Friday, April 2, 2010

modernized maxim

There is no sustainably free lunch, i.e. all net surprisal extracts a cost in thermodynamic availability.

What's new here is that:

  • we've added sustainably, since in the short run free lunches can be obtained from time to time but not in a steady-state fashion,
  • thermodynamic availability (e.g. in bits) and net surprisal (KL-divergence) are used to restate the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics in way which applies nicely to complex non-equilibrium systems,
  • and what else?

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