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No words to describe monkeys’ play
Way off topic Fred, but I know Rantburgers like to keep up to date with scientific advances. Delete at will...
A bizarre experiment by a group of students has found monkeys cannot write Shakespeare. Lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth wanted to test the claim that an infinite number of monkeys given typewriters would create the works of The Bard. A single computer was placed in a monkey enclosure at Paignton Zoo to monitor the literary output of six primates. But after a month, the Sulawesi crested macaques had only succeeded in partially destroying the machine, using it as a lavatory, and mostly typing the letter "s".
Sulawesi monkeys? They used Sulawesi monkeys? Oh fer C*****'s sake! Everyone knows red-bellied tamarins are the most literally gifted of all the primate species.
The project, by students from the university's MediaLab Arts course, received £2,000 from the Arts Council.
Money. Well. Spent.
Director of the university's Institute of Digital Arts and Technology (i-DAT), Mike Phillips, denied the project was a disaster and said they had learned "an awful lot about resource allocation". He also denied it had been a waste of money. He said the £2,000 was spent on purchasing the hardware to set up a radio link so the activities in the enclosure could be watched live on a website. "Compared to the cost of reality TV, this was a tiny pinch of money," he said. "It provided very stimulating and fascinating viewing." The six monkeys - Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan - produced five pages of text which consisted mainly of the letter "s".
Was one line of "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" too much to ask? Illiterate hippies.
But towards the end of the experiment, their output slightly improved, with the letters A, J, L and M also appearing. However, they failed to come up with anything that remotely resembled a word.
Do you speak Monkey? No? Then how the hell do you know what they were trying to say?! A bit of cultural relativism wouldn't have been amiss here, BEEB
Paignton Zoo scientific officer Dr Amy Plowman said: "The work was interesting but had little scientific value, except to show that the 'infinite monkey' theory is flawed."
Erm, how many less than "infinite" is six monkeys? I thought they were supposed to have infinite time, too. You proved nothing! Oh, yeah, you should have had an infintely large research grant, too. OK.
The results of the experiment formed part of a larger project developed by i-DAT. They have been published in a limited edition book entitled Notes Towards The Complete Works of Shakespeare.
Authors: Lee Muir & Rhys Uss-McCack
Posted by: Bulldog 2003-05-09
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=14048