I read Lemur's (aka Mary) latest blog entry and the rhetorical questions therein and immediately thought to myself "ah, another example of my '2nd Law of Thermodynamics and how it applies to humanity/society analogy/corollary.'"

Before I dive into this let me make it clear that I am drawing anecdotal, metaphorical comparisons; not actual scientific comparisons. You already knew that, of course.

So, as many of you know, the 2nd law is also known as "the Entropy one," and aside from being another gentle scientific reminder that everything is destined to go to shit, it also helps explain why otherwise brilliant ideas and useful tools will always fall into the menacing hands of the Lowest Common Denominator (see Video, Google, and Pornography, Internet).

Life itself is not a violation of entropy, as some would have you believe. Cells, the elemental unit of living things, are incredible well-ordered, and therefore have Very low entropy (they also, of course, need a steady supply of energy). Entropy just Loves it some good Disorder... in fact, Entropy IS Disorder, in a nutshell. So while the individual cells are incredibly well-ordered, more and more disorder creeps in as you put more and more of them together. Eventually, you get the living clusterfuck that is a human.

Even so, a human is still a fantastic well-ordered machine, despite all the cray shit that can go wrong with it, and we manage as individuals or teams to get together and do some pretty cool shit. Really, I mean, going to the moon, there were some 300,000+people in on that -- now that kind of shit is an accomplishment, the practical day-to-day relevance of such a feat aside.

Eventually you get enough of these living clusterfucks together, and then you're Really into some Disorder. Enough people with enough free time and enough stupid (or perhaps sometimes strangely brilliant) ideas will always succumb to the forces of what is often referred to as "the lowest common denominator," which can also be accurately described as the base energy state -- a sort of "absolute zero" of humanity -- pushed there by entropic forces in a sort of exponential decay curve.

In this regard, atrocities such as Google Video are not to be viewed as running counter to said "evolution," (it would take a lengthy aside here to delve into what Exactly is Meant by the term "evolution," best left for another rant) but instead as the inevitable result of the constant, steady, upwards push in sophistication (in all senses) that is intrinsic to life.

Left untouched here are important questions regarding the battle of said "evolution" vs the forces of Entropy -- the ultimate "Good vs. Evil" if you will, and the wonderful affirmation that said "evolution" always seems to triumph in the end. This, instead, is best left to things such as theologians and the "Star Wars" movies.