Reason  wrote or quoted:
> "Michael Ragland"  wrote in message 

> > Life, of course, is an anti-entropic system, increasing order inside
> > organisms while exporting entropy to the en-vironment, thus preserving
> > the validity of the entropy law...
> 
> Other natural processes create order from entropy.  A river will sort sand, 
> silt and gravel into neat, uniform layers from a chaotic mixture of 
> weathered rock.  A bottle of salad dressing settles out into uniform layers 
> of oil and water after it has been shaken. Where is the entropy being 
> exported in these processes?

Gravity is a *great* creator of apparent order.  It concentrates raindrops
into rivers.  It concentrates dust balls into planets.

How can this /obvious/ creation of order from disorder *possibly* result 
in entropy increasing?

The main key is friction.  When particles come together under the 
influence of gravity, the main thing that stops them from flying
apart again is friction.  Friction generates heat - and the heat
is then radiated off.

Of course this heat is often near-invisible - and all that is seen
on a macroscopic scale is an apparently mystical generation of order
from disorder.

So: examine that shaken bottle of salad dressing /carefully/ - and
you will observe it is radiating more heat than the unshaken bottle
next to it.
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