Thursday, January 6, 2011

the bottomless pit


If a chimpanzee sat at a typewriter and typed away for eternity it would almost certainly reproduce the complete works of William Shakespeare. This gives me hope, but I don't think it's true.

Infinite means infinite (I just wanted to clarify), which means that if you have an infinite amount of time and an infinite amount of typing, then you've got an infinite amount of possibilities to account for (warning: I am not a mathematician). Which also means that the Shakespeare or any other literary work would not necessarily ever be reproduced, because infinite is inexhaustible. There are an unlimited amount of combinations of words and non-words that can be typed, so the chimp could type forever and potentially never stumble upon each and every one.

I tell myself this story, because it reminds me that ideas are infinite. There are n to nth amount of possible connections that can be made about the world and it's imaginary affiliates. There are ideas floating out there in the ether just waiting to be caught like dandelions.

R.I.P. writer's block.

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