entropy

[hb]

bout a year ago i found Norbert Wiener's _The human use of human beings:
Cybernetics and society_ for 50 cents at off square books.  At the time I
   didn't know Pynchon had read this, but then later re-read the intro to
Slow Learner and saw that he had used this book...  so naturally I picked
the thing up and read it, started it, flipped through it, and only recently
have opened it for beginning to end read.....

        but anyway...  I was reading _Entropy_ last night, from slow learner
and noticed this....

        From Entropy:  "Hermetically sealed, it was a tiny enclave of
regularity in the city's chaos,"   this speaking of Callisto's hothouse type
apartment..

        Then this, from Human use of Human beings, preface:  "But while the
universe as a whole, if indeed there is a whole universe, tends to run down,
there are local enclaves whose direction seems opposed to that of the
universe at large and in which there is a limited and temporary tendency for
organization to increase.  Life finds its home in some of these enclaves."


also....here is another paragraph I liked....good explaination of entropy in
messages-----
        "In fact, it is possible to interpret the information carried by a
message as essentially the negative of its entropy, and the negative
logarithm of its probability.  That is, the more probable the message, the
less information it gives.  Cliches, for example, are less illuminating than
great poems."


and 1 more thing...I was thinking...maybe.... a good example of entropy in a
message would be that telephone game...or gossip as some may know it...
        where one person begins by telling his neighbor a sentence, then
that person tells the next in the circle until it gets back around and the
last person says what it is that they heard, and it is almost always much
different than the beginning message; entropized.

word
later

hb