The Last Question is one of the late Dr Isaac Asimov’s most famous stories. As befits the tidy-minded author, it’s all about humanity’s agelong quest to reverse the heat death of the Universe. In a sequence of short episodes, a human being asks a computer the same question – how can entropy be decreased? The computer’s reply is always the same – that as yet there are insufficient data for a meaningful answer. Until, that is, the very last human merges with the cosmic computer, asking this same question as it does so. This time the computer finds it has enough data and … oh, but I’m telling you the plot.
Dr Asimov was also allergic to family holidays, and I find that I am in full agreement with that sentiment. Thus it is that at 6 o’clock this morning – about an hour ago – I waved Mrs Gee, together with Gee Minor and Gee Minima, off in a taxi, whence, weather and providence willing, they’ll jet off to the sun for a week, leaving me at home with the dog (and many other animals). My task, this week, will be to undertake that massive decrease of entropy known as a spring-clean.
When two rather untidy parents with full-time jobs inhabit a rather small house with two school-aged children, a dog, two cats, two hamsters and a snake, and when the garden is the domain of four free-range chickens, four guinea pigs (in their EcoMo™), two plastic pigs, and Beelzebun Demon Bunny of DOOM, entropy tends to increase rather more quickly than you’d expect, in a manner similar to Alan Guth’s Cosmic Inflation or the way that the currently very trendy Dark Energy is pumping up the Universe, Jim, but as not as we know it.
One way to decrease entropy would be to allow the animals to eat one another, in a kind of home-made ecological catastrophe. The cats could eat the hamsters, the guinea pigs and the chickens; the cats would then be eaten by Beelzebun Demon Bunny of DOOM, after which it’ll be a battle between the dog and the snake. I could sell tickets. Although entropy might be decreased in this fashion (and the dog has already begun the process, with her habit of stealing the eggs from the chickens as they lay them), so would my popularity when the other human Gees return. I guess this all goes to validate the First Law of Ecology, which is that there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
But in a few hours time, when I have gotten used to some peace and quiet, I’m taking delivery of an enormous skip, into which much domestic rubbish, old garden furniture, elephants’-foot umbrella stands, nests of spiral staircases and other stuff will be thrown, much as cosmic matter is sucked up by a black hole. Then my neighbour Colin will arrive to dig out my front garden (in furtherance of the horticultural plans of Capability Gee), adding the topsoil and old plants to the skip. Another neighbour, Denny, will turn up later to do some decorating, and Dave the Electrician will arrive at some point to reconnect the giraffe to the unicycle. We’ll have a grand time; much calcium will be released from its intracellular stores; the veil of the temple shall be rent in twain; and great shall be the tumult thereof, I should think.
So by the time the other human Gees return, the place will be quite spiffied up, and entropy will have been reversed, at least for another year. And, who knows, I might even get some writing done.
POSTSCRIPT: Last night I made the most earth-shattering discovery, as important (to me, at any rate) as working out how to reverse entropy. That is, I can now order furniture from IKEA online and they’ll even deliver it as far as Cromer. Woooargh! I see a future adorned by much IVAR shelving. I adore IVAR shelving. Doesn’t everyone?
Oooh. Thanks for that Asimov link, Henry. Great stuff.
Never mind selling tickets to your demonstration of predator-prey interactions (cats don’t cycle like lynxes, by the way), can we buy tickets to watch you put up the new furniture?
You should know, Bob, that I own every Allen key IKEA has ever manufactured and I have a black belt in origami. Also to say the skip has now arrived … but it’s pouring with rain and blowing a gale.
If I remember my thermodynamics,
Delta Gee = Delta H – T Delta S
So you can’t have a change in entropy without changing yourself.
How true, Matt. How true.
IVAR shelves:) In the process of converting one of our smallest rooms into a walk-in closet, I ‘shelved myself in’ when fixing the metal X at the back of an IVAR combo crammed in the corner of the room. I actually had to crawl through the contraption to get out.
Matt, for that truly dreadful joke, consider yourself slapped.
Raf, I have been in that situation too, so I feel your pain. We IKEA veterans know that the metal X’s are called OBSERVATOR (don’t ask me why). Fixing these things is more of an art than a science. You need to set up a couple of shelves on the side panels to get the spacing right, after which you need to screw in the X-braces before the whole thing collapses. I have often wondered where IKEA gets so many of the cute names for its thousands of lines. I was at a conference in Uppsala last year and looked at a map of the Uppland region… and recognized many towns and places of interest as knives, cups, coffee tables, wardrobes…
You may get IVARed in, but at the end of the day you can be well POANGed. (In green, blue or black, no less.)
Forget IKEA - enjoy the skip. The are few more pleasurable activities than watching clutter disappear and a skip fill. There’s also the frisson of naughtiness that it’s all going to landfill. But still, you won’t ever get cluttered again. Will you?
I agree, Brian. I am an adherent to the religion in which one takes one’s worldly goods to the skip (or the recycling centre, or posts an advert on one’s local freecycle group) and feels cleansed and uplifted thereby. But yes, there have been skips in the past, and more skips in the future. The rest of my family, you see, being even more entropic than I am, don’t share my unswerving devotion to the fundamentalist cause that is radical declutteration.
Re radical declutteration—I am in the midst of that very enterprise. However, I do not know what to call the mighty force at my household that opposes it (besides ‘spouse’).
Entropy implies a passive default. Instead I experience active hostile resistance, accompanied by a flood of highly creative rationalizations. It’s not just the passive, entropic, unwitting accumulation of clutter, but an active & energetic defense of it. What would one call an input of effort and energy into actively protecting the clutter?
Does resistance mean I give up? Of course not. I have evolved a key defense of my own. For the benefit of all determined declutterers pressing on despite the vocal forces arrayed against us, may I recommend the following dialogue?
Clutter defender: “Gasp! I see the table surface! What did you do with My Stuff?”
Declutterer: “You tell me what is missing, and I will tell you what has happened to it.”
Jenny – my favourite IKEA name is BANG, which refers, of all things, to a mug. They must be doing something right because they’ve sold 25,000,000 of them. Amazing, huh?
Anna – that’s why I remove the problem by ensuring that the Forces of Resistance are away. I have long ago come to an agreement with the aforesaid Forces of Resistance, which is a variation on your dialogue: the F of R says that I can throw things away, within reason, provided that she’s not there to watch. On her return even the F of R admits she rarely misses anything I’ve declutterized. Therefore, Anna, Dr Gee’s advice is to declutter only when the spouse is away (there must be an upcoming conference on the release of calcium from intracellular stores that he’s keen to attend, for example.)
The F of R . . . I like that. Has a ring to it. It could be a scientific abbreviation, or it could be a catty reference in a political roman a clef . . . living near Washington, DC I have to say I like terms that suggest political machinations . . . but I digress.
As it happens, the F of R will indeed attend a conference soon, though it is more along the lines of lipids. I will plan my attack accordingly.
And I will use solid black trash bags, rather than the kind people can see through. —looks around, whispers— Because spies are everywhere.
btw I love your blog, which I recently came across. Long may it wave.
You are very kind.
I am in need of more FLÄRKE myself – but then, who isn’t?