Ruminatrix
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Sunday, May 11, 2003
More Research Required
One of my favorite album covers ever was the chimp sitting at an old-fashioned Remington typewriter on The Mekons' 1979 album The Quality of Mercy is Not Strnen. So I'm very disheartened by this story from BBC News:
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".
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