81. Editor's Daily Blog: Entropy I interpret entropy to mean that the wind could not possibly have left my room neater than it was. entropy also argues in favor of refactoring. http://weblogs.java.net/blog/editors/archives/2003/11/entropy.html

User: Password: Register Login help My pages Projects ... java.net Get Involved java-net Project Request a Project Project Help Wanted Ads Publicize your Project ... Submit Content Get Informed About java.net Articles Blogs Events ... java.net Archives Get Connected java.net Forums Wiki and Javapedia People Partners , and Jobs Java User Groups RSS Feeds Search Web and Projects: Online Books: Advanced Search Editor's Daily Blog Main Entropy Posted by daniel on November 13, 2003 at 08:18 AM Comments (2) Last night we had high winds in the midwest. Our house lost a piece of gutter and my office window blew open scattering papers everywhere. I interpret entropy to mean that the wind could not possibly have left my room neater than it was. Entropy also argues in favor of refactoring. Sure there are arguments against refactoring and we pointed to them this summer when the debate heated up after Bob Cringely wrote an article based on correspondence with Paul Tyma . Tyma wrote "'Cleaning up code' is a terrible thing. Redesigning WORKING code into different WORKING code (also known as refactoring) is terrible. The reason is that once you touch WORKING code, it becomes NON-WORKING code, and the changes you make (once you get it working again) will never be known. " And yet I look at the loose papers covering my floor. Everything I need is there. It is possible, if I take the time to organize these papers into piles and folders that I will spend time on pages that I will never need to look at again. Perhaps that time is wasted. But when it comes time for me to find something I need, I'd like to be able to put my hand right on it.

82. Entropy, Disorder And Life Creationists claim that the second law of thermodynamics prevents order from increasing in natural processes. In fact, thermodynamics is not concerned at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/thermo/entropy.html

Entropy, Disorder and Life by John Pieper [updated: May 24, 2002] Other Links: Post of the Month: August 2001 Gordon Davisson explains why the macroscopic arrangement of an object's atoms and molecules is for all practical purposes irrelevant when attempting to calculate its entropy. t is often asserted by creationists that the evolution of life is impossible because this would require an increase in order, whereas the second law of thermodynamics states that "in any natural process the amount of disorder increases", or some similar claim. "Entropy" is frequently used as a synonym for "disorder". Of course, this represents a serious misunderstanding of what thermodynamics actually states. It can be explained patiently (or less than patiently, after the 1000th iteration or so) that entropy only strictly increases in an isolated system; that there are no completely isolated systems in nature, save maybe the universe as a whole; and that the whole idea of isolated systems is really an abstraction for pedagogical purposes; but still the creationist won't let go. There just has to be some reason why "order cannot come from disorder", and the reason must be in thermodynamics. That's the science that talks about order and disorder, isn't it?

83. Entropy Gradient Reversals Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle http://www.panix.com/userdirs/clocke/EGR/

New! October 17: Writer's Block We Came We Clicked We Yawned RageBoy Rants on Microsoft no lie click the eyeball Microsoft took a look at EGR and decided they liked our style. It's true: there's no accounting for taste. Here's the initial proposal we sent them when they asked what we might do for their "Start" page. The Official Invitation (un)Subscribe Here For Free! Here Comes the New Media! Meet the Editor ... The Early Years - We Smell A Rat "If you can digest all of RageBoy's angry prose, we have some James Joyce for you to translate into ancient Incan." -Howard Greenstein writing in Larry Chase's Web Digest For Marketers ...lest we forget The Kontent! meanwhile, what the critics are saying about EGR... "lethal" the gate "passion-driven" microsoft "a visionary e-zine" sun microsystems press "EGR - [zine]" www acronym server "get it, live it, love it" t@p online "biting sarcasm" 4work.com "no-holds-barred, in your face web journalism" callahan "RageBoy® - web virtuoso run amok"

84. The Entropy www.theentropy.ca/ 1k - Cached - Similar pages entropy from FOLDOCThe entropy of a system is related to the amount of information it contains. A highly ordered system can be described using fewer bits of information than a http://www.theentropy.ca/

85. BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Beads Of Doubt The law of entropy, or the Second Law of Thermodynamics, The Second Law states that the entropy or disorder - of a closed system always increases. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2135779.stm

CATEGORIES TV RADIO COMMUNICATE ... INDEX SEARCH You are in: Science/Nature News Front Page World UK ... Programmes SERVICES Daily E-mail News Ticker Mobile/PDAs Text Only ... Help EDITIONS Change to World Thursday, 18 July, 2002, 11:09 GMT 12:09 UK Beads of doubt Future vision: Nano-subs would seek and destroy cancer (Image by Science Photo Library) By Dr David Whitehouse BBC News Online science editor One of the most important principles of physics, that disorder, or entropy, always increases, has been shown to be untrue. This result has profound consequences for any chemical or physical process that occurs over short times and in small regions ANU team Scientists at the Australian National University (ANU) have carried out an experiment involving lasers and microscopic beads that disobeys the so-called Second Law of Thermodynamics, something many scientists had considered impossible. The finding has implications for nanotechnology - the design and construction of molecular machines. They may not work as expected. It may also help scientists better understand DNA and proteins, molecules that form the basis of life and whose behaviour in some circumstances is not fully explained.

86. Crypto At Lothar GPG. The GNU Privacy Guard is a GPL ed implementation of the new OpenPGP standard (RFC 2440). It is mostly interoperable with PGP 5.0, uses no patented or http://www.lothar.com/tech/crypto/

Crypto GPG The GNU Privacy Guard is a GPL'ed implementation of the new OpenPGP standard (RFC 2440). It is mostly interoperable with PGP 5.0, uses no patented or otherwise restricted algorithms, and can be used legally just about everywhere (except perhaps France where a lot of crypto is just plain outlawed). I'm following the development closely, submitting bug reports and suggestions. I'm hoping to see some extensions put in place that will make it easy to, for instance, keep my private key on an iButton or in my Pilot. My GPG public key is available here . Feel free to use it when you send me mail. Most of the files I make available for download are signed with it. Mailcrypt + GPG Mailcrypt is a package for Emacs that makes it easy to sign, encrypt, verify, and decrypt message in email or news. It removes all of the hassle from using encryption in your every day correspondence. Len Budney is the new maintainer of MailCrypt, having added support for PGP 5.0 in addition to the original PGP 2.6 . I've added support for GPG to MailCrypt. It's working pretty well, and is now part of the standard distribution. For the latest version, check out the

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