Eliezer Yudkowsky (I'll remove the underscores from now on): I enjoyed reading this, but I don't quite understand all the references to the impossibility of turning warm water into electricity and ice cubes: You don't need extra information or violation of the laws of physics to do this. You could run a heat engine off the temperature difference between the warm water and the environment, and have that work drive a refrigerator. It's just that you couldn't exploit this phenomenon to make a perpetual motion machine.

I probably missed an implicit (or explicit!) qualification of all that, and if so, reader new to thermodynamics can just take this as a clarification.