Author Archives: Toronto

Admin: Everyone In Moderation

Posted on by
6

I don’t know if anyone will be able to see this.  I posted a similar message on the Sandbox, but it didn’t appear.

If you are a logged in, registered user and click on the little speech bubble on the dashboard bar, you’ll get a list of comments awaiting moderation.  You’ll also see this warning message:

Akismet has detected a problem. Some comments have not yet been checked for spam by Akismet. They have been temporarily held for moderation. Please check your Akismet configuration and contact your web host if problems persist.

This suggests that either Akismet is unreachable, possibly due to the recent storm, or that bit rot has set in and we need to summon Lizzie back somehow.

Granville Sewell Doubles Down

Posted on by
45

As much as I hate to drive any traffic to Uncommon Descent, Granville Sewell has clarified his misunderstanding of the Second Law there recently.

Of particular note is his response to the argument that “The second law only applies to thermal entropy, and what is happening in this video does not result in a net decrease in thermal entropy, so there’s no conflict with the second law.”

In fact, it is universally recognized that the second law of thermodynamics applies to more than thermal entropy, it applies to other types of entropy, for example, the “X-entropy” associated with any other diffusing component X: as pointed out in my AML paper, these types of entropy are defined by the same equations as thermal entropy, and are equally quantifiable. And it is widely applied in physics texts to less quantifiable types of “entropy.”

I would be interested in references to the physics texts in which his concept of entropy is “widely applied” but he seems to have inadvertently disabled comments on his post. Perhaps it will provoke discussion here instead.