[TalonDJ]

This guy's version of the first and seconds laws of thermodynamics are not the ones I was taught in an Engineering Thermodynamics.

That is funny because they are the same ones I learned in Engineering Thermodynamics. Putting them in equation form does not contradict the article. Saying "people decrease entropy all the time" supports an intelligent design as the only verifiable way things in a local space can contradict entropy. But even the refrigerator example does not really contradict it. Take a 'fridge, hook it to a battery and put it in a 'closed system'. For a while it will decrease the local entropy of a part of the system, until finally it runs out of batteries and breaks down. And even while it is working the total disorder of the close system will be increasing. And when the power runs out even the local order will degrade away. BUT none of that contradicts what he said. The whole refrigerator example requires first a human to wander up to the closed system and stuff a really HUGE piece of order into it, a refrigerator. Lets say the statistical order of the refrigerator (the likelyhood of it forming randomly) is the amount of 'order' added to the system at the start of the experiment. Moving a little heat around, in a probability sense, is a drop in the bucket compared to the order increase of stuffing a refrigerator into the box in the first place.

[dr_lew]

Moving a little heat around, in a probability sense, is a drop in the bucket compared to the order increase of stuffing a refrigerator into the box in the first place.

This is exactly backwards, and it is just what is wrong with the examples of entropy increase, such as broken teapots, that Sewell cites.

Entropy is a calcuable quantity of a physical system in thermal equilibrium, and the "order" imposed by macroscopic manipulation of objects implies an incredibly miniscule decrease in entropy, which is dominated by the dynamics at the level of atoms and molecules.

The concept of entropy lends no weight whatsoever to intuitive appeals for the rejection of self-organizing physical systems.