OK, the 9:00:
It seems to be a digital projection of the old adage about monekys typing Shakespeare by accident: get enough typers and eventually you'll have brilliance by mathematical probability: "two primates, two computers, and we're already rivaling shakespeare," is the slogan of the blog worldwiderant.
As if to illustrate the principle that if you have enough bloggers eventually you can find anything, I found these Web pages on the mathematical probability of monkeys typing Shakespeare:
Here's one:
It has been suggested that an evolutionist first used the now familiar parable of monkeys typing Shakespeare. "It was, I think, Huxley, who said that six monkeys, set to strum unintelligently on typewriters for millions of millions of years, would be bound in time to write all the books in the British Museum. If we examined the last page which a particular monkey had typed, and found that it had chanced, in its blind strumming, to type a Shakespeare sonnet, we should rightly regard the occurrence as a remarkable accident, but if we looked through all the millions of pages the monkeys had turned off in untold millions of years, we might be sure of finding a Shakespeare sonnet somewhere amongst them, the product of the blind play of chance." (Jeans, Sir James, The Mysterious Universe, New York, Macmillian Co., 1930, p. 4.) More recently, the classic monkey myth was employed by Hawking. After citing the monkey illustration he comments, "very occasionally by pure chance they will type out one of Shakespeare’s sonnets." (Hawking, S.W., 1988, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, p. 123) This is absurd. The assertion that the monkeys *will not* in fact perform this feat is as close as we can get to a scientific fact.
There you have it. Here's another one.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
About Me
Labels
- 4 (14)
Blog Archive
-
▼
2002
(559)
-
▼
July
(153)
- Chicago architecture watch: The Trump Tower is bac...
- Today's edition of my Notebook Reader, a daily dig...
- Number of the day: 400: Americans who die each yea...
- Word of the Day, from M-W: abecedarian \ay-bee-see...
- So there's an ombusdman for ombudsmen. Who knew? M...
- ANOTHER BLOW IS STRUCK AGAINST MEDIA INDEPENDENCE:...
- Cleaning out my notes on blogging, here's a Time I...
- Letters to Sports Illustrated about its recent NAS...
- My latest story for the Tribune: http://www.chicag...
- Thought of the day: More Blogathonning, please! 48...
- That's it. I made it 24 hours straight. Tribune Ch...
- The end is in sight. The light at the end of the t...
- One last angle to explore here on the question of ...
- My friend Nathan once mentioned that one of the ca...
- Hunger is clawing at my insides. I just looked out...
- Relevant clipping from Time magazine a week or two...
- From The Electronic Word How can one argue that rh...
- Back to reverence and words--when there are fewer ...
- This notion of the divinity of the word is intrigu...
- From On Literacy, an engaging sociological history...
- I knew I'd be thinking about this topic of the fut...
- I'm staring to feel weak--I'm running on pizza, ma...
- This words and waste question unfurls a deeper que...
- As I've said, the most mind-boggling thing about t...
- I think I'm catching my second wind. I don't feel ...
- Instapundit, writing the other day about another b...
- I just got done watching Rain Man with my wife, wh...
- You may have wondered, why do I insist on proper c...
- For the most part, it's been fun though. And I'm n...
- I may have come across as a little snide about blo...
- The word blog itself suggests, by onomatopoeia, th...
- 11:30 and I'm already yawning. 8 a.m seems about 1...
- Quentin Schultzemy professor and author of the for...
- The question of wasteful blogs may seem like a so-...
- A couple years ago I posed the issue of words and ...
- Part of the reason I asked whether blogs were all ...
- And the 9:30: Nine at night and I just went outsi...
- OK, the 9:00: It seems to be a digital projection...
- AOL just crashed--I'm actually stunned this is onl...
- The halfway point seems as good a time as any to r...
- 24 posts, and only halfway home! It's going to be ...
- Since blogging is like talk radio, you would expec...
- One last (hah!) thought on the print news/weblogs ...
- Thank goodness for supper. I've hardly eaten all d...
- Will has written up a strikingly thorough analysis...
- My friend Will checks in from Beijing: regarding ...
- This weblog itself is an interesting convergence o...
- In the discussion of newspapers on paper and on th...
- The other thing about this question is that weblog...
- I just stepped out into my apartment hallway, wher...
- The newspaper on the desk beside me still has me t...
- I've transferred to my desk by our bay window, whi...
- I spoke yesterday by phone to Paul Grabowicz, who ...
- More on blogs on campus: Gordon helps keep a weblo...
- I'm going through my notes on weblogs and the acad...
- Overheard on the Blogathon bulletin board: - Too ...
- Trying to coherently summarize how Blogathon so fa...
- Just got an e-mail from Cat Connor, founder and ma...
- THE POLITICS OF BLOGGING: Like talk radio, the gra...
- Let's open the mailbag: As a blogger for almost a...
- I'm finally going to break for that breakfast and ...
- Another twist on the mainstreaming question: blog ...
- I'm also wondering, is there something inherently ...
- So this raises the question, is blogging going ma...
- Oh, and I forgot Salon, which just launched its bl...
- I just picked up today's Tribune; I've been online...
- Blogroots.com on blogging: Weblogs are a grassroo...
- Diaries have been around for centuries, stuffed un...
- I'll be trying to extract much of the mundanities ...
- Here's today's edition of my Notebook Reader, a da...
- I need breakfast and a shower. I was hoping to hav...
- Link of the day: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldc...
- I just posted a little Guide to My Blog and Blogat...
- BLOGATHON BEGINS: This is the first time I've ever...
- Tomorrow is Blogathon! I'll be posting at least ev...
- Quote of the day: "I get picked on pretty bad. Peo...
- Number of the day: 30,000 Gallons of sewage disgor...
- Here's my Notebook Reader for today, a daily diges...
- John Madden's new deal with ABC means he'll also b...
- President Bush will give an exclusive interview th...
- Link of the day: http://www1.passur.com/lax.html T...
- Number of the day: 30: Percent drop in tourism at ...
- Rob Lowe leaves West Wing: From the beginning he w...
- Quote of the day: "You can [blame] a little bit of...
- Leave it to the testosterone-pumped, give-em-hell ...
- Today's installment of my Notebook Reader, a daily...
- I said earlier this week that I was keeping an eye...
- The Starbucks-ization of the world: Business 2.0 b...
- Here's a twist: Joe Lieberman has been wearing a g...
- Thought of the day: the need to be outside the box...
- Link of the Day: http://www.longbets.org/ Long Bet...
- The main product of Taiwan's government-owned Toba...
- I meant to post this with my marriage rant the oth...
- My ongoing series on why I'm sometimes embarassed ...
- My best friend Nathan is an adventurous journalist...
- Thought of the day: Finding the ordinary-ness in t...
- James Brosnahan, attorney for John Walker Lindh, o...
- I suppose it's a trivial detail in a sad, strange ...
- Thought of the day: The spiritual function of temp...
- John O'Sullivan in today's Chicago Sun-Times "When...
-
▼
July
(153)
No comments:
Post a Comment