Thanks, Everybody,
It Was Barry Commoner, in a three article series in the NY-er beginning Feb 2, 1976, called "Energy". And it does have a long and loving account of entropy. I still haven't been able to read it because the archive system is hostile to ordinary mortals, but I will let you all know if it is as good as I remember it being. My especial gratitude to Carl Tollander, Jonathan Barker, and John Kennison, who helped me look, and to Renata Golden, who found it. What threw me off the scent was that Commoner wrote a book, a few years earlier on a closely related topic, that does not mention entropy once! Nick From: Nicholas Thompson [mailto:nickthomp...@earthlink.net] Sent: Friday, December 17, 2010 9:24 PM To: 'c...@plektyx.com'; 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' Subject: RE: [FRIAM] Help with memory Carl and everybody, The Wikipedia entry sure looked like it was going to have the reference, but alas, it did not! You are probably all prepared for one of the well-known terrors of old age, that you forget stuff. But another terror of old age you may not know about - that you remember with great force and clarity things that never happened. So, everybody, despite Carl's best efforts, the question remains open. I have put in calls to local nursing homes, but in the meantime could you put your thinking caps on? Thanks, Nick PS What the dickens did Roger Rabbit have to do with street cars and entropy? From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Carl Tollander Sent: Friday, December 17, 2010 8:28 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Help with memory Google "Roger Rabbit", which sends you to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_streetcar_scandal Many links. On 12/17/10 8:03 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote: Many years ago, perhaps more than 40, I swear I read a series of articles, later published as a book, that laid out the basic principles of entropy, told the history (perhaps mythic) of how GM tore up the trolley lines in LA to get its dirty busses to replace clean trolley cars, argued that we would in the next 40 years transition to natural gas as the price of other fossil fuels rose, etc., etc. I think I read it in the New Yorker, and I have had two candidates for who wrote it, both of which have turned out to be wrong: Bradford Snell and Barry Commoner. Does anybody else remember it? Is anybody else on this list OLD enough to have read it? I promise I have googled the hell out it to no avail. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ <http://home.earthlink.net/%7Enickthompson/naturaldesigns/> http://www.cusf.org <http://www.cusf.org/> ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
