Chapter III — Raconteur Road
Entropy — The counting that governs everything.
S = k_B ln Ω is the only equation the book will not let you look away from. It says that what we call order is rare and what we call mess is common, and that the universe spends most of its time turning the first into the second. The Karoo is doing it now. So am I.
Deadvlei, under the wheel
These trees died nine hundred years ago and the desert is too dry to let them rot, so they just stand there, black and patient, while the whole galaxy turns over them. Entropy usually wins fast. Here it forgot to finish the job.
Even decay needs water. The desert denied it that, too.
Skeleton Coast, the long rust
Someone built this ship to beat the sea, and the sea won, the way it always does — slowly, then all at once, then slowly again. Now the dunes are finishing what the water started. Give the coast another fifty years and there'll be nothing here but a stain in the sand.
The sea is patient. The desert is patient. The ship was built for neither.