John Woods Said:
>I'm not sure I have it right, but what I believe is that right now in the
>universe, more energy is pouring into places like the earth, driving more
>rather than less complexity. Entropy is about energy balancing out
>everywhere. Right now there is a kind of imbalance, with our planet (and
>many others) having all the energy needed to move evolution forward. I
>suspect growth and aging are an example of entropy at work. The human
>system has the capability of taking in and maintaining its wholeness for
>about + or - 4 score years, and then it begins to break down.
John,
This is parlor talk, but I was talking to a research
shrink at a party a couple of years ago and he was saying that
the human organism has an on/off switch for growth and that
they were looking for a way to keep the switch from turning
off at a point in time thus guaranteeing that humans would
continue to live. Immortality? (Unless someone cut of his
head!) Perhaps some of you biologists out there could tell me
whether this guy had too many Margaritas?
As for entropy, this used to be the stuff of a great many mid-nite
chats in college years ago, with the children (engineering majors)
of Manhattan project scientists. It reminds me of a story that
another shrink told me about behavior studies he was doing at the
Museum of Natural History in New York City. They were studying
Angel fish and light. His job was to continually observe the
angel fish's response to a regular light pulse and to come up
with a theory of what was motivating the fish to move a certain
way with the light pattern. He got the stats and the regularity,
but being the dreadfully honest anthropological soul that he was,
decided that unless he could become a fish, he didn't have a prayer
of really knowing whether his theory was more about him studying
fish than about fish observing light. He also feared that some
fish breeder would take what he had written and devise a way to
use his theories to torture fish according to theories "alla Stein,"
all the while believing that the fish would be better off because
of their new theories of fish breeding.
Anybody know anything on this list about LEAN and AGILE? (I checked
the LO archives and could only find one reference to it, which didn't
say anything.) I have a few friends who are the "Angel Fish" in those
MIT experiments going on in the corporations here. It's ruining
their middle-aged lives and shows great promise at explaining why
downsizing to temporary employees is no longer a reason for
shareholders to abandon a stock. In fact they now do the opposite.
Anything to say about that Thomas?
Yours,
-- Ray Evans Harrell Artistic Director The Magic Circle Opera Repertory Ensemble, Inc. 200 West 70th Street, Suite 6-c New York City, New York 10023-4324 212-724-2398 mcore@soho.ios.com