sort of fascination for me that rubberneckers have for gruesome road accidents. An item in yesterday’s Times of India (ok, ok, bad move I know) caught my eye: “Just a bottle of water can power your home.”

Just a bottle of water powering my home? That’s amazing. I have lots of water at home. OK, tell me more, I said. I continued reading. Fascinating stuff.

It appears that all you need is a bottle of water, to power your home if you live in the average house in a developing country. A bottle of water and a bit more: a 30-square meter of photovoltaic cells, four hours of sunlight, a tank to store the hydrogen that is produced by using the electricity from the photovoltaic cells to split the water into oxygen and hydrogen, a fuel cell to use the hydrogen to as fuel and combine it with oxygen to produce the electricity for powering your home. And all this from a bottle of water! Amazing!!

(The cunning plan is to use the hydrogen to power the fuel cells and to liquify the oxygen for Ajit to use for his diabolical schemes.)

Now I understood the miracle of it all. Inspired by that I wrote to the Times of India. I wrote, “Just some air is all you need to move about the city.” I explained that all you need is air, and then you mix some fuel with it, and put an electric spark into the air fuel mixture, and do this controlled explosion in an internal combustion engine, and voila! you have air powering your transportation. All you need is petroleum fuel, an internal combustion engine, the rest of the car and that’s it.

(The Times of India article quote appears at the end of this post.)

Retardedness is manifested in all human endeavours. Stupidity is a common human condition. No one, present company not excepted, is immune from it. But for real USDA Grade AAA retardedness it is hard to beat the Times of India.

The Times of India reports stupid stuff like it is going out of fashion.

How does one then explain the popularity of that rag? I suppose stupidity sells. Stupidity mixed with pictures of scantily clad white females. That’s clearly an explosively popular combination. Like combining hydrogen and oxygen.

With one bottle of drinking water and four hours of sunlight, an MIT scientist says he can produce 30 KWh of electricity — enough to power an entire household in the developing world.

With three gallons of river water, Dan Nocera says he could satisfy the daily energy needs of a large American home. The key to these claims is a new, affordable catalyst that uses solar electricity to split water and generate hydrogen. reports physorg.com.

Using the electricity generated from a 30-square-meter photovoltaic array, Nocera’s cobalt-phosphate catalyst converts water and carbon dioxide into hydrogen and oxygen. The process is similar to photosynthesis, except that in nature, plants create energy in the form of sugars instead of hydrogen.

The hydrogen produced through artificial photosynthesis can be stored in a tank and later used to produce electricity by being recombined with oxygen in a fuel cell, even when the sun isn’t shining. Alternatively, the hydrogen can be converted into a liquid fuel. “Almost all the solar energy is stored in water splitting”, Nocera said at the first-ever ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy) conference last Tuesday. “We emulated photosynthesis for largescale storage of solar energy.”

The retards who wrote that do not understand the distinction between an energy source (petroleum, etc) and the working fluid (water in the case of steam engines, air in the case of internal combustion engines, etc.)