The Editor’s Notes
by Ken Holder
[email protected]
Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise
Welcome to the last issue for the year 2021. We will be taking our usual week off between Christmas and New Years days, and will be back … um … awkward. New Years falls on a Saturday, so it looks like two weeks off, with us returning January 9th? And I already hate my 2022 to 2023 pocket planner, seeing as how it put Saturday and Sunday into boxes atop one another in the same spaces M-F each gets. Too bad I didn‘t notice that before I shelled-out 2 or 3 dollars for it at Target or somewhere. Have to toss it and get another one, preferably one just like my old one. Unless I saved the receipt. Ha!
I seem to have gotten derailed there. Happens a lot when yer gets old, don‘t you know.
One of my grandsons asked what I wanted for Christmas. I said “Peace on Earth, Good Will Towards Men.” How do ya do that? Beats me.
So, anyway. I read a lot. I‘ve said that before. And in one of the books I just read I found this gem:
This statement represented a major change of course for me, but it was nevertheless consistent with the principle I have embraced since the beginning of my philosophical life—of following the argument no matter where it leads.
I was particularly impressed with Gerry Schroeder’s point-by-point refutation of what I call the “monkey theorem.” This idea, which has been presented in a number of forms and variations, defends the possibility of life arising by chance using the analogy of a multitude of monkeys banging away on computer keyboards and eventually ending up writing a Shakespearean sonnet.
Schroeder first referred to an experiment conducted by the British National Council of Arts. A computer was placed in a cage with six monkeys. After one month of hammering away at it (as well as using it as a bathroom!), the monkeys produced fifty typed pages—but not a single word. Schroeder noted that this was the case even though the shortest word in the English language is one letter (a or I). A is a word only if there is a space on either side of it. If we take it that the keyboard has thirty characters (the twenty-six letters and other symbols), then the likelihood of getting a one-letter word is 30 times 30 times 30, which is 27,000. The likelihood of a getting a one-letter word is one chance out of 27,000.
Schroeder then applied the probabilities to the sonnet analogy. “What’s the chance of getting a Shakespearean sonnet?” he asked. He continued:
All the sonnets are the same length. They’re by definition fourteen lines long. I picked the one I knew the opening line for, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” I counted the number of letters; there are 488 letters in that sonnet. What’s the likelihood of hammering away and getting 488 letters in the exact sequence as in “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?”? What you end up with is 26 multiplied by itself 488 times—or 26 to the 488th power. Or, in other words, in base 10, 10 to the 690th.
[Now] the number of particles in the universe—not grains of sand, I’m talking about protons, electrons, and neutrons—is 10 to the 80th. Ten to the 80th is 1 with 80 zeros after it. Ten to the 690th is 1 with 690 zeros after it. There are not enough particles in the universe to write down the trials; you’d be off by a factor of 10 to the 600th.
If you took the entire universe and converted it to computer chips—forget the monkeys—each one weighing a millionth of a gram and had each computer chip able to spin out 488 trials at, say, a million times a second; if you turn the entire universe into these microcomputer chips and these chips were spinning a million times a second [producing] random letters, the number of trials you would get since the beginning of time would be 10 to the 90th trials. It would be off again by a factor of 10 to the 600th. You will never get a sonnet by chance. The universe would have to be 10 to the 600th times larger. Yet the world just thinks the monkeys can do it every time.1
After hearing Schroeder’s presentation, I told him that he had very satisfactorily and decisively established that the “monkey theorem” was a load of rubbish, and that it was particularly good to do it with just a sonnet; the theorem is sometimes proposed using the works of Shakespeare or a single play, such as Hamlet. If the theorem won’t work for a single sonnet, then of course it’s simply absurd to suggest that the more elaborate feat of the origin of life could have been achieved by chance.
1. Gerald Schroeder, “Has Science Discovered God?” http://science.lenicam.com.
From There is a God; How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, by Antony Flew, with Roy Abraham Varghese (New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 2007)
So much for Shakespearian monkeys.
Another book I‘m reading right now is a new translation of Homer‘s Iliad by Caroline Alexander (HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 2015). Okay, not super new, but new to me, for sure. It manages to have that almost breathless forward motion of the original Greek while retaining the intrinsic strangeness of the whole thing, while avoiding getting trapped in English poetic methods. Think Alexander Pope‘s horrible couplets, or Richmond Lattimore‘s stately hexameters (otherwise one of the best translations, but a bit too stately), or Robert Fitzgerald‘s good English iambic pentameter, or Robert Fagles‘ vigrorous prose, or … or … well, if you can‘t read Greek—I once could, a little bit, but now can‘t—one of these guys will do, or all of them (but not Pope *shudder*). [additional links to Amazon.com for Lattimore, Fitzgerald, and/or Fagles.]
Some good new for those fleeing to Mars: Scientists Just Found a ‘Significant‘ Volume of Water Inside Mars‘ Grand Canyon, by Brad Bergan.
I hope you use DuckDuckGo for your searches instead of Google. Of course DuckDuckGo uses Google, but it hides you from the Google Monster. If you have ever wondered how they say in business, If they don’t sell your data, how does DuckDuckGo make money?, by Albert Khoury explains.
Kodachi is the operating system for those who value privacy but don‘t want to learn Linux, by Jack Wallen might be interesting if that‘s you.
The MRI machines can really help your doctor see what‘s inside, but they are expensive and help is finally on the way: Inexpensive, AI-driven MRI machines could revolutionize medical imaging by Mihai Andrei.
We knew it all along: Facebook admits the truth: ‘Fact checks’ are really just (lefty) opinion, by the New York Post.
And on the Flying Car news: A UK Startup Successfully Flight Tested Its Flying Car Prototype in Dubai, by Chris Young. Gives ya something to look forward too, don‘t it?
But enough of stuff, now for funny pictures (that‘s what I live for!):
Huh, I see temp is supposed to drop below freezing here in North Texas tonight (Saturday night/Sunday morning). Always something!
Stay Deplorable! my friends!
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