#classification

We all behave like Maxwell’s demon. Organisms organize. In everyday experience lies the reason sober physicists across two centuries kept this cartoon fantasy alive. We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, and put our rooms in order, and all this we do requires no great energy, as long as we can apply intelligence. We propagate structure (not just we humans but we who are alive). We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium. It would be absurd to attempt a thermodynamic accounting for such processes, but it is not absurd to say we are reducing entropy, piece by piece. Bit by bit. The original demon, discerning one molecules at a time, distinguishing fast from slow, and operating his little gateway, is sometimes described as “superintelligent,” but compared to a real organism it is an idiot savant. Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells and carapaces, leaves and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways - miracles of pattern and structure. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe. ↗

— James Gleick

#entropy #information #maxwell #organization #experience

In my country of South Africa, we struggled for years against the evil system of apartheid that divided human beings, children of the same God, by racial classification and then denied many of them fundamental human rights. ↗

— Desmond Tutu

#against #apartheid #beings #children #classification

I was part of the draft resistance movement in L.A. where we did demonstrations at the draft centre and burned our cards and made a lot of trouble on campus. I had a student classification and they said that anybody who'd taken part in these demonstrations would be reclassified and drafted. And that's when I went to Canada. ↗

— Cheech Marin

#burned #campus #canada #cards #centre

The proposition of an established classification of states as slave states and free states, as insisted on by some, and into northern and southern, as maintained by others, seems to me purely imaginary, and of course the supposed equilibrium of those classes a mere conceit. ↗

— William H. Seward

#classification #conceit #course #equilibrium #established

The higher the classification of secrecy, the quicker you will report it. ↗

— George P. Shultz

#higher #quicker #report #secrecy #will

العيال اللى كانت بتقعد ف أول ديسك وبيتصاحبوا على المدرسين ويفتنوا على أصحابهم، غالبًا لما يكبروا بيبقوا إخوان. والعيال عديمة الموهبة اللي نفسهم يبقوا حاجة بالعافية، بيكبروا ويبقوا ظباط. والعيال اللى كانت بتجيب معاها حلويات مستوردة والمقلمة أم دورين، هم وأصحابهم بيبقوا فلول. والعيال اللى كانت بتقعد معاك ورا تقشّر يوستفاندى وتقزقز لب سوبر وتقلب ريحة الفصل، بيكبروا يبقوا ليبراليين ويطلع ميتين أبوهم علشان علّموا على كل العيال دى وهمّ صغيرين. ↗

— مصطفى إبراهيم

#politicial #social #socialism

I would never jeopardize classified information to be brought out to the public. This information is all open source. There is no reason to worry about classification. It is simply an attempt by bureaucrats to cover their rear ends. ↗

— Curt Weldon

#attempt #brought #bureaucrats #classification #classified

Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive. ↗

— Roland Barthes

#classification #code #forget #language #legislation

It seems we will continue to have problems with this classification and it may be because it comes under the heading of creation rather than preservation. ↗

— Walter Lang

#classification #comes #continue #creation #heading

Science is the systematic classification of experience. ↗

— George Henry Lewes

#experience #science #systematic