Apes

Right now, millions of monkeys are tapping away at typewriters in cyberspace in an effort to prove that an infinite number of monkeys hitting random keys for an infinite amount of time will inevitably reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare.

By contrast, five or six chimps, three hours and a bottle of mandarin-flavoured vodka will get you the entire works of Stephanie Meyer.

To put the Shakespeare theorem to the test, US programmer Jesse Anderson replicated the experiment with a computer program and says his virtual apes have so far stumbled their way through more than 99 per cent of the Bard’s works.

Continue reading "The serious art of monkey business" »

Since the beginning of the London riots, everyone’s been talking about social media and, confusingly, The Planet of the Apes.

Specifically, folks have been discussing the possibility of shutting down social media during crazy, violent times (let’s not worry about the apes thing, for now).

The discussion, dry as most of it has been, has prompted me to think about what the world would be like if social networking sites were actually suddenly switched off.

I’m told there’s a giant switch hidden somewhere in the desert. What if we all woke up tomorrow and Twitter and Facebook were gone, replaced by a link to a 57-minute video of Bob Katter building a tiny model ship in a glass bottle?

Continue reading "Turning off social media would be a riot" »