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1 " Maybe if I could slip into Sylvia's mind, sort out the spices in her rack, alphabetize them and dust them off. Maybe then I'd understand how it's the little things that pull you under. "
― Kelli Russell Agodon
2 " Sir James waved a gnarled hand. " They're nothing but feral file clerks, dragons. They used to alphabetize the coins in their hoards. "
3 " Many of my friends think I read books all day and alphabetize the shelves. Well, sometimes I do alphabetize shelves. But more often than not, my job title could be " friend" . Or just simply " caring ear." Public librarians are often part information seekers, part social workers. "
4 " We all behave like Maxwell’s demon. Organisms organize. In everyday experience lies the reason sober physicists across two centuries kept this cartoon fantasy alive. We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, and put our rooms in order, and all this we do requires no great energy, as long as we can apply intelligence. We propagate structure (not just we humans but we who are alive). We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium. It would be absurd to attempt a thermodynamic accounting for such processes, but it is not absurd to say we are reducing entropy, piece by piece. Bit by bit. The original demon, discerning one molecules at a time, distinguishing fast from slow, and operating his little gateway, is sometimes described as “superintelligent,” but compared to a real organism it is an idiot savant. Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells and carapaces, leaves and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways - miracles of pattern and structure. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe. "
― James Gleick , The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
