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Why the site title, then, if I'm not trying to put the electric company out of business? Well, way back in the misty dawn of time I earned a bachelor's degree in physics. Amazingly, I still remember some of it, and the title is a reference to thermodynamics. Everybody knows about entropy (not really, but a lot of folks seem willing to talk about it without understanding it). Entropy is always increasing, right? And it's something or other to do with disorder.

But entropy has a less famous twin: free energy (or Gibbs free energy, or sometimes enthalpy). Oversimplifying a bit, the entropy of a closed system is the energy in the system that you can't get any use out of, and the free energy is the energy that you can get some use out of. So, if entropy is disorder, then its twin, free energy, is order. And this site is an attempt to increase the order in my universe of projects.

This is strictly a metaphor, by the way; to be precise about it, I'd need to haul out mathematics. I'll trot out math as necessary in other places on this site, but it isn't necessary here. In the specific case of thermodynamics, I'd also have to haul out and review a textbook or two; it's been a while, and I'd embarrass myself if I tried to talk precisely about it off the cuff.

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