Subject: Re: pronunciations



>Yes, quite entertaining.  I got a particular giggle out of the (rather 
>obvious) troll from the guy who claimed, "As a Christian, I find both terms 
>[dee-mon, day-mon] offensive. I prefer to refer to them simply as 
>"resident processes."  


man oh man.. obscure knowledge download opportunity on line 3!

for your general amusement and edification, the term 'daemon'
refers, in fact, to a thought-experiment in physics..
specifically the third law of thermodynamics.

a gentleman by the name of Maxwell observed that what we know as
temperature is really just the average velocity of the atoms
within a given body.   as such, it's a macroscopic property of
the system as a whole, not an intrinsic property of the parts
that make up the system.   there's no such thing as
'temperature' at the atomic level, because the atoms themselves
are constantly changing speeds as they bounce off of each other.
one consequence of this fact is that in a glass of lukewarm
water, some of the atoms are moving at the speed of boiling
water, and others are moving at the speed of ice.

the third law of thermodynamics says that, in the absence of
external forces, the fast ones and the cold ones will mingle as
thoroughly as they can.   at the macroscopic level, that means a
glass of lukewarm water is guaranteed to remain a glass of
lukewarm water, and not suddenly transform itself into half a
glass of ice and half a glass of steam.

if you add external forces to the system, though, all bets are
off.   as an example, Maxwell postulated a Y-shaped pipe with a
little critter sitting at the fork called a daemon.   the
deamon's job is to watch atoms coming in from the base of the
pipe, and send them out the left fork if they're moving slowly,
and out the right fork if they're moving quickly.   with that
kind of machine, you could pour lukewarm water into the main
pipe, and get ice from the left fork and steam out the right.  
the critter that does the work became known as "Maxwell's
daemon".


almost every background process in a computer does work which is
notionally identical to that of Maxwell's daemon.   it sits and
waits for input, then classifies it and shunts it off for
further, specific, processing.   the Elder Hackers who created
the first such programs knew the value of a good metaphor, so
they called their creations 'daemons'.