yay, we win! but will global entropy prevail?

President Chen has won re-election in Taiwan, by the slimmest of margins (~30,000 out of about 13 million votes). Of course, a la Florida, the opposition is demanding a recount. Apparently there were over 300,000 invalidated ballots, but the hypothesis is that they were due to a campaign which advised voters to go to the polls, but vote for neither of the candidates. Nevertheless, KMT supporters have stormed the election headquarters in Taichung. I was proud to hear that the Taiwanese people had remained calm during the voting process, even with the shooting one day before. It's too bad that yesterday's composure is being overshadowed by today's chaos, in the eyes of the world.

On an unrelated, and more depressing note, I was talking to a friend today about an article about a man who tried to extort $100,000 from Google using a computer program he had written as a threat.

She brought up an interesting point. The nature of crime has changed. Crimes are much more complex, making them harder to track down. I wonder how many financial scandals didn't happen because the perpetrators of the crimes were too smart and didn't get caught? It's possible to glorify Robin Hood and stealing to feed the poor, but how can you glorify the mutual funds scandal?

In fact, lots of things have changed. War is no longer the structured type of affair in which civilians are safe watching from the sidelines, and soldiers agree to break for the night. Authors love to write about medieval knights and chivalry, but will they want to write about atomic bombs and air-to-air missiles?

I read that a terrorist once said that the object of terrorism was to kill as few people as possible, as publicly as possible, in order to draw the most attention. The object of terrorism was a concrete goal, whether it be publicity for a particular cause, or the extraction of certain concessions. It often seems nowadays that there is no object to the terrorism; terrorists kill as many as possible, and they don't seem to want anything, except to kill, out of hatred.

It's as depressing as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Is that what we're seeing, a kind of global entropy?