VON+NEUMANN+BICYCLE+RACE

VON NEUMANN BICYCLE RACE.
In "The Crucifixion Considered...," he irreverently transposes the events of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ to a more modern and familiar form, that of the bicycle race. The race commences with the crack of Pontius Pilate's whip. Christ has the misfortune of getting a puncture on a thorn, after which he must carry his bicycle (cross) up the last hill. The final sentence alludes to Christ's ascension: "We know that he continued the race airborne -- but that is another story." Experimental novelist J.G. Ballard was inspired to write a similar short piece entitled "The Assassination of John F. Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race." []

RAW FLY INTERVIEW
[Would you be able to talk a little about Von Neumann and Games Theory and how they influenced the cold war?]

RAW: Yeah, I think were all still alive because of John Von Neumann. Von Neumann was the pioneer, or certainly one of the pioneers of programmable computers. The first computers at MIT were put together to solve specific problems then take them apart, put them together again and add another problem and Von Neuman drawn and invented a distinction between hardware and software and how you could use the same computer to do many classes of problems. He also wrote one of the best books on quantum mechanics but that's a digression. He also invented mathematical game theory which he showed could be applied to poker and other games like that, strategy, and to tactics, and to war - pretty soon the Pentagon had a big budget to build computers and play war games on them. "If we attack Russia this way, how much can they hit us back" and the answer was always that the losses were too unacceptable, most of them were usually total obliteration so they went on playing their war games for 30 years until the funding ran out and they decided not to have the war at all because Von Neumann showed that by solving these things in advance then when you know you can't win. Why go ahead and fight? why why why why why wipe yourself out, cut off your nose to spite your face? So that's why we're all still here and that's why most of the controversy and opposition about Bush's desire to invade Iraq, comes from the military because their the ones with the computers who are working out War games with Iraq on their computers, and they know it's not gonna be the cake walk that George Bush imagines. This has been all over, even on television news, all over internet - that the people in the Bush administration, the people leading the rush to war have never served in a war. The opposition is almost entirely military men, they call them Chicken Hawks ; the guys who want war because they have never been in one and have no idea what its like. I can see the United States 20 years from now still bogged down in Afghanistan, still bogged down in Iraq, and attempting to fight Saudi Arabia! OY! - Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups. [laughs]

FROM ILLUMINATUS! TRILOGY
"No rational interpretation of the events of August 1968 in Chicago, satisfactory to all participants and observers, has yet been produced. This suggests the need for value-free models, inspired by the structural analysis in von Neumann and Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, which will allow us to express what actually occurred functionally, without tainting our analysis with bias or moral judgments. The model we will employ is that of two teams, an uphill motorcar race and a downhill bicycle race, accidentally intersecting on the same hill. The Picasso statue in the Civic Center will be regarded as "start" for the downhill motorcar race and "finish" for the uphill bicycle race. Pontius Pilate, disguised as Sirhan Sirhan, fires the opening shot, thereby disqualifying Robert F. Kennedy, for whom Marilyn Monroe committed suicide, as recorded in the most trustworthy tabloids and scandal sheets. -- THE FIFTH TRIP, OR GEBURAH Swift-Kick, Inc. Page 135, Illuminatus! Trilogy, Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. Copyright 1975. []

QUOTATIONS:
"Two extremes of redundancy in English prose are represented by Basic English and by James Joyce’s book “Finnegans Wake”. The Basic English vocabulary is limited to 850 words and the redundancy is very high. This is reflected in the expansion that occurs when a passage is translated into Basic English. Joyce on the other hand enlarges the vocabulary and is alleged to achieve a compression of semantic content. - Claude Shannon, Mathematical theory of communication.

The "nat language" of Finnegans Wake, in fact, can best be described as hologrammic prose. just as a hologram is so structured that each part contains the whole, Finnegans Wake is structured in puns and synchronicities that "contain" and reflect each other, creating the closest approximation of an infinite regress ever achieved in any art-form. The absent is ever present, the dead are all alive, and the abyss of uncertainty appears in every multi-meaningful sentence. --Robert Anton Wilson, Coincidance.

"There is clear relevance between all these notions, and they all contribute to our understanding of socio-economic change. The Adamses on migration and acceleration, Douglas on increment of association, Korzybski on “time-binding,” Fuller on synergy, Schrödinger on life as an anti-entropic process, Shannon and Weiner on information as negative entropy, and Leary on neuro-genetics, all illustrate part of what we mean by Information Increase. --Robert Anton Wilson, Human Intelligence Increase.

What underlies the accelerations noted by Henry Adams and Korzybski is nowadays known as the selection of negentropy out of stochastic processes. Our understanding of this is chiefly due to almost-simultaneous discoveries (1946-48) by quantum physicist Erwin Schrodinger, mathematician Norbert Weiner and an electronics-communication expert at Bell Laboratories, Claude Shannon. -- RAW, Prometheus Rising, page 110.

lastly but mostly, in her genesic field it is all game and no gammon; she is ladylike in everything she does and plays the gentleman's part every time. Let us auspice it! --James Joyce, FW, pg. 112

http://threadonism.blogspot.com/2010/04/towards-theory-of-flything.html

http://ataleofatribe.blogspot.com/2010/06/ai-and-james-joyce-beast-is-awake.html

http://ataleofatribe.blogspot.com/2010/04/raw-valis-joyce-holo-gramic-prose.html

http://ataleofatribe.blogspot.com/2010/04/hubbleforth-slouch-finnegans-wake-and.html

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“TO LIVE, TO ERR, TO FALL, TO TRIUMPH, TO RECREATE LIFE OUT OF LIFE.” – from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.