Pomo Science, Evelyn Fox Keller, Maxwell's Demon, and Mister Information

[Adam J. Thornton]

Poking through _Refiguring Life_, I find that none other than Maxwell
compares his Demon to "a pointsman on a railway with perfectly acting
switches who sends the express along one line and the goods along another."

A-and we remember, don't we, that Claude Shannon quantified the relation
between information and entropy in the 1940's.  So maybe Mr. Information is
alluding to that colleague of Mr. Faraday's (the one with the eyes) who
gave us the laws that make the double integration of acceleration to
distance within the magnet-and-coil assembly of The Rocket.  Just a
thought.

Oh, and while I'm on a history of science and technology kick, I found a
minor boo-boo in the _Gravity's Rainbow Companion_ last weekend.  "Jo
block" is taken to mean the porcelain smoothness of a toilet.  Well, it
ain't.  "Jo Block" is short for "Johannson Block," which was the tool by
which intervals as small as a ten-thousandth (? maybe a hundred-thousandth
or even a millionth) of an inch would be measured in a machine shop in the
early decades of Our Fair Century.  The Jo Block was thus the symbol of
Perfect Smoothness and Precision, not unlike the nasal passages of an
inveterate Cocaine Fiend.

Adam
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