Infinite Monkeys

Why are so many supposedly intelligent people so damned stupid?

Two Australian mathematicians have called into question an old adage, that if given an infinite amount of time, a monkey pressing keys on a typewriter would eventually write the complete works of William Shakespeare…However…Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta…found that the time it would take for a typing monkey to replicate Shakespeare’s plays, sonnets and poems would be longer than the lifespan of our universe…the study also did a series of calculations based on the current global population of chimpanzees, which is roughly 200,000.  The results indicated that even if every chimp in the world was enlisted and able to type at a pace of one key per second until the end of the universe, they wouldn’t even come close to typing out the Bard’s works…

It’s easy to “disprove” anything if you’re allowed to change the conditions.  The original concept does not call for “a monkey” or “the current global population of chimpanzees” (which are not monkeys); it calls for an infinite number of monkeys.  It also does not constrain the allowed time to “the age of the universe”, but to an infinite amount of time.  I knew this “study” was BS when the article didn’t mention transfinite mathematics; these clowns don’t even seem to recognize that 13.7 billion is exactly as far from infinity as zero is.  In short: don’t talk about fucking infinity if you are not prepared to intellectually struggle with Cantor, or at least with imaginary polar monoliths and immortal birds.