Welcome to 2nd Law
Hello everyone. Welcome to 2nd Law.
I thought it would be appropriate to write a brief introduction for this blog, if not for the sake of our potential readers (one day!), then for the benefit of its modest creator, Eremi. The blog's title refers to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that the entropy within a closed system never decreases. No matter how much energy is used, entropy cannot be reduced. Or, as Eremi saw it, no matter how much energy is expended, things are still going to be just as complicated. 2nd Law serves as a metaphor for our final year at Columbia, as well as for what we will continue to do in life once we have graduated.
In many ways, 2nd Law makes sense. It's something towards which we've been working. Throughout the years, there have been many attempts and visions of club-building, project-making, and idea-sharing. There was Apathy Club, INERTIA, Optimism Club, and PM Club. While club activities were relatively low in energy, it is fair to extend the original title metaphor and say that it didn't reduce the scope of our ambition or ideas. Hopefully this blog will become more self-explanatory over time. And hopefully our contributors will reveal their talents and intelligence to you the same way they have to me. To sum it up, this blog is a collection of a collection of people who have made theories, stories, art, polemics, essays, interpretions, critiques, and whatever else people can create together. With that, welcome; read and enjoy.
I thought it would be appropriate to write a brief introduction for this blog, if not for the sake of our potential readers (one day!), then for the benefit of its modest creator, Eremi. The blog's title refers to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that the entropy within a closed system never decreases. No matter how much energy is used, entropy cannot be reduced. Or, as Eremi saw it, no matter how much energy is expended, things are still going to be just as complicated. 2nd Law serves as a metaphor for our final year at Columbia, as well as for what we will continue to do in life once we have graduated.
In many ways, 2nd Law makes sense. It's something towards which we've been working. Throughout the years, there have been many attempts and visions of club-building, project-making, and idea-sharing. There was Apathy Club, INERTIA, Optimism Club, and PM Club. While club activities were relatively low in energy, it is fair to extend the original title metaphor and say that it didn't reduce the scope of our ambition or ideas. Hopefully this blog will become more self-explanatory over time. And hopefully our contributors will reveal their talents and intelligence to you the same way they have to me. To sum it up, this blog is a collection of a collection of people who have made theories, stories, art, polemics, essays, interpretions, critiques, and whatever else people can create together. With that, welcome; read and enjoy.
posted by Thessaly | 10:46 PM
1 Comments:
hello, CU bloggers. do I know you? I'm John Atkinson, a friend of Ezra's and a CU alumnus etc. just thought it's worth mentioning that neither Columbia nor Planet Earth is a closed system, thus the 2nd law applies to neither. the universe is the only truly 'closed' system - all systems that we're familiar with in our earth-human experience are in fact open. thanks to this, man has been very successfully decreasing entropy in his immediate environment (Earth, ultimately) and increasing order of all kinds since 'the beginning', of mankind at least. the 2nd law isn't violated - we just move the disordered energy (in the form of waste heat) into the atmosphere/outer space. by getting rid of entropy, we gain usable, e.g. ordered, energy here on earth, and by consuming more and more we have progressively made the human species - and our ideas in particular - more and more ordered, more rationalized, less entropic, etc. so, you know, there's hope yet, even after you graduate.
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