Out of chaos…
Remember your high school physics?
Remember that thing about entropy and laws of thermodynamics? There’s one universal law that basically amounts to: everything winds down unless you keep investing energy into it. To be orderly it takes energy whether that is to keep your hedge perfectly in line, the windows clean or the dandelions in the yard at bay.
It’s just curiously interesting to me how we valuate energy in our system of money. Obviously, the hulking dirt pile that blocked the front of my house this morning didn’t move it self. It took a massive energy input from man and machine. Energy came from the release of potential energy from hydrocarbons, human muscles running on calories extracted from various edibles that one may or may not legitimately call food, and from leveraging other laws of physics –yes, you slept through that little chapter on simple tools and levers too. Of course, if you had known about Fat Phred and Phidoux, you might have stayed awake, but that’s a whole other post.
In the end, all those kinds of energy input came together in my yard today to create order from chaos, reversing the natural tendency of physics. Next, we’ll all get together
and decide what ink loops on a piece of paper handed from me to those involved are equivalent to all that energy input. Wild when you think about it.
And the easiest way to re-create total entropy again? Neglect to put those ink loops on the paper.
