Keep Shaking

President Bush was set Thursday to ask the country for more time to let success bloom in Iraq as his administration saluted a Sunni sheik assassinated after challenging al-Qaida's presence in Anbar province.

You know, my semiotics professor--for reasons that are still a tad hazy to me--was talking about entropy today. One of his examples was a box of marbles: you have all the blue marbles neatly arrange one side, and all the red marbles on the other. Then you shake up the box, and bam, they get all mixed up. Well, surely, if you just keep shaking the box, eventually the marbles will all return to their original configuration, right? It could happen! Well, no it couldn't, because systems can't go from disorder to order like that. I may well be mangling this principle (science is hard), but that's about the way and shape of it.

We've been shaking this for years, you fucking idiot! The marbles are not going to align themselves! They've never even come close to aligning themselves; they've never shown any indication of trending towards aligning themselves. It will never. ever. happen. how much of a fucking epsilon-minus semi-moron would you have to be to think otherwise? I think we all know the answer to that question.

But hey, maybe if we shake it long enough and hard enough, we can at least shatter all the marbles and reduce them to powder, which will all come together in a fetching shade of purple. Mission accomplished.

UPDATE: Okay, so it's not exactly entropy. I think I kinda knew that. Nonetheless, I think the analogy holds. I don't think that introducing random blasts of energy into a system automatically means order can come about (this is where I wish I knew more science). But even if it did, the chances would so infinitesimal that it would be purely a mathematical possibility as opposed to a practical one.