Friday, March 03, 2006

Koan of silence

Infinite monkeys
infinite blogging keyboards
so why no Shakespeare?

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very precise. But darling, I can tell you need to get out...don't worry, spring's almost here.

ether said...

If everything were infinite, would there be that much charm?

Anonymous said...

That's easy. Entropy...

coyote said...

Isn't it all infinite, already? But where there's charm, there's muons and gluons, too. Not that semi-mythical coyotes know a helluva lot about particle physics.... our bailiwick is really more in the realm of metaphysics, y'know?

David Scrimshaw said...

To answer your question really technically, it's all about which infinity we're dealing with.

The infinite monkeys are an aleph-null infinity (like the set of integers) meanwhile they're typing away and each one is doing the equivalent of creating a real number. Between each integer there are infinite real numbers, and between every pair of real numbers there are an infinite number of other real numbers. Which means that the "infinity" of the works that can be produced is a much bigger infinity than the monkeys producing them.

So... between each monkey, an infinite number of literary works are being missed.

To answer your question in a blogger kind of way, you might be interested in what the British Library thinks about this.

coyote said...

Charm, muons, gluons, and now an aleph-null infinity. And to think I saw them all on Mulberry Street. But all I really know about this opus is that ya gotta love a British Library director of e-strategy named Richard Boulderstone.... perfect.