Apophentic? Apophantic?

The eclectic reading list has thrown up some nice things, well one that struck me in particular. One strand is the Chaosmosis reading list, which is currently on Norbert Wiener, and has got very equation-heavy. But one of the bits I did understand was about the Maxwell Demon. This - paraphrased and probably misunderstood as best I can remember, I’m on a train and the book is not - is a thought experiment? Sort of? Maybe? Undertaken by someone called Maxwell, in which you consider the possibility of a demon who is able to efficiently sort incoming signals based on speed into two camps/piles/gates (demons like guarding gates, or those who undertake thought experiments like placing them around gates, or maybe we just like thinking of everything as lying beyond gates). Were such a thing to exist, then it would be possible to a) send communications without interference and b) have perpetual motion. Hurrah!

So another strand of reading is current fiction writing research based, in this case a book from Warwick library on the history of the postal service in Europe 1500-1800, which mentioned the Thurm and Taxis messenger service, and how this features in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, which I have owned for ages but never read, despite the fact that it is (I think?) the shortest thing he's written, and I love all the other books of his I’ve read, but had been working my way through them backwards and had, as so many before me, become stuck on/in Gravity's Rainbow. It happens. There's no shame. So I have been reading The Crying of Lot 49, which linked up rather delightfully with another reading strand (Renaissance/Jacobean tragedy, that strand’s always been hanging around somewhere, possibly since I fucked up that interview question for Cambridge, but I regret nothing, and also digress), and also brought in the Maxwell Demon about 8 hours after I read about it for the first time in Wiener. I was very pleased :)

And then here is quote of the month (a new feature, I’m trialling it..), for all the differential calculus fans out there, especially in its Difference and Repetition manifestation:

..’dt’, God help this old tattooed man, meant also a time differential, a vanishingly small instant in which chance had to be confronted at last for what it was, where it could no longer disguise itself as something innocuous like an average rate; where velocity dwelled in the projectile though the projectile be frozen in midflight, where death dwelled in the cell though the cell be looked in on at its most quick. She knew that the sailor had seen worlds no other men had seen if only because there was that high magic to low puns, because DTs must give access to dt’s of spectra beyond the known sun, music made purely of Antarctic loneliness and fright. But nothing she knew of would preserve them, or him.

The Crying of Lot 49 p.89

So, which unexpected book coincidences have delighted you this week? Answers in the comments please! By which I mean of course construct a badge representing the goals of the secret society that would notice such a coincidence, preferably from milk bottle tops either old or new, and wear it prominently in a San Francisco bar or your nearest local equivalent. I will know..