2318: Dynamic Entropy
| Dynamic Entropy |
 Title text: Despite years of effort by my physics professors to normalize it, deep down I remain convinced that 'dynamical' is not really a word. |
Explanation
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This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a PHYSICS PROFESSOR. Should briefly explain dynamic programming, information theory, entropy. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks. |
This comic strip is a "science tip", suggesting that a cool concept should be called "dynamic entropy" -- "dynamic" because it is "impossible to use in a pejorative sense", and "entropy", because "no one knows what entropy really is". The result is a phrase that can mean whatever the concept's originator wishes it to mean, and cannot possibly be heard in a negative light (as has happened with e.g. "cold fusion").
Transcript
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This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks. |
Dynamic "It's impossible to use the word 'dynamic' in the pejorative sense...thus, I thought 'dynamic programming' was a good name."
- - Richard Bellman, explaining how he picked a name for his math research to try to protect it from criticism (Eye of the Hurricane, 1984)
Entropy
"You should call it 'Entropy'...no one knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage."
- - John von Neumann, to Claude Shannon, on why he should borrow the physics term in information theory (as told to Myron Tribus)
[Two arrows leading from the definitions above to:]
DYNAMIC ENTROPY
[Caption below box] Science Tip: If you have a cool concept you need a name for, try "Dynamic Entropy."
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Can confirm, have never lost an argument. Dynamic Entropy (talk) 00:45, 11 June 2020 (UTC)
- You came here for an argument? No, this here is abuse. Argument's next door. Kev (talk) 10:26, 13 June 2020 (UTC)
- Allegrini, P., Douglas, J. F., & Glotzer, S. C. (1999). Dynamic entropy as a measure of caging and persistent particle motion in supercooled liquids. Physical Review E, 60(5), 5714, doi: 10.1103/physreve.60.5714.
- Asadi, M., Ebrahimi, N., Hamedani, G., & Soofi, E. (2004). Maximum Dynamic Entropy Models. Journal of Applied Probability, 41(2), 379-390. Retrieved June 11, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/3216023
- Green, J. R., Costa, A. B., Grzybowski, B. A., & Szleifer, I. (2013). Relationship between dynamical entropy and energy dissipation far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(41), 16339-16343.
- S. Satpathy et al., "An All-Digital Unified Static/Dynamic Entropy Generator Featuring Self-Calibrating Hierarchical Von Neumann Extraction for Secure Privacy-Preserving Mutual Authentication in IoT Mote Platforms," 2018 IEEE Symposium on VLSI Circuits, Honolulu, HI, 2018, pp. 169-170, doi: 10.1109/VLSIC.2018.8502369.
- Bugstomper (talk) 01:28, 11 June 2020 (UTC)
- Can someone with knowledge of the reference system in a wiki make the reference appear above the discussion, maybe in a section named References?--Kynde (talk) 07:06, 11 June 2020 (UTC)
- Done Bugstomper (talk) 09:13, 11 June 2020 (UTC)
- Can someone with knowledge of the reference system in a wiki make the reference appear above the discussion, maybe in a section named References?--Kynde (talk) 07:06, 11 June 2020 (UTC)
Well bugger me (METAPHOR! METAPHOR!) but my current Master thesis in Computer Science could use that term without much shoehorning. (tl;dr: Binary search trees that adapt, =dynamic, can serve a query series faster than static, and the gain depends on the structure of the query series, =entropy. I prefer the good old "instance optimality", though...) 162.158.159.122 08:58, 11 June 2020 (UTC)
This seems to tie in with the recent comic 2315: Eventual Consistency, which is also about entropy (in a thermodynamic(al) sense), but I guess that like the rest of the world I don't know what entropy really is, because if entropy is a measure of how "surprising" a variable is, why is everything being flat and spread out evenly called a state of maximum entropy? Everything being the same doesn't sound very surprising to me... --IByte (talk) 09:08, 11 June 2020 (UTC)
- Because entropy is the inverse of how "surprising" or organized or full of information a system is. Bugstomper (talk) 09:27, 11 June 2020 (UTC)
- It's not about "surprising" but about an even spread of probability, so for matter a complex molecule has less entropy than a smaller molecule because the atoms are held in place, and if the quarks in the atoms aren't even held together in subatomic particles then that is ultimate entropy. For information having more possible choices for the message or password spreads the probability of any one occurrence around more possibilities. If it is narrowly defined it has low entropy because the probability is concentrated in a few items.162.158.75.104 13:53, 11 June 2020 (UTC)
I can think of a number of cases where "dynamic" would be a bad thing, but not necessarily pejorative. The structure of a building had better not be dynamic (think "sudden energetic disassembly"), and when my (salaried, should be steady) paycheck becomes dynamic, I have to talk to HR. Can someone come up with a pejorative? 162.158.78.212 11:16, 11 June 2020 (UTC)
- 2050 retro slang: Dynamic, variant of Dienamic, portmanteau of Die and (Viet) Nam + adjectival suffix // Dienam (n): a long, brutal slog with an unsatisfying ending, possibly with unintended consequences arising some time after the conclusion (cv Agent Orange) "Just like the soldiers a century ago, they knew the project was a dienam -- resources would be wasted, careers ended, and goals unmet -- but they couldn't convince the executives to abandon the project." // Some[thing] that is a failure, many years in the making, from which no success can be extricated. "[The development team] was working on a dynamic project for the studio when [the studio] finally was forced to declare bankruptcy and shutter due to literally years of overcomitting and underdelivering." 162.158.75.104 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)
As there exists such a thing as resilience by explicitness, when it comes to type system discussions in computer programming language design the term 'dynamic' can be pretty condemning. 141.101.76.204 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)
(Looks like people aren't ~~~~ing. My contribution starts here.) I can just see a reporter, at the scene of some breaking news, saying "It's very much a dynamic situation here", while dodging various rioter/police missiles, hurricane debris, moving away from a wildfire front or in the middle of a rescue situation in post-earthquake aftermath yet still amidst aftershocks. 141.101.107.164 05:28, 12 June 2020 (UTC)
The 'Use “-ic” with nouns ending in “-ics” (usually)' section of that Free Dictionary article is relevant here, since dynamics is a thing. 172.69.62.148 15:28, 12 June 2020 (UTC)
Dynamic gravity, dynamic oxygen level, dynamic surgical compentency, dynamic astronomical unit ... none of these are desireable. These Are Not The Comments You Are Looking For (talk) 20:18, 15 June 2020 (UTC)
