Time

Time is one of the most enigmatic terms one would have trouble describing. Take a breath and try describing it now. What is time?

Most simplistically time is simply a mathematical dimension describing change in the position of objects in space. It is not a physical quantity like matter but a virtual quantity.

But fundamentally time or more accurately the arrow of time points to a direction in which a quantity we call Entropy increases.

Entropy is disorder in the Universe and it is always on the rise. The order does not come back by itself; it is as if the arrow of time prevents it from happening.

There is also constant loss during the process of making order. Even if we spend energy to restore the order there will always be an amount of entropy we could not restore (conservation of energy).

This is a war we cannot win.

It is for Entropy dust disperses, disorder increases and decay starts to prevail in a room if we don’t clean it up regularly by adding more energy. Ultimately all living species borrow this energy from the Sun so that we could restore stuff and experience living.

The reason we have an illusion that there appears to be an eternal order in the Universe is because in our limited part of the Universe and in our pathetically short life span it appears so.

Life (plants and animals) constantly restores order by spending energy they borrow from the Sun. In our short-life span we avoid realisation of distant-past and far future that have no practical implications.

But in reality the fuel of Sun is not endless end it will die in about 5 billion years into the future. That would be the time when the debt of energy borrowed by all living species for the duration of life would be settled. Entropy will win or rather we would pay our debt by turning into dust.

In its ultimate twilight the increase in entropy will slow down, and the Universe will be in its heat-death. No heat to restore anything.

References:

The Temperature of History

Recommended background music: Blade Runner End Title.

The Year 2010

We all know the year 2010 is a random section across the eternal arrow of time, yet we think this is going to be a special episode to rewind our lives, start a healthy diet, quit smoking etc.

The year started with the news of a mass murder in Finland by an Albanian migrant, this is followed by routine suicide bombings in Pakistan and Iraq. Then cartoonist Kurt Westergaard and his granddaughter were attacked by a Somalian jihadist with an axe in his hand in Denmark, as usual dozens of people were killed in road accidents, even the legendary Sydney fireworks were not less boring than last year's.

The only spectacular exception to these depressive chain of events was of course the movie "Avatar". Avatar was the only human achievement worth to talk if you are obsessed with yearly summaries.

It is interesting that I started the year by reducing entropy that I have been responsible for. Stuff grew in my wardrobe drawer on their own in the last ten years or so. I have been able to find memorabilia such as a train ticket from year 2001, a never used hair brush that massages your scalp, various coins from different parts of the world, obsolete medicine prescriptions, obsolete medicine, business cards that I forgot where they came from, truckloads of dust mites and so on. It took me two hours to clean up the drawer. Then I went down to our garage and with a manic expression on my face I crushed and tore off dozens of empty card-boards that were saved in case they would be needed.

I am now beginning to understand desperate house wives and why they are so obsessed with cleaning. It gives you a false sense of achievement by re-ordering stuff. In fact all you have done is to reduce disorderliness accumulated in your environment because of you.

Where does this lead us? Well nowhere really. The earth is going to be warmer, more living species will become extinct due to us, there will be more suicide bombings, we will interpret return of 'the greed' as 'economic recovery' until we have another economic downturn in a decade or so, in nearly one in three of my age group some form of cancer time bomb will expire in the next decade or so, more misfortunes everywhere.

Or are these events really misfortunes? Like Seneca perhaps we should learn to accept misfortunes as being unavoidable parts of our lives rather than mere exceptions.

Hyper-clicking

According to a study made by James A. Evans, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, today scientists and scholars tend to search electronically and follow hyperlinks rather than browse or peruse.

Traditionally the forced browsing of print archives may have stretched scientists and scholars to anchor findings deeply into past and present scholarship. Today however searching online is more efficient and following hyperlinks quickly puts researchers in touch with prevailing opinion, but this may accelerate consensus and narrow the range of findings and ideas built upon.

These remarks show just one unpleasant aspect of a pandemic induced by overuse of hyperlinks, what I call hyper-clicking. We are simply lured by the power of hyperlinks, inclined to follow them wherever we see them without in depth questioning.

Even scarier the path we follow from one hyperlink to another is statistically the most probable one, the links we are exposed to are simply the most popular ones. Hyper-clicking often acts like a double-edged sword, not only we rapidly diverge from our original intent, we also converge to a direction not dictated by our freewill but by popular opinion.

Hyper-clicking narrows down options rather than multiplying them, our intention of finding answers is channeled into popular choice. We become a zombie like victim of populist ignorance. Misused this way the Internet becomes nothing more than a giant billboard on which the choices are narrowed down by popular demand and alternative thoughts are hidden somewhere like fine prints no one wants to read.

To combat hyper-clicking I suggest:

• First and foremost learn to slow down. Get back into the habit of "read more, follow less". Finish the article you started reading. Imagine yourself in a long train journey and you have no choice. Rediscover the wisdom in boredom.
• Question objectivity of content providers before blindly following the links offered by them. Ask yourself about their original intention, the reliability of information they provide, and their syndicates.
• From time to time refine your favourite site list, remove the sites you think offer less or no value for you.
• Beware of RSS-entropy, regularly clean up RSS feeds you no longer benefit from.
• Use more than one search engine (examples: Google, Bing, and Wolfram).

Software Entropy

One of the common reasons why software bugs are not fixed is:

"The developers often don't have time or it is not economical to fix all non-severe bugs."

Bugs scattered across software systems cause "software entropy" to increase (a term that I coined.) Therefore disorderedness of any isolated software system increases over time, similar to physical systems.

On the other hand what makes a software company survive is selling "orderly behaving" products. But competitive market forces and aggressive Sales pressures may increase organizational tendency not to fix bugs. This behavior in turn may lead to software entropy to increase in an exponential rate.

Therefore the size of the backlog of Support department may start to increase exponentially rather than logarithmically. In those circumstances increase in software entropy may result in "customer dissatisfaction" which may eventually lead to sales to decrease.

Therefore there must be a balancing act between Sales and Support. Development resources must be shared and utilized in a way to keep software entropy increase in a logarithmic but controllable and stable fashion if not decrease.

This is similar to "clean house" analogy. If you don't clean up, air and maintain your house regularly, say once every two weeks, it would become more difficult to keep up with entropy. Dust and mold will cumulate. Certain mechanical devices will rust away, or start to malfunction, more dust-mite colonies will flourish, the air will become stuffy and unhealthy. If you leave your house for 20 years, the chances are you may need to rebuild the interiors, i.e. start from scratch.

Software business is no different, negligence of balancing out software entropy may bring catastrophic consequences. And at some "no return" point the business may fail all together if not acted early enough.

Bugs

A software bug is the common term used to describe an error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault in a computer program that prevents it from behaving as intended (e.g., producing an incorrect or unexpected result). Most bugs arise from mistakes and errors made by people in either a program's source code or its design.

...

There are various reasons for not fixing bugs:

• The developers often don't have time or it is not economical to fix all non-severe bugs.
• The bug could be fixed in a new version or patch that is not yet released.
• The changes to the code required to fix the bug would be large, and would bring with them the chance of introducing other bugs into the system.
• Users may be relying on the undocumented, buggy behavior; it may introduce a breaking change.
• It's "not a bug". A misunderstanding has arisen between expected and provided behavior

Given the above, it is often considered impossible to write completely bug-free software of any real complexity. So bugs are categorized by severity, and low-severity non-critical bugs are tolerated, as they do not affect the proper operation of the system for most users.

Wikipedia Software Bug

Second Law of Thermodynamics

Since energy is conserved, why does energy have to be fed to a car to keep it from stopping? Since energy is conserved, why does hot soup cool and ice-cream melt? Why does smoke fill up a room rather than crowding into one corner? Why do re-chargeable batteries eventually die? Why do machines eventually fail?

...

There are many equivalent statements of the second law of thermodynamics: Isolated systems inevitably become less organised; the usable energy in an isolated system is constantly decreasing; a system naturally attempts to distribute its energy equally among all of its parts; mechanical energy, on average, degrades into heat; heat naturally flows from hot places to cold, equalizing temperatures; isolated machines cannot remain in perpetual motion; entropy (disorder), on average, increases. These statements all express the second law of thermodynamics. Physicists believe that it is the second law of thermodynamics that defines the direction of time, that distinguishes the past from the future.

Great Ideas in Physics, Alan Lightman