Monthly Archives: November 2013

THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS: TYPING MONKEYS

Much like nerds argue whether Kirk or Picard is the better starship captain (Picard), philosophers can’t seem to stop talking about infinity. This thought experiments assumes we have an infinite number of monkeys randomly typing on an infinite amount of keyboards over an infinite amount of time.

Because of how mind-numbingly infinite infinity really is, the probability of one of those monkeys eventually banging out the complete works of Shakespeare is 100 percent. This is because any story is just one long string of characters. And while the probability of randomly typing it out is incredibly small, it isn’t zero, so given an infinite period of time, it will occur. Unfortunately, the same holds true for Fifty Shades of Grey.

That doesn’t necessarily mean it would happen quickly though. Some mathematicians have theorized that it would take longer to achieve a pristine (error-free) replication than the current age of the universe.

Correction time! What you are saying would be correct given a finite number of monkeys. However, when dealing with an infinite number of monkeys it will take the time it takes a monkey to type, say Hamlet, to get a copy of Halmlet. In fact, when you have an infinite monkey army, Hamlet won’t be the first thing a single monkey types, but that an infinite number of monkeys type. And infinite copies of 50 Shades of Grey, The Fault in Our Stars, Hunger Games will also be produced, all by the end of the week if the monkeys are quick enough.

So THAT is how mind-numbingly infinite really is.

Charles Bergquist

wrote-miss-ibis:

cellarspider:

lyricalred:

whiskyrunner:

Just a reminder:the natural diet of these birds is BONES. Not just bone marrow; actual bone shards. They pick up huge freaking bones from carcasses and drop them onto rocks until they get spiky pieces and then they swallow them. Their stomach acid dissolves bone.

look me in the eye and tell me that’s not a fucking dragon

And they aren’t naturally red like that. That’s self-applied makeup. They find the reddest earth they can to work into their feathers as a status symbol.

And they don’t scavenge other parts of carcases, just the bones. 85-90% of their diet is exclusively bone. Hence why it’s only a myth that these birds would just pick up whole lambs and carry them off. It’s not true, but in German they’re still called Lämmergeier as a result.

So metal