Agnes by Tony Cochran for February 27, 2010

Do what I do, Agnes, and type like a sentient monkey…the hours just fly by.

Not wasted, finger exercising.

From what I read of modern prose, we need more time and less monkeys

jklsknosd jk;afl;ewklsdgju9hg90rllv,vn v jfkdls;alekfujgl;d;dfo p-rl;a\N MSDLSOGRJUkdflakfinbv,vo39045kigngkdk dlsloaoierirflkadlkasdklfjw20289gtjals,mvn m ows[-m

No, monkey typing doesn’t work, but had to try

@ all-hail-hypnotoad…

laughing out loud…

well, one hour down and something like 8.76 billion hours to go

With modern word-processing technology instead of typewriters, the original million-year estimate has been revised to a mere 600,000 years.

Meanwhile, great strides are already being made. Shakespeare remains a distant goal, but the “Twilight” books were produced by a team of capuchins over a five-year span, and a single howler wrote “Going Rogue” for Sarah Palin in a long weekend.

MONKEY TYPING EXPERIMENT: A bunch of monkeys are put in a room with a computer and keyboard. What is the result? If you guessed literature resembling Shakespeare, then you may be a fan of 19th-century scientist Thomas Huxley — but maybe you haven’t been hanging out with real monkeys lately.

Some researchers tried it. They actually left a computer in a monkey enclosure in an English zoo…. In terms of the literary output, basically, the monkeys pressed the “S” key a lot. “Later, the letters A, J, L and M crept in.”

It didn’t start out that auspiciously, though. Actually, according to one researcher, the first thing that happened was that “the lead male got a stone and started bashing the bleeep out of [the computer] … Another thing they were interested in was in defecating and urinating all over the keyboard.”

Source: http://patterico.com/2003/05/09/ which referenced the Washington Post, but that page wasn’t found.

The whole “infinite monkeys with infinite time” isn’t supposed to explain anything about monkeys or about Shakespeare, of course. It’s a thought experiment about probability.

Check out Jose Luis Borges’s story “The Library of Babel”, which posits a library containing every possible combination of letters, spaces, and punctuation that can be contained in a 410-page format.

Somewhere on the shelves of course is Shakespeare’s Hamlet (in all three authoritative texts), but also the lost Ur-Hamlet, an otherwise-correct play wherein the Prince of Denmark is called Hambone, the play in pig-Latin, the play backwards, the play with all the vowels removed, the play with genders reversed, the play with obscene language sprinkled randomly thoughout as if WS had Tourette’s…

The infinite monkeys are as certain to produce any of these within that infinite timeframe as they are to produce ANY prespecified text that you might suggest, but it would have as little significance or meaning as 410 pages of “SSSSSSssssssX &GG8hiki][p[ ”

(Actually, a truly infinite number of monkeys would mean that any specified text would somewhere appear on the first attempt, and likewise any finite number of monkeys would eventually produce anything given truly infinite time.)

@fritzoid

Have you ever read the Thursday Next novels by Jasper Fforde? Hamlet plays a big part in one of them, but they are all equally, wonderfully, skewed and inventive.

Sorry, FishStix, global warming is still happening. If Gore doesn’t choose to return Fox News’ telephone calls, a simple look at the language you posted will show exactly why. That’s what passes for “fair and accurate”? The whole article is nothing but a hit-piece.

World AVERAGE temperatures are still rising, with the rise being most pronounced at the poles and in the ocean. The fact that these result in unusally unstable and severe LOCAL weather (massive precipitation in some places, drought in others) is why the terminology has been altered to “climate change”, not because of a bait-and-switch.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/science/01/22/nasa.warmest.decade.data/index.html?eref=igoogle_cnn

As we approached Y2K, there was a great hue-and-cry about a possible global computer meltdown. As it turned out, nothing much happened. Was that a result of a concentrated effort to prevent it (which there certainly was), or because it was never going to happen in the first place? At this point, we don’t know. We have the luxury of looking back on it and asking the question, though.

We’re dumping tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year, while simultaneously killing off the rain forests and algae fields that SHOULD be acting as a counterbalance.

Honestly, I HOPE that the Global-Warming/Climate-Change deniers are right, but if they’re not we don’t have the luxury of playing “let’s wait-and-see.”

Actually, fritzoid, I DID see what I consider an accurate statement in that article: “Senator Inhofe will never stop working to protect Big Oil by denying that global warming exists, and frankly he’s an embarrassment to the United States Senate and the nation,” said Kert Davies, research director for Greenpeace.

“This is just a continuation of his 15-year-plus smear campaign and clearly not a serious effort to discuss the increasingly urgent warnings from climate scientists about what is happening to our planet.”

Inhofe’s record on the environment is well-known and a matter of concern to anyone besides Oklahoma (or ANY Big Oil) oil interests. However, while choking at the thought of money for the environment (the environment in which our children and grandchildren will be living), he is fond of increasing money to the defense industry.

i really don’t underdstand how protecting the environment that we have done so much to damage, while freeing us of our addiction to oil and dependence on the oil barons of the world stifles freedom. it also occurs to me that OPEC and the rest have done more to destroy economies (including ours) than any environmentalist could possibly accomplish, even if that somehow was the intent.

the oil age is ending and the sooner we realize this the better off we’ll be.

It’s not “just in case”; we’re already observing the adverse effects, and the only question is how severe they’ll end up and how soon.

Fossil fuels are running out. Whether they last 50 years or 100 years or 10 years is merely a question of our rate of consumption. Our water, air, and soil are accumulating toxins at an ever-increasing rate. These are undeniable. It WILL take a change in the global economy to even reduce the rate of increased toxicity, let alone attempt to reverse these. How much will it cost? It’ll cost a hell of a lot less to take steps NOW than to wait until even the most die-hard denier feels his fanny in the fire.

The old saying “your freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose”, and the “freedoms” that you talk about stifling are merely one individual’s freedoms to poison everyone else on the planet.

Boy, Agnes! See what you started with your monkey typing?

Monkey See, Monkey Do Do

There’s an old “Calvin & Hobbes” strip that comes to mind.

Calvin: “Dad, how do they know what the weight limit on bridges is?”

Dad: “Well, they drive heavier and heavier trucks across until the bridge collapses. Then they weigh the last truck, and rebuild the bridge.”

Substitute “How much junk can we dump into the atmosphere before we do cataclysmic damage?” and you have Big Business’s attitude towards climate science. The cracks in the bridge are already showing, and if it DOES collapse there’s no rebuilding.

“Fritzoid, there are none so blind as those who will not see!”

FishStix, the only response necessary is “There are none so blind as those who will not see!”