Entropy

My oldest son is home this morning. The state is issuing a test to all juniors in high school so everyone else had the day off yesterday and gets a very late arrival today.  I reminded him that this Sunday, he has nothing going on, and that I am SO excited to watch how he will be cleaning his room.  He walked away, while eating his Cap'n Crunch, telling me he had something to send me. A couple minutes later, I received a text. It was a picture he copied from somewhere. Here is what it said:

Why You Should Not Clean Your Room

Situations of greater entropy are statistically favoured.  Things that are statistically favoured tend to happen, especially over time.  A disordered room has greater entropy than an organized one.  Thus an organized room will tend to become disordered over time.  The only way to reverse this is by continually putting in energy from an outside system. (i.e. making the effort to clean your room regularly.)

HOWEVER, at some point, a disordered room will be maximally entropic.  At this point, continually failing to clean one's room will not generally result in a more disordered state.  Thus no additional input of energy is needed to maintain the state of the room.

Therefore, cleaning one's room is futile- a task for the modern day Sisphus.  It is much more energetically efficient to allow the room to stay at its natural, maximally entropic state towards which it will always tend (and to expend that energy on more interesting things.)

Oy vey.  As if I don't know how to speak bullshit.

I asked my son, knowing what the answer would be, what entropic meant. He gave me his wonderful smile and mumbled some noise.  I asked him again what it meant.  Again, he smiled and then asked me what it meant.  I told him he sent me the picture, I wanted to know what it meant. Of course, he had no idea.  I asked him where he found the picture. He said he just looked it up.  I asked him why he took the time to look something like this up rather than taking the time to clean his room. His response, "It took me 30 seconds to find it. If I could clean my room in 30 seconds, I would."

Merriam's Dictionary define's entropy as the following:

a measure of the unavailable energy in a closed thermodynamic system that is also usually considered to be a measure of the system's disorder, that is a property of the system's state, and that varies directly with any reversible change in heat in the system and inversely with the temperature of the system; broadly :  the degree of disorder or uncertainty in a system

He should've saved himself the 30 seconds and said he wasn't cleaning. :o)