Stupid biochem question...

On a large scale, life is a nonequilibrium phenomenon, driven by a free energy flux coming from the sun. On a smaller scale, it's chemical: we eat stuff, and burn it, oxidize it, and exhale the CO2. So you can also see life as a flow of redox potential, or so says the book in front of me. But are these different? Different language for the same thing, or separable concepts? Is this flow of redox potential just the form that the energy flow takes, or are they (even sometimes) distinct?

I really care. I'm not saying "energy flow" to be merely mystical or evocative (though it is that), but because it matters, both philosophically and professionally.

Damn. So much learning, so little knowledge. Or maybe I'm just stupid.

Faux cowboy poem

Across the west white hills I saw
three horses
one black, one gray, one dun
they were ridden by no one
they walked real slow, heads bowed
down towards the setting sun

So long, Art

I wrote not long ago of a friend, seriously ill, but in recovery. Or so I wrote. And hoped. But it was not to be: he died last week. No flowers, said the obit, just donations to the Liver Foundation. Damn it, I thought you were going to make it. I thought you were going to be okay. I thought you were going to come back. But no.

None of us are getting out of here alive, though, as another friend said. It's just a question of how and when. And what you do before you go.