#sifi

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

Mr. Luskin also says that Rove did not knowingly disclose classified information and did not tell any reporters that Valerie Plame worked for the C.I.A. ↗

— Michael Isikoff

#any #classified #classified information #did #disclose

Speech sounds cannot be understood, delimited, classified and explained except in the light of the tasks which they perform in language. ↗

— Roman Jakobson

#classified #except #explained #language #light

And what we're doing in Ohio is we're moving from a basic manufacturing economy to one that's diversified, including energy and health care and agriculture and IT. ↗

— John Kasich

#basic #care #diversified #doing #economy

When shopping was still connected to the street it was also an intensification and articulation of the street. Now it has become utterly independent - contained, controlled, surveyed. ↗

— Rem Koolhaas

#articulation #become #connected #contained #controlled

I know how it feels to be a woman because I am a woman. And I won't be classified as just a man. ↗

— Pete Townshend

#because #classified #feels #how #i

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

Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#intensified #nuclear #nuclear weapons #our #simply

In the Tea Party era, it is the restless conservative Republican who has become passion's plaything, the toy of impetuous romance, an erotomania only intensified by the lusting for an upstart savior. ↗

— James Wolcott

#conservative #era #impetuous #intensified #only

The starting point for energy security today as it has always been is diversification of supplies and sources. ↗

— Daniel Yergin

#been #diversification #energy #energy security #point