About a month ago in handling the remains of one Dr. Fred McCabe I found rich notes of contemplation on the subject of information theory. It appears that Fred could have written an entire book on the intricacies of hidden data, encoded messages and deceptive methods of transmission. Instead his notes exist in the form of a cryptic assemblage of definitions and examples, arranged into what Dr. McCabe himself labelled a series of ‘moments’.

I offer these moments alongside some of the ten thousand images Dr. McCabe amassed in a separate, but intimately linked, archive. The preface to this abridged compendium is little capable of preparing one for the disarray of material, but by introducing this text with Fred's own words it is my hope that a sense of the larger project will take root in the reader’s fertile imagination.

The Moment of the Message: A Diatribe

by Dr. Fred McCabe

More than ten thousand books on mathematics and a thousand books on philosophy exist for every one upon information. This is surprising. It must mean something.

I want to give you a message. But first. I have to decide how to deliver the message.

This is that moment.

I can write it down, or perhaps memorise it – reciting it in my head like a mantra, a prayer chanted in the Palace gardens. And later, speaking in your ear, I will repeat it to you. That is, if you want to hear it.

I could send it to you, by post, or telegram. After writing it down I will transmit it to you. Broadcasting on your frequency in the hope that you will be tuned in at the right moment. Speaking your language. Encoded and encrypted, only you will understand it.

I have a message for you and I want you to receive it. But first. I have to decide what the message is.

This is that moment:

This is the moment of the message

From the earliest days of information theory it has been appreciated that information per se is not a good measure of message value. The value of a message appears to reside not in its information (its absolutely unpredictable parts) but rather in what might be called its redundancy—parts predictable only with difficulty, things the receiver could in principle have figured out without being told, but only at considerable cost in money, time, or computation. In other words, the value of a message is the amount of work plausibly done by its originator, which its receiver is saved from having to repeat.

This is the moment my water arrived at room temperature

The term enthalpy comes from the Classical Greek prefix en-, meaning "to put into", and the verb thalpein, meaning "to heat".

For a simple system, with a constant number of particles, the difference in enthalpy is the maximum amount of thermal energy derivable from a thermodynamic process in which the pressure is held constant.

This is the moment the wafer became the body of Christ

The Roman Catholic Church got itself into a bit of a mess. Positing God as the victim of the sacrifice introduced a threshold of undecidability between the human and the divine. The simultaneous presence of two natures, which also occurs in transubstantiation, when the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, threatens to collapse the divine into the human; the sacred into the profane. The question of whether Christ really is man and God, of whether the wafer really is bread and body, falters between metaphysics and human politics. The Pope, for all his failings, has to decide the undecidable.

This is the moment black lost the game

A ko fight is a tactical and strategic phase that can arise in the game of go.

Some kos offer very little gain for either player. Others control the fate of large portions of the board, sometimes even the whole board, and the outcome of those kos can determine the winner of the game. For this reason, finding and using ko threats well is a very important skill.

This is the moment Robinson Crusoe becomes the first, English language novel

According to Abel Chevalley, a novel is: "a fiction in prose of a certain extent”, defining that "extent" at over 50,000 words. Some critics distinguish the novel from the romance (which has fantastic elements), the allegory (in which characters and events have political, religious or other meanings), and the picaresque (which has a loosely connected sequence of episodes). Some critics have argued that Robinson Crusoe contains elements of all three of these other forms.

This is the moment Sarah Conner takes control

A paper clip is usually a thin wire in a looped shape that takes advantage of the elasticity and strength of the materials of its construction to compress and therefore hold together two or more pieces of paper by means of torsion and friction. Some other kinds of paper clip use a two-piece clamping system.

In fiction, a paper clip often takes the place of a key as means of breaking and entering, or, in Sarah Conner’s case, as means of escape.

This is the moment they found the missing piece of DNA

In northern Spain 49,000 years ago, 11 Neanderthals were murdered. Their tooth enamel shows that each of them had gone through several periods of severe starvation, a condition their assailants probably shared. Cut marks on the bones indicate the people were butchered with stone tools. About 700 feet inside the cave, a research team excavated 1,700 bones from that cannibalistic feast. Much of what is known about Neanderthal genetics comes from those 11 individuals.

This is the moment Bill Clinton lied (to himself)

A microexpression is a brief, involuntary facial expression shown on the face according to emotions experienced. They usually occur in high-stake situations, where people have something to lose or gain. Unlike regular facial expressions, it is difficult to fake microexpressions. Microexpressions express the seven universal emotions: disgust, anger, fear, sadness, happiness, surprise, and contempt. They can occur as fast as 1/25 of a second.

This is the moment I strained my iris

Idiopathic is an adjective used primarily in medicine meaning arising spontaneously or from an obscure or unknown cause. From Greek idios (one's own) and pathos (suffering), it means approximately "a disease of its own kind."

This is the moment everything changed

In ordinary conversation, everything usually refers only to the totality of things relevant to the subject matter. When there is no expressed limitation, everything may refer to the universe or the world.

Every object and entity is a part of everything, including all physical bodies and in some cases all abstract objects. Everything is generally defined as the opposite of nothing, although an alternative view considers "nothing" a part of everything.

This is the moment of another message

In information theory the value of a message is calculated by the cost it would take to repeat or replace the work the message has done.

One might argue that a message’s usefulness is a better measure of value than its replacement cost. Usefulness is an anthropocentric concept that information theorists find difficult to conceptualise.

Rooted in our language is a bias. It’s a bias that we can hardly be blamed for, based as it is in our conception of ourselves as distinct entities whose existence can be felt, from one moment to the next, through time. Nature appears to move ‘forwards’, the ice-cube melts if left unattended, the scream in the night dissipates into silence. For very similar reasons we see society as a progressive entity. The 19th Century, Positivist appeal to a human reality that moves towards an ultimate goal still lingers in our rational arguments, in our science, in our humanist rhetoric. Again, we see technology as endlessly progressive. The tractor is fundamentally better than the plough, the internet trounces the telephone; the mailed envelope; the scream in the dark night. But forwards is not the only way that things can move. Most days I head to the British Library and pick up my pile of books from the counter. At the moment half of them are about ‘play’, about the systems of rules that mediate human games and what the order of games can tell us about human social activity. The other half of my book pile is made up of works of philosophy written in the last 30 years. Works by Deleuze, Serres, Agamben and Foucault. Their work speaks to me in a non-progressive way. Deleuze and Serres especially expound systems of thinking that grow like a supernovae or a colony of slime mould. From one perspective the supernovae is a system destined to implode, its central core rebounding the slew of material manufactured in the star’s long lifetime, out and into the wider cosmos. A slime mould, similarly, appears to be a system destined to grow, procreate and expand its genetic impact on the world. Both of these systems though can be better understood if we take them out of their human perceived, progressive contexts. To really grasp the supernovae one must understand the laws that govern its cycle of energy ebb and bloom. The same laws that govern the life cycle of the slime-mould. Thermo dynamics and the transitional principles that underlie physical systems – as seeming chaos bifurcates into autopoietic order. How these principles underlie the philosophy of Deleuze and Serres is difficult to summarise here, and also dangerous. I am still a novice when it comes to their theoretical paradigms. What can be said though is that their principles are non-progressive, non-positivistic. The order they see in social systems, in cultural artefacts and metaphysical constructions is better understood as order determined by thresholds rather than historical movements, by the flow of information between systems, rather than the inevitable consequences of scientific and social orders. At present I am working through the vague notion that our systems of symbolic communication would be better understood through their non-linear logics. That sacrifice and sacrament, scribe and inscription, digital code and malleable media are each a series of complexity thresholds in a grand order of semiotics that has been growing and blooming, shrinking and decaying in time with the ebb and flow of human culture and technology. I write this here as an annotation on things to come (on my website). It is not a delineated path of enquiry. It is merely a structure I intend to topographically identify, map and encourage. Here’s to Gilles Deleuze and Michel Serres, as well as some other names I will label their accomplices, such as Giorgio Agamben, Manuel de Landa, Lev Manovich and a whole heap more.