Popular Use
The term entropy is often used in popular language to denote a variety of unrelated phenomena. One example is the concept of corporate entropy as put forward somewhat humorously by authors Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister in their 1987 classic publication Peopleware, a book on growing and managing productive teams and successful software projects. Here, they view energy waste as red tape and business team inefficiency as a form of entropy, i.e. energy lost to waste. This concept has caught on and is now common jargon in business schools.
Read more about this topic: History Of Entropy
Famous quotes containing the word popular:
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I am glad of this war. It kicks the pasteboard bottom in of the usual “good” popular novel. People have felt much more deeply and strongly these last few months.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)