Year: 2022

VAST IMPACT. “For instance, the design of every modern communications device--from cellular phones to modems to compact-disc players--relies on Shannon entropy.” https://lnkd.in/draqjTW View in LinkedIn

ORGANISMS AS AGENTS NOT OBJECTS. “Natural selection is not a consequence of how well the organism solves a set of fixed problems posed by the environment; on the contrary, the environment and the organisms actively co-determine each other.” (Lewontin 1978, in article by Denis M Walsh) https://lnkd.in/dchkheh View in LinkedIn

The gynaecium is at the heart of generational futures. View in LinkedIn

ENTROPY AND INFO. “Thermodynamic entropy and Shannon entropy are conceptually equivalent: the number of arrangements that are counted by Boltzmann entropy reflects the amount of Shannon information one would need to implement any particular arrangement.” https://lnkd.in/draqjTW View in LinkedIn

SHANNON VS BOLTZMANN. “The two entropies have two salient differences, though. First, the thermodynamic entropy used by a chemist or a refrigeration engineer is expressed in units of energy divided by temperature, whereas the Shannon entropy used by a communications engineer is in bits, essentially dimensionless. That difference is merely a matter of convention.” https://lnkd.in/draqjTW View in LinkedIn

SHANNON VS BOLTZMANN. “Even when reduced to common units, however, typical values of the two entropies differ vastly in magnitude. A silicon microchip carrying a gigabyte of data, for instance, has a Shannon entropy of about 10(10) bits (one byte is eight bits), tremendously smaller than the chip's thermodynamic entropy, which is about 10(23) bits at room temperature.” https://lnkd.in/draqjTW View in LinkedIn

THERMODYNAMIC VS INFO. “This discrepancy occurs because the entropies are computed for different degrees of freedom. A degree of freedom is any quantity that can vary, such as a coordinate specifying a particle's location or one component of its velocity.” https://lnkd.in/draqjTW View in LinkedIn

SHANNON BINARY INFO. “The Shannon entropy of the chip cares only about the overall state of each tiny transistor etched in the silicon crystal--the transistor is on or off; it is a 0 or a 1--a single binary degree of freedom.” https://lnkd.in/draqjTW View in LinkedIn

BOLTZMANN. “Thermodynamic entropy, in contrast, depends on the states of all the billions of atoms (and their roaming electrons) that make up each transistor.” https://lnkd.in/draqjTW View in LinkedIn

COMPETING BODY PARTS. “Typically, the animal body is made up of anatomical units that can often evolve independently.” https://lnkd.in/gmREWTV View in LinkedIn