The black folder w turquoise is Michelle's "death pak" from French Mortuary.
The blue and white rectangular box holds a spanking new automotive part most likely for the 1961 Dodge Lancer Michelle's grandfather bought new. We sold it in 2015 for $1,000.00.
The pen holder is a souvenir from Japan. It did duty as a cigarette holder in its hey day. (The phrase hey day originated in the 16th century as "heyda," an expression of cheerfulness or surprise.)
Northwest of the pen holder is Michelle's desk.
Entropy! What a facinating and misunderstood word! In the world of datacenters it's the mystery factor that determines if a cooling system will work or not. Mystery because, not only does it vary depending all the evolving relationship between the other factors involved, but not many understand thermodynamic entropy so don't factor it in at all when designing a system, then wonder why ithe system doesn't perform as expected under some conditions. The interesting thing is that, with some knowledge and a bit of calculating the "disorder" of a system's entropy is actually quantifiable. In other words, the chaos of the desk is actually a well-ordered system that's misunderstood simply because we don't always know why it does what it does.
ReplyDeleteGreg,
DeleteI'm gonna sidle up to this with a sideways stance, back slightly arched, ears partially folded back and tail - though not in full zucchini mode - is readying, and ask, "Just what *is* the measurement used to quantify entropy?
OK, now you want to get technical!
DeleteIn my former world thermodynamics ruled. Specificly how to move heat from one place to another and how much energy (cost) was going to be needed to do that at a rate sufficient to maintain a constant temperature range (say 23C to 27C) in an enviroment with variable heat inputs.
So out of the several different formulas that are used to quantify entropy or the change in entropy, the important one for my world, in order to calculate the change in entropy of a reversable process in a system with multible variables while maintaining a constant temperature was (I had to go look it up - it's been a long time since that was my world) Delta S = Q/T.
Q = heat transfered (variable)
T = absolute temperature (for 25C that's 298K because the formula doesn't work with negative numbers and Kelvin is all positive.)
Delta S = change in entropy
Plug the resulting Delta S into your various heat absorption/transfer formulas along with the variables for the specific location and loads, and you can start refining the exact specs for the cooling system needed to maintain the desired environment to avoid under specing (system fails) or over specing (system costs more to purchase, run, and maintain than it needs to) Of course, because of all the constantly shifting variables, it's a moving target so multible iterations using all the reasonable ranges is needed. Though in practice the focus can be on the extremes because everything else will fall into an acceptable range.
But I still like the disorder component of entropy better!