The Adventures of Tobasco da Gama

I don’t know what the lolscience folks are drinking, but give me a gin & tonic for all my anti-entropic needs.

Given the release of Team Fortress 2 (not to mention the other Orange Box games and Bioshock), I decided to build myself a new gaming PC. What struck me was, first, the fantastic level of standardisation that goes into the modern PC. Seriously, I’m pretty sure that even somebody who hasn’t been immersed in the guts of computers for 14 years going could have assembled one from basic components like I just did. With all the one-way connecters and solder-mask labels and such, we’ve got to the point that somebody who doesn’t even understand what all the parts do could put them all together and get a running machine on the first try.

The second thing that struck me was how much of the machine is dedicated to fighting entropy. Anything that does anything in a modern computer has some way to dissipate and carry away heat. Not just the CPU and the power supply, but the northbridge and southbridge come with heatsinks. Even memory nowadays comes with heat spreaders on the DIMMs. And then you’ve got to put a heatsink and fan on your video card’s GPU, of course. Not to mention two fans for intake and exhaust. And all this to hold back entropy and keep the magic smoke in.

Life itself is really just a process of giving entropy the finger by cycling through a series of equilibrium states, each one metastable but not permanent. You can temporarily seem to defy the second law of thermodynamics this way, but entropy will take it all ‘though it seems a shame.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 21st, 2007 at 21:32 and is filed under Go Away, Personal, Science & Skepticism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.