I recall reading the NYer article by Commoner at the time,
as the subject matter was of keen interest to me then, and continues
to be.
FYI, a couple of other related seminal publications from those days:
The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen,
Harvard U. Press, 1971.
"Energy and Information", by Myron Tribus and Edward C. McIrvine,
Scientific American, Sept. 1971 (issue on Energy and Power).
I haven't checked to see if these are available online.
Richard
On Dec 23, 2010, at 12:21 PM, George Duncan wrote:
See
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1976/02/09/1976_02_09_038_TNY_CARDS_000316706
for the second article in the series,
found via Bing.
On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 10:41 AM, Nicholas Thompson
<[email protected]> wrote:
Thanks, Everybody,
It Was Barry Commoner, in a three article series in the NY-er
beginning Feb
2, 1976, called “Energy”.
And it does have a long and loving account of entropy. I still
haven’t been
able to read it because the archive system is hostile to ordinary
mortals,
but I will let you all know if it is as good as I remember it
being. My
especial gratitude to Carl Tollander and John Kennison, who helped
me look,
and to Renata Golden, who found it.
What threw me off the scent was that Commoner wrote a book, a few
years
earlier on a closely related topic, that does not mention entropy
once!
Nick
From: Nicholas Thompson [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Friday, December 17, 2010 9:24 PM
To: '[email protected]'; 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity
Coffee Group'
Subject: RE: [FRIAM] Help with memory
Carl and everybody,
The Wikipedia entry sure looked like it was going to have the
reference, but
alas, it did not!
You are probably all prepared for one of the well-known terrors of
old age,
that you forget stuff. But another terror of old age you may not
know about
– that you remember with great force and clarity things that never
happened.
So, everybody, despite Carl’s best efforts, the question remains
open. I
have put in calls to local nursing homes, but in the meantime could
you put
your thinking caps on?
Thanks,
Nick
PS What the dickens did Roger Rabbit have to do with street cars and
entropy?
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]
On Behalf
Of Carl Tollander
Sent: Friday, December 17, 2010 8:28 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Help with memory
Google "Roger Rabbit", which sends you to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_streetcar_scandal
Many
links.
On 12/17/10 8:03 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
Many years ago, perhaps more than 40, I swear I read a series of
articles,
later published as a book, that laid out the basic principles of
entropy,
told the history (perhaps mythic) of how GM tore up the trolley
lines in LA
to get its dirty busses to replace clean trolley cars, argued that
we would
in the next 40 years transition to natural gas as the price of
other fossil
fuels rose, etc., etc. I think I read it in the New Yorker, and I
have had
two candidates for who wrote it, both of which have turned out to
be wrong:
Bradford Snell and Barry Commoner. Does anybody else remember it?
Is
anybody else on this list OLD enough to have read it?
I promise I have googled the hell out it to no avail.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
http://www.cusf.org
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--
George Duncan
georgeduncanart.com
(505) 983-6895
Represented by ViVO Contemporary
725 Canyon Road
Santa Fe, NM 87501
Life must be understood backwards; but... it must be lived forward.
Soren Kierkegaard
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
