May 28th, 2009

An unexpected application of the First Law of Thermodynamics

This past winter, my furnace failed catastrophically. (The furnace repair person told me that when furnaces fail, it tends to be catastrophic failure.) It was a few days before everything was back in order, and the very day everything was working again, the furnace belonging to one of my relatives stopped working.

This was an application of the First Law of Thermodynamics with which I had previously been unfamiliar.

Fortunately, the repair on the second furnace was very simple and was done in just a few hours.

After I informed my friends of my discovery of this law of the universe, one of them wrote, “Our furnace broke on Sunday. I can’t help but feel like you’re kind of responsible.”

Author

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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