#entropy

The global industrial economy is the engine for massive environmental degradation and massive human (and nonhuman) impoverishment. ↗

— Derrick Jensen

#entropy #environmental-degradation #global-industrial-economy #impoverishment #economy

I think that there's something extremely beautiful about the Olympic ideal and its motto - 'Swifter, higher, stronger' - it's such a beautiful motto, and it celebrates everything which is the antithesis of death and dissolution and entropy. ↗

— Chris Cleave

#antithesis #beautiful #celebrates #death #dissolution

Franz said 'Your picture, Viki, suggests that sense of breaking-up we feel in the modern world. Families, nations, classes, other loyalty groups falling apart. Things changing before you get to know them. Death on the installment plan – or decay by jumps. Instantaneous birth. Something out of nothing. Reality replacing science fiction so fast that you can't tell which is which. Constant sense of deja-vu - 'I was here before, but when, how?' Even the possibility that there's no real continuity between events, just inexplicable gaps. And of course every gap – every crack – means a new perching place for horror. ↗

— Fritz Leiber

#entropy #horror #change

Heretics are the only bitter remedy against the entropy of human thought. ↗

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

#bitter #entropy #heretics #human #human thought

Just because something bears the aspect of the inevitable one should not, therefore, go along willingly with it. ↗

— Philip K. Dick

#rebel #rebellion #revolution #revolution

Only entropy comes easy. ↗

— Anton Chekhov

#easy #entropy #only

We could not, for example, arrive at a principle like that of entropy without introducing some additional principle, such as randomness, to this topography. ↗

— Michael Polanyi

#arrive #could #entropy #example #for example

Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the second law of thermodynamics; i.e. it always increases. ↗

— Norman Ralph Augustine

#difficult #entropy #grasp #i #increases

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

Everything that comes together falls apart. Everything. The chair I’m sitting on. It was built, and so it will fall apart. I’m gonna fall apart, probably before this chair. And you’re gonna fall apart. The cells and organs and systems that make you you—they came together, grew together, and so must fall apart. The Buddha knew one thing science didn’t prove for millennia after his death: Entropy increases. Things fall apart. ↗

— John Green

#decomposition #entropy #fall-apart #science #together