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timtyler comments on The Popularization Bias - Less Wrong
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If anyone else would like to read up on maximum entropy thermodynamics - particularly Dewar's recent work - that would be cool. This material explains much about why self-organising systems (including living ones) behave as they do - in thermodynamic terms. I discuss this here now and again, but - despite the links to Bayes and Jaynes - no-one seems to know very much about it.
A primer: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Life/Signed_Articles/John_Whitfield
That looked to be interesting until I glanced down at Figure 1, which reads:
Eeek! Tropical forests the most entropy-exporting? Not, say, the 1000 C regions below the earth's surface? Not volcanoes or geysers?
Volcanoes and geysers are mostly uncommon, intermittent phenomena. Some volcano craters do stay pretty hot, for extended periods, though - it's true.
I'm not sure about how to measure the rate of entropy dissipation within the Earth - but I'm not sure it radiates as much heat from the surface as ultimately comes from the sun.
The insides of nuclear reactors, and other power plants are probably the most entropic places of all - again, per unit area. Whether those count as "environments" could be debated.