A concept from physics called negentropy could help your life run smoother
Life is full of small decisions: Should I pick up that sock on the floor? Should I do the dishes before bed? What about fixing the leaky faucet in the bathroom?
Leaving a sock on the ground is a manifestation of a concept from physics you may have heard of: entropy is a measure of how much energy is lost in a system.
If a system loses too much energy, it will disintegrate into chaos. It takes only a little bit of energy to pick up one sock. But if you don't take care of your yard, let pipes stay clogged and never fix electrical problems, it all adds up to a chaotic home that would take a lot of energy to fix. And that chaos will leach away your time and ability to accomplish other things .
The good news is that entropy has an opposite – negentropy.
As a researcher who studies social systems, I have found that thinking in terms of negentropy and energy can help you fight against entropy and chaos in daily life.
Do you think this will reduce the chaos in your life ?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 16 2021, @01:51AM (14 children)
From the post and the wikipedia, dunno - guess picking up the sock comes out 1% more efficient long term? And those 1%s add up over time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 16 2021, @02:15AM (10 children)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Immerman on Tuesday March 16 2021, @02:51AM (9 children)
I'm working more towards the minimal-energy model - if I pass the sock going in the direction of the hamper, I pick it up. Since I'm already spending most of the energy to to get it to the hamper anyway, a small increase in immediate energy expenditure removes the need for a much larger dedicated future expenditure. Or if I've been putting off washing dishes and need to wash a spoon for my cereal, I wash a few more things I'm getting low on while I'm at it - I've already "paid" with the disruption to my flow, a small additional payment can reduce the chance of future disruptions before I get around to actually washing a full load.
Also - all my socks match. I don't own pairs of socks - I own socks. Sometimes one gets lost or develops a hole and gets tossed out - then I own an odd number of socks. Eventually it will happen again and I'll own an even number of socks again. Simplifies the whole system immensely. Especially since I no longer have any reason to pair my socks after doing the laundry - pile of socks goes in the sock drawer, and I grab out two as needed. It's not like anyone's going to notice that my socks are wrinkled, even if putting them on didn't stretch them smooth anyway.
My pants still come in pairs - but only because they're sewn together and I'm not actually sure where the dividing line is...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 16 2021, @03:18AM
but then you miss out on the exercise you get by expending that extra energy. More exercise is healthier for you.
(Score: 2) by legont on Wednesday March 17 2021, @01:06AM (4 children)
I think about picking up socks in terms of exercise. The more I pick them up the fitter and healthier I will be.
As per socks matching, I totally agree, but... I still can't find a brand that would stay consistently reasonable. Not to mention that the vast majority sells differently colored socks packed together. Would you share your exact choice by any chance?
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday March 17 2021, @03:53AM (3 children)
There are more satisfying ways to get exercise - the more time+energy not spent picking up socks (etc,etc,etc), the more I have available for other things - even dedicated exercise. I find walking (or better yet, hiking) offers psychological renewal with moderate exercise as a side effect. Yoga's actually really great too, did that for a few years and the improved flexibility was incredible. Who knew stretching could be such a workout? The meditative aspects were also nice, if you're into that kind of thing. Pretty much every old person I know laments the loss of flexibility as one of their major regrets - and flexibility is great insurance against injury as well.
I find full packs of solid black or white socks are fairly common. I go with black as low contrast hides minor variations (and a multitude of other sins) fairly well. Couldn't tell you the brand I go for - Hanes? Fruit of the Loom? Something basic. Probably several, the differences are fairly minor. Occasionally I'll notice my socks don't quite match perfectly as I put them on, due to age or brand. But neither I, nor anyone else, will notice the difference through my pants-legs. If you wear shorts/skirts... maybe worth a little more attention. If knowing your socks don't quite match bothers you, possibly worth buying a few packs at a time and stashing the extras someplace out of the way to replenish your sock drawer as needed.
(Score: 2) by legont on Wednesday March 17 2021, @12:25PM (2 children)
Hiking is my favorite exercise/meditation too. I usually do a known path and push myself while listening for a book or outright daydreaming. I did try yoga as well and it worked, but stretching was too boring for me so I eventually gave up. When time is more limited, I switch to a bicycle.
My wife and I also love to explore places on bicycles. It's very convenient as it's way easier to find a parking spot pretty much anywhere if one is ok with a couple of miles radius. We drive to cities and towns, park in suburbia, and bike the place. We've even done a few of European trips as well. The last one - Bordeaux - fully on bicycles. It was truly relaxing to pedal from one winery to another. Europe has very nice path network that would take one pretty much anywhere with very little share the road biking.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday March 17 2021, @01:57PM (1 child)
Yeah, biking is nice. One of these days I really want to visit the Netherlands - I understand they're the shining beacon of bicycle-centric cities, with dedicated bike paths typically taking far more direct routes between most anywhere you'd want to go than is possible by car.
(Score: 2) by legont on Wednesday March 17 2021, @02:48PM
Yes, I've been there a few times. In many places cars are simply not practical while bike - and train - will take you anywhere.They also take biking at face value with no snobbism. Bikes are old, cheap, stolen a lot and generally used similarly to your socks; in a good way I mean))). While I love my truck, I like this king of environment even more.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday March 18 2021, @02:49AM (2 children)
This works almost as well it you get packets of 3 socks in three colours. Buy 5 packs. You'll have 15 socks of each colours. You apply your procedure on each colour of socks. It doesn't much matter if the 15 grey socks become 14 or 13.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday March 18 2021, @03:58AM (1 child)
Certainly does. Except that I've never seen a pack that only includes 3 socks of the same color - 3 *pairs* maybe. ;-)
But in practice I don't recall often seeing such a thing - multi-color packs typically come in a random selection. Buy 5 packs and you've likely got at least 8 different colors, unless there was a huge selection to choose from.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday March 18 2021, @06:05PM
You're right, of course. I meant pairs of socks.
The 3-packs I find in my local store have 3-packs with dark grey, mid-grey, and light grey.
And they're all the same shades of grey.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday March 16 2021, @03:31AM (2 children)
So all I need to do is pick up 100 socks (or other random clothing, I'm assuming) off the floor and I'll reach maximum efficiency? I'm all for that.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday March 16 2021, @02:59PM (1 child)
If you reach maximum efficiency after 100 socks, does it mean you cannot pick up the 101st sock? :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday March 18 2021, @02:51AM
Of course you can pick up the 101th sock. Your efficiency would go down slightly. You might be at risk for dropping one as you carry a huge bale of loose socks to the hamper.
-- hendrik
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 16 2021, @02:00AM (3 children)
Yep, the media, especially TV, has an extreme case of it.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 16 2021, @02:03AM (2 children)
No no no! It's NIGGENTROPY! But, yes, we are experiencing it nationwide today. :(
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 16 2021, @02:11AM (1 child)
Anybody else have a niggling [spectator.us] feeling someone would post a comment as dumb as the one above?
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 16 2021, @04:38AM
‘A Brit in America Makes Sense of . . . ‘
Pure lies.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by darkfeline on Tuesday March 16 2021, @03:03AM (3 children)
There's a concept from economics called economies of scale. Keeping your house at minimum entropy all the time is very inefficient compared to letting some entropy build up (up to a point) and fixing it all at once. As a simple example, it's far more efficient to dust every week/month than to dust twice a day, every day.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 16 2021, @05:22AM (1 child)
Agreed. That's how I handle my dishes, I took note today cleaning about 4-5 pieces that it took me nearly as long as it did to do it on Friday, with a week's worth of pile-up. The ratio of clean dishes to water used was way worse, too. Of course this isn't the case in every example, e.g. socks and such, it's much faster just to place your hamper ideally, or have multiple hampers. Nobody's time is really important enough to actually reasonably try to negate that infinitesimal loss though. Scaling up to families would definitely put a limit on both, though, and the time investment would rapidly grow per unit, but you also have the advantage of delegation in that scenario so it's difficult to say where optimacy is found since there are so many variables at that point, like a 3-bodies problem.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday March 18 2021, @02:54AM
One thing that really helps is having the clothes washing and drying machines on the same floor as the bedrooms and bathroom. No more carrying hampers down to the basement and up again.
-- hendrik
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Tuesday March 16 2021, @08:36AM
Or take the Quentin Crisp [wikipedia.org] approach: “There was need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.” [wikiquote.org]
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday March 16 2021, @03:41AM (2 children)
This would seem to match the broken window theory [npr.org] in the small-scale.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 16 2021, @04:00PM (1 child)
Ah the broken bullshit theory, which claimed the decrease in murders over a short period was due to a political initiative rather than the long period of time before, during, after and still going on, that murders declined.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday March 16 2021, @07:12PM
Spring cleaning vs. murder -- that escalated quickly.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 16 2021, @10:25AM
>> negentropy and energy can help you fight against entropy and chaos in daily life.
Back in the good old days, you could tell your house niggers to pick up your socks and your house would stay in a low-entropy state without your expending *any* energy.
>> If a system loses too much energy, it will disintegrate into chaos.
Correct... that pretty much describes most inner cities.
(Score: 4, Informative) by progo on Tuesday March 16 2021, @12:29PM (1 child)
The new-age pseudo-science self-help people don't need any new physics loan-words or new bad physics analogies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 16 2021, @04:02PM
Exactly. The real news story here is: "Hey everyone I just learnt a new word! Everyone, hey everyone!! Watch me use it in my blog!"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 16 2021, @01:25PM
i think it's always "fun" when negentropy is used or rather hindered to make money.
sh1t that should be simple, nay IS simple, is made difficult or fickle in the name of profit ... sometimes it is even labeled as progress!
one mans negentropy, or rather the bunched collection of mens negentropy is your personal entropy ... that can be "negated" for a price.
also known as "general asshats(tm)" :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 16 2021, @02:31PM (2 children)
So long as chaos exists, I can aspire to be a butterfly, who, with a mere flap of his wings (or a kind word), triggers the monsoon (or otherwise transforms the world for the better).
--
Surely this is all a dream.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 16 2021, @04:04PM
More likely you'll trigger a bunch of low forehead thick eyebrow types to make a clever play on words based on the presence of the letters N and G.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 17 2021, @03:04AM
Sharpie Theory
(Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Tuesday March 16 2021, @02:56PM (1 child)
If you identify the chaos in your home with entropy, then the second law of thermodynamics has bad news for you: Entropy can only increase. Thus the only way to get rid of the chaos is to throw it out (which in term also means loss of energy).
Now of course you can't equate the two, and that is the good news: You can turn macroscopic chaos into microscopic chaos; that process is known as tidying up. The microscopic chaos is the heat you produce doing it. You then get rid of the microscopic chaos by opening the window (provided it's cold outside; if it's hot, there's a microscopic chaos remover called air condition that you can use).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 17 2021, @02:19AM
Further, negentropy doesn't need to be negative entropy. In the processes of house cleaning, one painful truth is that it takes much more energy to clean something than the theoretical minimum (keep in mind that in near constant temperature, changes in entropy are almost proportional to changes in energy). For example, picking that sock off the floor, transporting it to the top of a hamper, and dropping it in, all using rather inefficient human muscles, takes considerably more energy than a robot that uses just the bare minimum energy to do the same (including recycling energy when the load goes down the gravity gradient).
Further, one might value human time much more than the energy input. Whatever your valuation of the cost and benefits of house cleaning (or other entropy reduction), changes in negentropy would then become the change in valuation minus the cost of the effort as you consider shifting towards a better state.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday March 16 2021, @04:52PM
In order to post this comment, a dozen dirty socks were left lying on the floor.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Tuesday March 16 2021, @04:59PM (3 children)
Consider anything you do in the light of how much benefits it brings. Examples:
- My wife, if she has her way, cleans the house like a maniac on steroids. Sure it's spotless, but she spends hours cleaning little corners here and there that nobody cares about. Inefficient use of energy in the short run.
- My son doesn't want to clean anything. If we let him have his way, pretty soon we'll have bugs in the house. And then we'll have to spend money and/or time getting rid of the bugs. Inefficient use of energy in the long run.
- I clean just enough that it's clean enough to avoid major problems. Efficient use of energy. If I see I get problems by not cleaning enough, I clean a little more. If I see cleaning less wouldn't change anything, I clean a little less. I constantly adjust the variables until I expend as little effort as possible on the cleaning and the consequences of not cleaning combined.
I try to maximize the return on anything I do that way. My motivation is utter laziness, and it's the best motivation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 16 2021, @07:18PM
What about your wife's boyfriend? Maybe he is a neat freak who appreciates all her cleaning.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday March 18 2021, @04:01AM
Ah, but clean too little and you'll find yourself sleeping on the couch - which will in fact save even more energy, but in a most unsatisfying way.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday March 18 2021, @06:11PM
Could it be your son doesn't want to clean anything because he knows if he doesn't his mother will do it anyway?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 16 2021, @07:15PM
Negentropy is the force that causes fatigue due to all pro Black garbage pushed by globohomo.