Culled from the Britannica dictionary, we found a good definition for entropy as “the measure of a system’s thermal energy per unit temperature that is unavailable for doing useful work. Because work is obtained from ordered molecular motion, the amount of entropy is also a measure of the molecular disorder, or randomness, of a system.”

In common parlance, entropy is a measure of disorder or randomness in a system that affects all aspects of the system. In fact, with our daily lives you can think of entropy as nature’s tax. Left unchecked disorder increases over time, energy disperses, and aspects of our lives dissolve into chaos. The more disordered something is, the more entropic we consider it.  Entropy as seen in everyday life manifests as aging in living organisms, rusting of certain metals, ripening of fruit and eventually the decaying of organic matter.

Related to digital content, if left unmaintained, systems slow down or fail, and become targets for attack by malware threats and viruses.