Spagetti is an astoundingly good way of describing Entropy.
October 22nd 1983, Big Blue Desk Diary from the Central Electricity Supply Board, and the cramped handwriting seems to be a recipe for spaghetti with a very basic sauce. It makes no immediate sense for cryptography and time travel until you read the incredibly elegant, simple comment: there are more ways for spaghetti to be tangled than for spaghetti to be untangled.
Raw spaghetti is straight. Raw spaghetti does not cross itself. Raw spaghetti is stiff and, if you tap it, fractures and breaks. Adding water will make the spaghetti, eventually, soft and pliant. Hot water will make the strands softer more quickly. When spaghetti is soft then it gets tangled up. Cooking in cool water makes that tangle happen slowly: stretched out over time; while hot water makes tangling happen more quickly: compressed in time. Tangled spaghetti has hight entropy. There are more ways to be untidy than tidy. There are more ways to be tangled up than straight. Add some kind of sauce to the spaghetti and that tangle becomes harder to untangle. The edges of the spaghetti become tangled and sticky.
Derek liked metaphors. Visualising time as a pan full of spaghetti, boiling, was just such a vivid metaphor. The constant motion of the spaghetti in the water, with the constant crossing and uncrossing of strands made him wax lyrical about the knotting of strands being akin to the local pooling and dissipation of strands. Boil spaghetti for long enough and it becomes a bland, durum filled, liquid with a sad, dull surface and zero strands. Fail to boil it long enough and it remained what it was in the jar: a series of long, thin strands in a column.
The difference between two pans of spaghetti is the information inherent in the spaghetti.
In a technical sense, if you measure entropy in one place and in a second place and subtract the larger value from the smaller, you get an idea of the velocity at which you are moving towards the place of higher entropy. Physicists call it the Arrow of Time. Derek always referred to it as the difference between two pans of spaghetti. Which was a surreal experience for most people. It never occurred that watching how tangled up spaghetti gets is the same as stepping into the fifth dimension and watching how someone travels in time.
In 1867, Lord Kelvin proposed that atoms, described as knots of swirling vortice, makes a perfectly reasonable model of what it is that atoms do when atoms interact. As the vortices swirl about each other they bring into existence all of the matter around us. More importantly, the matter around us is delineated by regions of high and low entropy. In every conception of Entropy there is some notion of change. Which has a shadow, or a negation, in being surrounded by information. Like spaghetti in boiling water. Kelvin's vortices would be islands of entropy or chaos in an unending plenum of order. Which makes the knots of spaghetti important. Like the cryptographic locks of a Ledger.
The reality of a ledger is that it is a means for navigating all of those tangles. In a technical sense, there is only one way for a ledger to be untangled but there are many ways for a ledger to be tangled. The reality of each Block in a Blockchain Ledger is that it is signed using what amounts to a knot. The Blockchain Ledger is a kind of complicated spaghetti made of digital patterns. Each transaction is a new knot. A new tangle. If you happen to untangle the knot in the reverse of the way that the knot was made then Entropy is preserved. Meaning information can be preserved. A complex notion if Time is involved.
The basic principle of Entropy is that it increases. Preserving entropy in one place increases it in another. Creating a knot of entropic processes - say a Ledger Token Exchange - and then unwinding that knot of processes will, as a general rule of thumb, create chaos for someone else. Which Derek noted, was exactly what happens with Cryptocurrency Exchanges: they knot and unknot.
Which is how Derek became most enamoured of DOGE. A coin without any pretence to being anything other than a social activity. yet a coin that placed a kind of faith in the knotting together of the time lines - the spaghetti - of idiosyncratic social purposes. DOGE has a definite Arrow of Time. An Arrow that always points directly to the Moon. It is not a complex or subtle coin. One DOGE will always be equal to One DOGE. The events that take place around DOGE are not DOGE. It becomes a kind of mystical experience of Cryptocurrency. DOGE is both the Spaghetti and the Water and the Spaghetti in the Water. A kind of Taoist coin: flipped into the air and landing neither face up nor face down but obstinately on an edge that everyone claims to be impossible.
DOGE is the Entropy of Cryptocurrencies. Like the layers of meaning and importance that are developed and coded and implemented and devised on the top of the basic technology of locking a secret message in a box, DOGE can be as complex or as simple as is needed. Which makes DOGE the entropy - the Spaghetti - of Cryptocurrencies. Unless it is embedded in something, DOGE means nothing. Which returns to the idea of tangles and entropy.
DOGE was used to fund the Jamaican Bob Sled Team. The methodology seems strangely simple, because it is understandable. Which is to say, the way the tangle was made was explained to everyone. DOGE moved from being the straight, dry, untangled Spaghetti, to a delicious bowl of, admittedly Caribbean, sauce and pasta. The exact recipe was made clear to everyone. So the tangles were clear to everyone. When the spaghetti was served, everybody knew where the knots were and how to untangle them. Which ensured that the Jamaican Bobsled Team got to compete in the Olympics. The chaos in the digital Ledger became translated to chaos in the Olympic Stadium.
Which is not to decry or belittle the achievements of the Jamaican Bobsled Team. Rather, it is a very clear indication of how Cryptocurrencies move disorder around the World in a creative way that allow people to achieve things. All it really takes is a clear recipe, much like making Spaghetti. No two bowls are alike but the recipe is the same. That is how entropy manifests: little vortices of cryptographic
