If you were wondering if monkeys will really type Shakespeare, then here are some words that should make you very, very sad: There's empirical data on that. From the BBC (via Tyler Cowan, via Barking up the Wrong Tree):
If you sit monkeys at a computer, will they type the works of the Bard? No, they will partially destroy the machine, use it as a lavatory and mostly type the letter "s". It took university researchers one month and £2,000 of Arts Council England money to find this out.
Of course, the joke here is Why the hell were they actually testing that? I'm not so sure. Maybe next week they'll come up with a way of finding out if trees make noise when they even if no one's around to hear it. I'm sure the answer would make Barkley spin in his grave.
Speaking of typewriters, the New York Times has this tidbit, complete with horrible headline:
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD TYPEWRITERS
Cormac McCarthy has written more than a dozen novels, several screenplays, two plays, two short stories, countless drafts, letters and more — and nearly every one of them was tapped out on a portable Olivetti manual typewriter he bought in a Knoxville, Tenn., pawnshop around 1963 for $50.
Lately this dependable machine has been showing irrevocable signs of age. So after his friend and colleague John Miller offered to buy him another, Mr. McCarthy agreed to auction off his Olivetti Lettera 32 and donate the proceeds to the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit interdisciplinary scientific research organization with which both men are affiliated.
Let us mourn the passage of a giant. To think, Cormac McCarthy was a lone reed.
If you were wondering why I just made a You've Got Mail reference, the reason is that I'm trying to compete with the Times for most obnoxious reference.
And speaking of McCarthy, my friend and high school English teacher is reading The Road, and she has this to say on the subject:
BLACKNESS WITHOUT DEPTH OR DIMENSION
I think I walked around Oberlin and made sad faces at people. But, the blackness bit sounds about right too.
Speaking of blackness without depth or dimension, my recital's on Saturday at 4:30 in Fairchild.
|