Words Enough and Time
Regular readers of this newsletter may remember when I expressed some dismay upon learning that one of my favorite weird facts was not in fact a fact.* Well, get ready. I’m about to ruin another fun fact.
You’ve no doubt heard that with a typewriter and enough time (and presumably enough bananas for motivation), a monkey would eventually type the complete works of Shakespeare. And given the realities of mathematics, this is still true, infinities being what they are. However, some clever Charlies at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, whipped out their calculators and did the math. They found that it would take 10 7448366 random keystrokes to produce the complete works of the bard. I have no real concept of a number that ginormous, but according to the guys with the calculator, it would take far longer than the expected lifespan of the universe to make all those keystrokes. (And here I was thinking I’d typed that much last week.)
So, yes, theoretically a monkey could do that if it had enough time (and enough bananas). But in our universe at least, there’s simply not enough time. Still, I’m going to think about that the next time I’m pushing a deadline.
’til next time,
Avery
* The “fact” in question was that only 10 percent of the cells in the human body were human; the rest were bacterial. Advances in genomics have revealed that we’re only about half bacteria, which, if you ask me, is still pretty cool.
Image created by DALL-E 3