Monkey Don’t

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chimpanzee_seated_at_typewriter.jpg

The infinite monkey theorem holds that a monkey typing at random for an infinite amount of time will almost certainly produce the works of Shakespeare.

This may be true, but mathematicians Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta of the University of Technology Sydney find that it would take an extraordinarily long time — longer, in fact, than the life span of the universe.

Assuming a typing speed of one character per second on a 30-key keyboard, they find, a single chimp has only about a 5 percent chance of typing BANANAS in its own lifetime. And even the entire global population of 200,000 chimps will almost certainly never string together the 884,647 words that make up Shakespeare’s works within 10100 years.

“There are many orders of magnitude difference between the expected numbers of keys to be randomly pressed before Shakespeare’s works are reproduced and the number of keystrokes until the universe collapses into thermodynamic equilibrium,” the authors conclude. “As such, we reject the conclusions from the Infinite Monkeys Theorem as potentially misleading within our finite universe.”

Speaking of Shakespeare: Grand Theft Hamlet is a British documentary about the staging of a production of Hamlet inside Grand Theft Auto:

Winner of the Jury Award for best documentary feature at the 2024 SXSW Film Festival, it will be released in the U.K. in December and globally early next year.

(Thanks, John.)

| Literature · Science & Math

The Portuguese Fireplace

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Portuguese_Fireplace_-_geograph.org.uk_-_43995.jpg
Image: Clive Perrin / The Portuguese Fireplace / CC BY-SA 2.0

This unusual memorial stands in the New Forest National Park near Lyndhurst, Hampshire. At the start of World War I, manpower shortages prevented England from importing enough Canadian timber to supply the war’s needs, so English forests had to be felled to meet the requirement. The local foresters were away fighting, so a Portuguese Army unit with the Canadian Timber Corps lent its aid. The fireplace is all that remains of their cookhouse, and has preserved to honor their contribution.

The plaque reads, “This is the site of a hutted camp occupied by a Portuguese army unit during the first World War. This unit assisted the depleted local labour force in producing timber for the war effort. The Forestry Commission have retained the fireplace from the cookhouse as a memorial to the men who lived and worked here and acknowledge the financial assistance of the Portuguese government in its renovation.”

| History

Certainty

https://www.flickr.com/photos/tinyfarm/16108804
Image: Flickr

If I take a single glance at a speckled hen, I know that I’ve seen many speckles, but I can’t say how many I’ve seen. I have immediate experience of a determinate fact, but the experience doesn’t provide certain knowledge of the fact.

“[O]ur difficulty is not that there must be characteristics of the many-speckled datum which pass unnoticed,” writes philosopher Roderick Chisholm. “[I]t is, more seriously, the fact that we are unable to make a reliable judgment about what we do notice.”

“The problem is significant, since every possible solution appears to involve serious consequences for the theory of empirical knowledge.”

(Roderick Chisholm, “The Problem of the Speckled Hen,” Mind 51:204 [October 1942], 368-373.)

| Oddities

Alternate Route

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Squirrel_Bridge_-_Closeup.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Before 1963, hungry squirrels in Longview, Washington, had to leave their park and run across Olympia Way to collect nuts near a local office building. After seeing many of them killed, resident Amos Peters built a dedicated 60-foot bridge above the road.

It’s now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

| Oddities

Dressing Up

https://www.bestcoloringpagesforkids.com/paper-doll-template.html

Three girls dressed up in white, green, and blue dresses. They also wore shoes of these three colors. Only Ann wore a dress of the same color as her shoes. Neither Betty’s dress nor her shoes were white, and Carol’s shoes were green. What was the color of each girl’s dress?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

An Odd Book

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Klosterruine_Eldena_bei_Greifswald_(1824)_-_Caspar_David_Friedrich_(Alte_Nationalgalerie,_Berlin).jpg

Richard Jefferies’ 1885 novel After London is one of the first post-apocalypse stories, an adventure tale set in a future England after an unspecified catastrophe has destroyed civilization, cut off communication with the continent, and set the surviving human population back to a quasi-medieval existence among the overgrown ruins of the “ancients.” The nature of the disaster is never explained, but it must have been prodigious — the interior of the island is now filled with an immense freshwater lake, and the old capital is now choked under poisonous vapors; one old house collapses like salt at the hero’s touch.

The first section, called “The Relapse Into Barbarism,” reads like a nonfiction natural history, describing in detail how nature reclaims the ruins in the decades after the conflagration. The longer second section, “Wild England,” recounts the adventures of the young nobleman Felix Aquila as he leaves the stultifying court life in which he has been raised and rows out onto the lake in a homemade canoe.

Why invent such a richly detailed future when the story is essentially a medieval romance? Why withhold the nature of the disaster? Felix’s adventures in this world seem to unfold as if unplanned, as if Jefferies invented it simply to explore it, to commune with his own creative faculty. He doesn’t seem to know what he’ll find in his own imagination.

The full text is available at Project Gutenberg and on Google Books, and there’s a free audio version at Librivox.

| Literature

Wardrobe

https://merl.reading.ac.uk/blog/2018/10/chicken-wearing-trousers/
Image: MERL

In 1784, in the margin of a math notebook, English schoolboy Richard Beale drew a chicken wearing trousers.

The Museum of English Rural Life tweeted the find after acquiring 41 Beale family diaries in 2016. Program manager Adam Koszary told the Guardian, “When you see a 13-year-old from the 18th century doing the kind of doodles that kids are doing today, it is so relatable — there’s an instant connection. Also, there’s the fact it’s just so stupid.”

A (probably!) unrelated chicken in trousers. Homework doodles from 13th-century Russia.

| Oddities

Firelight

Four people are traveling in the dark when they arrive at a river. The narrow bridge can accommodate only two people at a time, and the group has only one torch, which must accompany each party that makes a crossing. Persons A, B, C, and D can cross in 1, 2, 5, and 8 minutes, respectively, and any pair of travelers can move only at the pace of the slower person. The torch will go out in 15 minutes. Can they all get safely across?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

The Unknotting Problem

The least knotted of all knots is a simple closed loop, the “unknot.” Certainly this is easy to spot on its own, but adding even a few twists can make it hard to recognize:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Unknots.svg

An elaborately draped loop can be quite difficult to distinguish from a knottier knot. Is this an unknot?

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thistlethwaite_unknot.svg

(Yes, it is.)

Surprisingly, while research is ongoing, it remains unknown whether the challenge of recognizing unknots is efficiently solvable — whether an algorithm can accomplish the task in polynomial time. It’s an open question.

| Science & Math