Date: Mon, 24 Feb 1997 11:46:06 -0500
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Marx's monkey writer


At 7:04 AM -0800 2/24/97, Scott McLemee wrote:

>> Not only is this idiotic at face value, but there is a certain
>> anti-intellectual insinuation, i.e. anyone, including monkeys, can perform
>> intellectual (or religious or political) work.
>
>Not at all.  The argument has nothing to do with Shakespeare, or monkeys
>for that matter.  Whatever else they may be, Hamlet or the Magna Carta
>are strings of letters; their sequence *could* be generated at random,
>given enough time and energy.

Perhaps we could devise a measure - Huxley monkey-units (HMUs) - that would
stand for the number of years it would take for the proverbial roomful of
monkeys to type a given text - sort of like the readability indexes
Microsoft Word helpfully computes. The Grundrisse would probably be several
billion HMUs. Hamlet, a much shorter text, would probably earn only several
hundred million HMUs. Your average Jerry Levy post, I suspect, would garner
an HMU count in the low two figures.

Doug

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