DNAunion: But that's not THE standard definition of a closed system.
Then why did YOU give it to us?
It may not be THE standard definition but it is the definition in the texts that I have used to study thermodynamics. For a recent example you can see page 4 of
MODERN THERMODYNAMICS:
From Heat Engines to Dissipative Structures by Dilip Kondepudi and Ilya Prigogene, John Wiley and Sons, 1998 which gives the definition of a closed system as one that can interact with a thermal reservoir but not exchange matter. The fundamentals of thermodynamics are nearly always derived using systems (heat engines) that are closed but not isolated. I would guess that you can also find these definitions on dozens if not hundreds of web pages and books on thermodynamics. Here are a couple more examples in addition to the three that you gave which all say the same.
http://class.fst.ohio-state.edu/FST822/lectures/Thermo.htm
http://www.ncusd203.org/north/depts/science/chem/marek/apintropage/ap_notes/chapter7/chapter7.htm
This is why you must specify that a system is adiabatic (which essentially means closed to any energy flow since any energy can be converted to heat) if you mean that it is isolated.
In chemistry open, closed and isolated systems are defined separately because closed systems that allow only heat flow without matter flow behave quite differently from either isolated (no flow of either) or open (flow of both) systems. For example a clear distinction must be drawn between Carnot cycles in closed systems and the adiabatic expansion of a gas in an isolated system.
Chemists nearly always define the three types of systems explicitly. Physicists may not. Enrico Fermi in
Thermodynamics written in 1936 does not specifically list all three types of systems but when he refers to systems with no matter or energy flow he always calls them isolated systems and not closed systems. I am not sure where what you call the dichothomous nomenclature arose but I don't happen to like it (I couldn't open the link you gave to some previous discussion). However, as long as you specify that a closed system is also adiabatic (as Badfish did in the first post) you are formally correct to call it isolated.
Now let me try to straighten out this systems + surrounding = isolated system thing that Lucaspa quoted from Barrow. First Barrow is saying that a closed system interacts with its surroundings but the two together may in some cases be considered isolated if they don't affect anything else. I'll try to explain what I quite sure that he means, though I don't have the book here at home. Let's say those
surroundings of the closed system consist entirely of a single heat reservoir. If you then isolate the heat reservoir to the outside world so that it can
only exchange heat with the closed system in question and the system can
only exchange energy with the reservoir, then the
reservoir plus the closed system are in total adiabatic. In this case you can consider the
reservoir plus the system an isolated system but this is
only true if the original closed system and the reservoir cannot exchange matter or energy with anything else in the universe. You could have more than one heat reservoir and still have an isolated system in total, as long as the closed system
and everything (the reservoirs) that it can possibly exchange energy with are isolated from the rest of the universe. The entropy of the closed system can decrease but the entropy of the closed system plus the reservoirs must increase in any real process if the reservoirs are isolated from everything but the system.
I would like to point out again that this somewhat pointless argument about semantics is irrelvant to evolution which occurs in an open system. I happen to think that it is also irrelevant to the big bang whether the universe is isolated or not. Entropy can be equated to (E+PV)/T . Now consider that the temperature has probably dropped from few trillion degrees to 2.7 K, E is constant since the bang and while P has decreased a lot V has inreased to the current size of the universe so it seems to me that S must have increased increased overall as a result of the big bang if such a thing actually did occur as current theory indicates.
The Frumious and somewhat pedantic Bandersnatch.