Thursday, July 19, 2007

Entropy


Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger

Just start reading another book (what else is new - one day I'll finish one) by David Weinberger (another hero). A few pages in to it and he's discussing how everything moves to some order - the opposite of entropy. IF this is the case....and things do move to their natural order - and we constantly try to rearrange for whatever reason - are we the ones putting things out of order? Let's think about the chicken and egg thing (sort of which comes first) - the order is:
  • chickens in a cope laying eggs
  • eggs gathered into a basket
  • the baskets sent to some processing plant
  • eggs separated and processed (I'd rather not think of it - but probably something on the nasty level of hot dog processing)
  • eggs gathered and packaged and packaged again (big boxes
  • eggs boxes put together on bigger trucks
  • boxes removed from trucks, moved into a store and broken back down for the shelves (watch the expiration date)
  • we buy - package up with other food stuffs take home and separate again into the refrigerator (hopefully not many broken ones)
  • we remove from the carton of 12 and cook.......
Most of what we are doing it packing and unpacking - gathering and disbursing.....not just eggs but in the case of PM information.......moving information into and out of it's natural order (what ever that might be).......if that is the case, would it make sense to understand the natural order of information and try to align to it as much as possible to reduce the packing/unpacking and reduce the effort of 'fighting' to put the info (or eggs) into some order it's not naturally meant to be? How much 'packing' up is required to transport the info to where ever in order to unpack and distribute.....??????

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