🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <5vtonh$b3m$1...@ezekiel.eunet.ie>,
Ben Walsh  <benw@iona.nospam.please.we'reirish.com> wrote:
|Tom Harrington wrote:
|> 
|> Jacob Love (jl...@engin.umich.edu) wrote:
|> 
|> : In other words, the whole long-winded nonsense is simily a lengthy
|> : demonstration of the infamous statistical point that if given a long
|> : enough time, a monkey would produce the works of Shakespeare by banging
|> : on a typewriter.
|> 
|> Thanks to Usenet, we know that this oft-repeated idea is simply
|> not true.  I don't know what implications this fact may have for
|> the alleged Bible codes.


	the sample's still too small - Usenet isn't
	enough monkeys to be statistically significant


|Well, it's sort of true. If there were something like 10^46 monkeys,
|banging typewriters at random, chances are one of them would type
|Polonius' quote from Hamlet: "methinks it is like a weasel." Extrapolate
|for the entire works of Shakespeare and you get a staggeringly large
|number of monkeys. Not that 10^46 isn't large - there isn't enough
|matter in the universe to make that many monkeys.


	Not to mention the bananas, diapers, exercise
	& sleeping quarters, etc... looks like we'll
	need to increase the budget so we can buy a
	bigger universe, sigh


|That's what Richard Dawkins says, anyway.


	so what's he know, he's got this blind guy trying
	to fix his watch in one of his books, o damn where
	did that spring bounce off to, not to mention the
	other seasons


-- 
  ,u,	 Bruce Becker		b...@gts.org	1 416 699 1868
a /i/	 "Let's imagine a rainbow zebra -
 `\o\-e   which do you see: a white animal with rainbow stripes,
 _< /_	  or a rainbow animal with black stripes?"	- Don Martin