-- .- .-. .-. -.-- / -- .

The Victorian Internet, Chapter Eight: Love Over The Wires
Tom Standage

The daughter of a wealthy Boston merchant had fallen in love with Mr. B., a clerk in her father's countinghouse. Although her father had promised her hand to someone else, she decided to disregard his intentions and marry Mr. B. instead. When her father found out, he put the young man on a ship and sent him away on business to England.
The ship made a stopover in New York, where the young woman sent her intended a message, asking him to present himself at the telegraph office with a magistrate at an agreed-upon time. At the appointed hour she was at the other end of the wire in the Boston telegraph office, and, with the telegraph operators relaying their words to and fro in Morse code, the two were duly wed by the magistrate. "The exchange of consent being given by the electric flash, they were thus married by telegraph," reports a contemporary account.

Chaos

Rarely do parallels amuse me, especially anything relating to religion, but this one is terrific. First, some background info: Chaos is mathematically described as a deterministic phenomenon, but one that is highly unpredictable due to great sensitivity to initial conditions (yes, a reference to the movie Butterfly Effect is appropriate here). Also important is Calvinism's focus on predestination.

It Must be Beatiful  -  Great Equations of Modern Science

Edited by Graham Farmelo

Excerpt: Chapter Five, The Logistic Map. Author: Robert May

Henry Horn suggested that here at last is the reconciliation between free will and the foreordained nature of human fates as seen by Calvinism and some other religions. The Creator has placed us in a world of deterministic chaos, obeying defined rules with no random elements, but S/He alone can know the exact initial conditions that determine how the future unfolds. For us, the system's sensitivity to initial conditions means that it is unpredictable, and we interpret this as free will. Horn initially suggested this as a jocular aside, but it now enjoys a modest scholarly literature!

Horn focuses on each person's fate, but it may be more relevant to think of it outside of a particular religion. The world is mostly deterministic, so how are a person's beliefs so unpredictable? As with any chaotic system, it's dependent on initial conditions. No, I don't mean the old "you have the same belief as your parents" argument. Your genetic makeup, along with a few influential childhood experiences will set you off into the deterministic world like in a pinball machine, armed with ideas that are unique to yourself and unknown to others so that no one can even guess who you'll turn into.

Colorado

On The Road, Chapter Five
Jack Kerouac

It was beautiful in Longmont. Under a tremendous old tree was a bed of green lawn-grass belonging to a gas station. I asked the attendant if I could sleep there, and he said sure; so I stretched out a wool shirt, laid my face flat on it, with an elbow out, and with one eye cocked at the snowy Rockies in the hot sun for just a moment. I fell asleep for two delicious hours, the only discomfort being an occasional Colorado ant. And here I am in Colorado! I kept thinking gleefully. Damn! damn! damn! I'm making it! And after a refreshing sleep filled with cobwebby dreams of my past life in the East I got up, washed in the station men's room, and strode off, fit and slick as a fiddle, and got me a rich thick milkshake at the roadhouse to put some freeze in my hot, tormented stomach.

Reason

Breakfast of Champions, Chapter Twenty-Two
Kurt Vonnegut

"You are pooped and demoralized," read Dwayne. "Why wouldn't you be? Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn't meant to be reasonable."

Slavery

Breakfast of Champions, Chapter Eight
Kurt Vonnegut

The prostitutes worked for a pimp now. He was splendid and cruel. He was a god to them. He took their free will away from them, which was perfectly all right. They didn't want it anyway. It was as though they had surrendered themselves to Jesus, for instance, so they could live unselfishly and trustingly--except that they had surrendered to a pimp instead.