It is a time of freedom and fear, of Gaia and of borders, of many paths and the widening of a universal toll road, emptying country and swelling cities, of the public bought into privacy and the privacy of the public sold into invisible data banks and knowing algorithms. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection.

These are the times when maps fade and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread.

Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times.



Friday, May 09, 2003
 
We normally aren't verbatim types, but this news story tickles me so...

Associated Press: Typing Monkeys Don't Write Shakespeare


Give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, the theory goes, and they will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare.

Researchers at Plymouth University in England reported this week that primates left alone with a computer attacked the machine and failed to produce a single word.

``They pressed a lot of S's,'' researcher Mike Phillips said Friday. ``Obviously, English isn't their first language.''

A group of faculty and students in the university's media program left a computer in the monkey enclosure at Paignton Zoo in southwest England, home to six Sulawesi crested macaques. Then, they waited.
At first, said Phillips, ``the lead male got a stone and started bashing the hell out of it.

``Another thing they were interested in was in defecating and urinating all over the keyboard,'' added Phillips, who runs the university's Institute of Digital Arts and Technologies.
Eventually, monkeys Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan produced five pages of text, composed primarily of the letter S. Later, the letters A, J, L and M crept in -- not quite literature.

Phillips said the experiment showed that monkeys ``are not random generators. They're more complex than that.

``They were quite interested in the screen, and they saw that when they typed a letter, something happened. There was a level of intention there.''


Posted by James Cook at 10:36 AM. # (permalink)



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