> I know that the Internet began as a primarily > American phenomenon.
While this may be true, the World Wide Web was born in Europe (at CERN), not in the US. And as we all know, to the uninitiated, Internet == WWW.
Re:arrow of time == direction of entropy increase
on
Time Doesn't Exist
·
· Score: 1
First of all, life does not decrease the overall entropy of the universe (although it does locally). And you can't say 'locally is good enough for me', since without a source of low entropy (for life on earth read: the sun), life would come to a standstil. I don't know, but probably somebody has done the statistical mechanics of superclusters, and I would be highly surprised if they decrease the entropy of the universe. Lastly, I think that the entropy of black holes is actually huge (Stephen Hawkings has calculated this stuff). So it does not vacuum entropy away. Also, black holes can actually evaporate (in 100 billion years or so), again this was discoverd (invented?) by Hawkings. This doesn't do much for entropy reduction either.
what a bollocks. Many of your breadwinners in trenches are wasting their time posting to Slashdot while at the same time, the real trenches are the continuing 24 hour care of screaming children (+ cooking, washing, cleaning etc.). This labour (and its considerable cost if it were to be expressed in terms of money) is simply not factored in your trenches attitude.
arrow of time == direction of entropy increase
on
Time Doesn't Exist
·
· Score: 2
usually, the direction in which time flows is the one in which the entropy (degree of disorder) increases. That is, say you have snapshots A and B of a piston with 1 million gas molecules. A: all 1 million molecules randomly distributed throughout the piston B: all 1 million gas molecules very close to the bottom of the piston The chances of situation B occuring by chance are exceedingly small, and were probably caused by compression of the piston or so (and the piston was expanded and immediately after that the snapshot was taken). In any case, moving from situation A to B by chance alone can safely be ignored, so time B is before time A. That's all there is to it; all the other laws of nature appear to be time-invariant.
Now, *how* the universe could have started with such an incredibly low entropy (== high order) is anybody's guess; fact is that the total entropy keeps increasing, and that's what we observe.
Now, you can play word games using the anthropic (!= entropic !!) principle: if the universe did not start with such a low entropy, who would have been there to observe it and argue about it on slashdot:-) So perhaps that's where the beholder bit comes in. But I should read the original I suppose.
Slashdot Mirror
> I know that the Internet began as a primarily
> American phenomenon.
While this may be true, the World Wide Web was born in Europe (at CERN), not in the US. And as we all know, to the uninitiated, Internet == WWW.
First of all, life does not decrease the overall entropy of the universe (although it does locally). And you can't say 'locally is good enough for me', since without a source of low entropy (for life on earth read: the sun), life would come to a standstil.
I don't know, but probably somebody has done the statistical mechanics of superclusters, and I would be highly surprised if they decrease the entropy of the universe.
Lastly, I think that the entropy of black holes is actually huge (Stephen Hawkings has calculated this stuff). So it does not vacuum entropy away. Also, black holes can actually evaporate (in 100 billion years or so), again this was discoverd (invented?) by Hawkings. This doesn't do much for entropy reduction either.
what a bollocks. Many of your breadwinners in trenches are wasting their time posting to Slashdot while at the same time, the real trenches are the continuing 24 hour care of screaming children (+ cooking, washing, cleaning etc.). This labour (and its considerable cost if it were to be expressed in terms of money) is simply not factored in your trenches attitude.
A: all 1 million molecules randomly distributed throughout the piston
B: all 1 million gas molecules very close to the bottom of the piston
The chances of situation B occuring by chance are exceedingly small, and were probably caused by compression of the piston or so (and the piston was expanded and immediately after that the snapshot was taken). In any case, moving from situation A to B by chance alone can safely be ignored, so time B is before time A. That's all there is to it; all the other laws of nature appear to be time-invariant.
Now, *how* the universe could have started with such an incredibly low entropy (== high order) is anybody's guess; fact is that the total entropy keeps increasing, and that's what we observe.
Now, you can play word games using the anthropic (!= entropic !!) principle: if the universe did not start with such a low entropy, who would have been there to observe it and argue about it on slashdot :-) So perhaps that's where the beholder bit comes in. But I should read the original I suppose.
> it is interesting to note that Perl and C++ share some design philosophies. Like "the user is always right" school of thought.
C++ ? User always right? Yeah, right.