Saturday, June 15, 2019

Entropy

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars. -Walt Whitman, poet

Williamsburg is lovely. Our condo is terrific. Long drive with my stops and a long stretch of road work on the beautiful route 17.
Chris is coming home today.
Liz is flying down here today and her Uber was involved in an accident on the way (Uber vs Uber!) and she made the flight by minutes.


A Bruin win would have given Boston its 13th championship in two decades and made Boston the first city since Detroit in 1935–36 to win three titles in one year.

From Chris: Outfielder Austin Meadows went into play Monday leading the American League in hitting with a .346 average. And, maybe more impressively, ranking third in the voting for starting spots on the All-Star team.
In a battle for last place last night, Reynolds went 4 for 5 in an 11-0 win. Imagine Reynolds and Meadows, two rookies in the outfield.

Though there is an elaborate psychopolitical effort underway to pretend otherwise, investigations already taking place by the inspector general of the Justice Department, a special counsel, and the attorney general of the United States, about to be joined by the Senate Judiciary Committee, will call upon the chief intelligence and law officers of the Obama administration, along with Hillary Clinton and members of her campaign staff, to account for their conduct. These include lies under oath to congressional committees, lies to federal officials, and misleading the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court. This is a series of dishonest statements and illegal acts that can only, at least provisionally, be seen as a coordinated campaign to influence the results of the presidential election and then to compromise the unwished-for outcome of that election. It will not be long before we hear the still familiar words, in reference to President Obama: “What did the president know and when did he know it?”--Nat Rev
If this turns out to be true, this will be a nightmare.

Philippic. Noun.  A bitter condemnation, usually in a speech.
From Greek philippikos, the name given to orator Demosthenes’s speeches urging Athenians to rise up against Philip II of Macedon.

Gas will start flowing from Cuadrilla’s two shale exploration wells in Lancashire this year. Preliminary analysis of the site is “very encouraging”, bearing out the British Geological Survey’s analysis that the Bowland Shale beneath northern England holds one of the richest gas resources known: a huge store of energy at a cost well below that of renewables and nuclear.

A recent study by economists at the University of Washington finds that the minimum wage in Seattle increased wages by 3 percent but reduced work hours by 6 to 7 percent. Let's do this nationally.

Texas kids of the entrepreneurial variety are now free to sell lemonade. Gov. Greg Abbott (R) signed a law on Monday that will allow children to set up lemonade stands without a permit. These are grownups.

Diane Hendricks is, according to Forbes, the richest self-made woman in the country, with a fortune estimated at around $7.2 billion. Her wealth swamps that of better-known billionaires like eBay veteran Meg Whitman, Oprah Winfrey, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, and Kylie Jenner. 

The Congo outbreak is both the second largest and second deadliest Ebola outbreak in history.
More than 1,300 people have died since it began in August.

                                                        Entropy


"Entropy is a measure of molecular disorder within a macroscopic system."

"The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases over time."

"Entropy is a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system's thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system."

And my favorite, "The direction of time is determined by which direction makes entropy go up."

But entropy is the universe' agent of change.
The great problems in the thinking world include how substance and order emerged out of energy and disorder, how the animate emerged from the inanimate, how consciousness emerged from no consciousness.  German physicist Rudolf Clausius’s paper on disorder, ‘On the Moving Force of Heat’ (1850), was published the same year that he became a professor of physics at the Royal Artillery and Engineering School in Berlin. In that paper, Clausius showed that change in the physical world is associated with the inevitable movement of order to disorder.
Indeed, without the potential of disorder, nothing in the cosmos would ever change. 
‘Heat’ occurs in the title of Clausius’s paper because increasing disorder is often associated with the transfer of heat from hot bodies to cold – but the concept is more general. In a later paper, Clausius coined the term entropy as a quantitative measure of disorder. The word comes from the Greek ἐν (en)meaning ‘in’, and τροπή (tropē), meaning ‘transformation’. It is the increase of entropy that is linked to transformation, movement, change in the world. The more disorder, the more entropy. The last two sentences of Clausius’s 1850 paper are:
1. The energy of the Universe is constant
2. The entropy of the Universe tends toward a maximum
How does this order and complexity happen?

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