amadeus
Bishop of Bio-Dome
Spoiler monkey business :
Random Thoughts XI: Listen to the Whispers
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Broken_Erika
Play with me.
meanwhile.......
amadeus
Bishop of Bio-Dome
I like that the monkey waits for Burns’ opinion.
I think it is a lot more than 6 trillion trillion (6 x 10^24). Apparently there are 884,647 words in the complete works of shakespeare. At 5 letters/word, and giving them 30 characters (forget capitals, give them space and 3 punctuation marks) that is 30^4423235 ~= 2.7 × 10^6533654 possible versions of text that long.
Also you are never guaranteed to get it, unless you have a way of ensuring you do not get duplicates.
amadeus
Bishop of Bio-Dome
I don’t think I’ve ever read anything by William Shakespeare but I did once have a copy of TekWar but I think that was written by someone else.
But you don't only have monkeys, you have monkeys/time. And it is only one work of Shakespeare. And, finally, you don't need to get the actual copy, just to the first level of likeness (which was defined to only mean "the general idea").
Of course I agree that it won't even get to that, but if we accept this then it won't get to that with a vast multiple either, if it is literally monkeys (pure chance). But there's always a chance that one of the trillions of trillions of monkeys will sit in front of one of the equal number of typewriters that contains a finished version of the text ^_^ If the monkeys have to write it by chance, clearly it would take more than a finite number to predermine one even gets past the case they all type one letter forever, regardless of what happens in practice.
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You've certainly read something inspired by Shakespeare, though. Unless you don't read. He's influenced so many writers and playwrights during the past 400 years that some of his words and phrases have become a normal part of our vocabulary, and even some of the themes of his plays.
Back just before the turn of the century, A&E ran a two-night event in which they had a countdown of the 100 most influential people of the past 1000 years. William Shakespeare came in at #5. The person who came in at #1 was Johannes Gutenberg, for the (European) invention of the printing press. Widespread literacy was the result, bringing the written word to regular people, and not just the church and nobility/royal classes. Everyone on this forum owes our reading ability and literary interests to this invention, and a significant part of our modern vocabulary, popular/classic literature, and drama to William Shakespeare.
For instance, have you seen the SF movie Forbidden Planet? It's a classic, and it's basically a science fiction version of Shakespeare's The Tempest. And some aspects of Star Trek (Original Series) were based on the Tempest. There are plenty of Shakespearean references in Star Trek, in the Original Series, the Animated Series, and Next Generation, either in the episode titles or the dialogue or the theme/plot of the episode. The TOS episode "Conscience of the King" is, of course, based on Hamlet, but not in the way people might expect. There's a twist, and a very good one.
TekWar was by William Shatner (likely with the help of his collaborators, the Reeves-Stevens, Star Trek novelists who have co-written and ghost-written quite a number of his books).
One of my bugbears is why do they make kids read shakespeare? It is not designed as a read medium, but a theatrical one. Sure, get them to study shakespeare, and have the books available to use for reference, but the primary way to consume it should be visually, probably on TV. There is so many goods books, why not get kids to read stuff that is designed to be read?
This is mostly based on the fact that you learn better when you enjoy the learning, and I hated reading shakespeare.
H4run
Deity
Perhaps, but I love "King Lear", I really appreciate the Jester, up until he was too frustrated with the situation and remain muted. There is the part where I lost my appetite to continue.
amadeus
Bishop of Bio-Dome
I don’t doubt that he’s had incredible literary influence and that he himself is responsible for the creation of many words that have entered the common vocabulary. I’m just not such a great reader of fiction for whatever reason—guess it’s just not my area of interest.
It keeps the kids quiet and the teachers have already written the tests.
I suppose it’s also to instill some sort of reverence for the man whose name is synonymous with English literature in the modern era, but like you I found a lot of reading I was assigned in school to be just plain boring.
But you get all that by showing it on TV, and as the kids probably enjoy it more it will be easier for the teachers. The difference between Shakespeare being a dry bit of literature you have to read and a bit of learning you do in front of the TV is massive for kids.It keeps the kids quiet and the teachers have already written the tests.
I suppose it’s also to instill some sort of reverence for the man whose name is synonymous with English literature in the modern era, but like you I found a lot of reading I was assigned in school to be just plain boring.
amadeus
Bishop of Bio-Dome
There’s also a perception issue—parents see reading = learning, video = entertainment. Depending on how old the students are too, it’s probably also an exercise in just getting them to read sentences longer than half a dozen words.
Do I think it’s a valuable use of time? No idea.
I reckon the schools could sell watching Shakespeare on TV to UK parents.
In apropos of nothing, the only thing I remember watching on TV at school is Quadrophenia.
H4run
Deity
Now, I'm imagining the kids watching "Merchant of Venice" at school, the one which Al Pacino played as the Merchant.
Actually, I like that movie.
Actually, I like that movie.
amadeus
Bishop of Bio-Dome
BEGIN AUDIO AT THE START OF THE NEXT FRAME
Now I’m thinking about all the filmstrips I was subjected to BEEP and how traumatic being in school was in general BEEP I wouldn’t want to subject that to anyone. BEEP
Now I’m thinking about all the filmstrips I was subjected to BEEP and how traumatic being in school was in general BEEP I wouldn’t want to subject that to anyone. BEEP
1) You're strongly reminding me of the endless library as described by J.L. Borges.I was thinking a bit of the rather infamous (and usually dull) "monkeys with typewriters" case, where supposedly a vast number of monkeys could, given enough time, come up with an inferior to the actual classics work, with the common example used being a play by Shakespeare (). Most of the times the monkeys-with-typewriters argument is used to refer to AI or similar, but not always. The general argument is that if you produce an incredible number of sets, you may force a repetition of an existent set.
But that argument is only true if both the set and the tries to form the set have a specific number. For example (a very good example, with small numbers), if you have three people, and they all have to vote in an election, and there are only two parties, it is obvious that you will have two people who voted the same. For the analogous in the shakespeare-pithicines you would need to have a set upper bound of different books created by using English, as well as a bigger number of monkeys/attempts to produce them. If there were x such books as an upper bound, and no more than x could ever be written, then having x+1 monkeys/attempts would suffice to force a repeat of one of the books.
The problem is that the number of different books is not finite. While the number of words in each book can only be finite (otherwise it wouldn't have been finished), you could always have a "new" book formed out of the previous one by just adding a letter (or, at worst, a repeated phrase, as happens in Arabian Nights with the ant skirmish story). And while one could, realistically, expect that the number of such trick-works would be relatively small, there is then the issue of specific word sequence and sentence building in each book: Certainly, given enough (a vast number) of attempts, some monkeys or AI would end up producing the general idea of a specific barbaric work, and given vastly more attempts than that they'd move on to cover the general idea on a sentence-by-sentence basis as well. But by the time you'd get to reaching at letter-by-letter basis, you would need so incredible a number of monkeys/attempts that it cannot materialize.
This is unfortunate, because a first repetition spells out the collapse of the system's ability to come up with differences, and ultimately will signal a next phase. It is also why no machine will cut a lego bit in exactly the same (infinite) decimals of measure as with another bit; although even if it did, we would never know it.
2) You say that ‘if you have three people, and they all have to vote in an election, and there are only two parties, it is obvious that you will have two people who voted the same.’. But in an election you can always submit a blank ballot or spoil it. Or am I being a sophist?
H4run
Deity
Taking from this reference:
The monkey would not filled the ballot, the most possible scenario the monkey would take and smell the ballot first to check if it's edible, when they found it's pretty "useless", they may throw it randomly, or they may rip it off and play with it while the best action they can do to the ballot is they will soil it.
So all this little math game of probability is negated by the infinite amount (not literally, due to the huge number of it lets called it infinite, while it is not really that infinite actually) of "illogical" possibility the monkey can do with the ballot. And not even one from that infinite possibility is "logical". According to us at least, but according to monkey those are the possible "logically sound" actions.
Farm Boy
I hope you dance
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With all the ridiculous mix-ups, sex, murder, and tawdry events, Shakespeare is barely fiction.
Exactly. My first exposure to Shakespeare was in Grade 10 (though I'd heard of him, of course). The play our class did was Romeo and Juliet, which is a rather easy one for teenagers to digest, since the main characters are teenagers, with all the mixed-up thinking, hormone-fueled thoughts and feelings that teenagers experience, including frustration with adults who push them around, and the comfort of having some other trusted adult (Romeo had Friar Lawrence and Juliet had her nurse as their go-to people for comfort and friendly advice).
The thing that some teenage readers find hard to digest is the fact that Juliet's parents were hell-bent on marrying her off, at age 14, to a man over 10 years older than her (I'm guessing at the age of Count Paris, but going by the actor who played him in the 1968 movie, he looked to be at least in his mid-20s, maybe a few years older).
Of course Juliet didn't want to be married off so young, to a man she didn't know! This would have been true regardless of whether she and Romeo had even met, never mind met and become instantly obsessed with each other. But that's how aristocratic and wealthy merchant-class marriages worked in Europe during medieval times. Life was a lot shorter than it is now, and the idea was to get the kids married off and producing an heir almost as soon as they hit puberty. There's a line in the play where Juliet's mother says she was about Juliet's age when Juliet was born (in that case they missed the casting a bit, since Lady Capulet looks somewhat older than 28 or 29).
Here is one of my favorite scenes from the 1968 Zeffirelli movie, starring Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting (kudos to the production team for casting age-appropriate actors; Olivia Hussey was actually too young to see her own movie in the theatre). This scene is magic when it's performed, but rather flat when you just read it (bonus: take a look in the crowd and see if you can spot Ann B. Davis, as an extra; this was several years before she was Alice in "The Brady Bunch"):
The family member objecting to Romeo's having crashed the party is Juliet's cousin, played by Michael York. I must say that while he was very good in this movie, I prefer his swashbuckler characters.
Some teachers are genuine Shakespeare fans. My high school English teacher obviously was, as she was very good at teaching this material. She had us read the play out loud, which is as close as we got to experiencing it as a performance. It wasn't until two years later that I saw my first live performance, when I was in Grade 12. A traveling theatre company came to town and they did "Twelfth Night" at the local theatre. I knew nothing about the play - not the plot, not any of the lines, just that it was supposed to be funny.It keeps the kids quiet and the teachers have already written the tests.
I suppose it’s also to instill some sort of reverence for the man whose name is synonymous with English literature in the modern era, but like you I found a lot of reading I was assigned in school to be just plain boring.
Well, I was blown away. I discovered that I understood a lot more than I would have if I'd just read it. One of my classmates was there, and we ran into each other in the lobby at intermission. He was practically bouncing up and down in excitement, and exclaimed, "Isn't it WONDERFUL?"
I had to agree with him. This performance is how I measure the rest of the ones I've seen of this play. The one I saw on TV was okay (for those familiar with British comedies, Felicity Kendal played Viola in the TV production), and the one that the drama department did years later at the College Arts Centre was a snoozefest by comparison, though it was good enough to please the others in the SCA (some of our Shire went as a group to see this one).
I've seen other live performances since then. I worked on one at the College Arts Centre - "A Midsummer Night's Dream." When you're on the props crew, you sometimes end up having to find or make some weird stuff, like period-authentic broomsticks and other things. I was told they were supposed to look "witchy" and rather bedraggled, so I took the shears and cut a bunch of twigs from the bushes in the front yard. This was in March, so there wasn't much else available.
And then I had to take this stuff to the theatre... the bus driver looked at the cardboard box I had of all these twigs and asked if I had a live animal in there. I told him I hoped not, since the twigs had thorns on them.
When it came time to construct the brooms, they actually had modern brooms that they'd cut off the bristle parts and were going to attach the twigs. The problem was that these brooms were painted blue (they'd been purchased from a hardware store), so that was the year I learned how to use an electric sander in the scene shop.
One of the things the director did with that play was have an actual stream with real water on stage (this theatre had some very cool technical features when it was first opened back in 1986, though it's likely considered fairly dated now).
I'd gotten involved with the front-of-house crew there, and it occurred to me that when they did Shakespeare plays, it might be a nice touch to get the local SCA involved for a performance or two. After all, it was well-received by another theatre company (the one I worked in for 12 years) when we did opening night front-of-house for their production of "Man of La Mancha".
So it was agreed that we'd do front of house for Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet, in return for getting to see the shows for free (providing it wasn't a sold-out house and there would be enough empty seats available).
Romeo and Juliet was... competently done. The audience got a bit of a shock to discover that yes, the bedroom scene was done with the actors actually nude (this is why Olivia Hussey wasn't allowed to see her own movie, as in the bedroom scene Leonard Whiting wasn't wearing anything and it was rather obvious when he got out of bed the following morning).
Macbeth lived up to its reputation as a cursed play. I wasn't involved in the actual production, but did hear about the fire that happened during rehearsal one night... Anyway, I don't know what the problem was when we saw it. Maybe I'm just not into that one, or the professional actor they hired was just naturally not very expressive with his voice. I nearly fell asleep during that play, so it's a good thing I didn't have to pay to see it.
TV and movies can be both entertaining and educational at the same time. When Kenneth Branagh's Henry V came to town, it was only here for 6 nights. I saw it twice, since it was so impressive. Later, when it was on video, I bought it. It was surprising one day, when my grandmother was having her friend over for coffee, she said she'd like to have a movie for them to watch (she had a VCR in her room where they had their visits). So I told her to have a look at my tapes and pick something, and to my surprise, she chose Henry V. I reminded her that it was Shakespeare and the people talked differently than in most movies, but she said they'd try it... and they loved it. So my grandmother saw her first Shakespeare movie in her 70s.
Another favorite is Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing. By that time I realized that Branagh had his favorite actors to work with (besides Emma Thompson), and it was fun to see Brian Blessed both in the historical Henry V and in a comedy. Interestingly, Much Ado About Nothing is the only movie I've ever seen that Denzel Washington was in. I've never seen anything else he's been in.
Of course there have been a zillion different productions of Hamlet. I've never seen that one live, though I'd love to some day. I've seen two movies - one by Branagh, which was set in what I think might be the Regency era, and I disliked it so much that I didn't finish watching it. It came as a two-volume VHS set, and that second tape has never been out of its package.
The Mel Gibson Hamlet movie was excellent, though. Some of our SCA branch went to see it at the theatre, and when it was over we gathered in the parking lot to compare notes to see if anyone spotted any anachronisms or errors. The consensus was that the only real reservation anyone had was that it was weird casting to have Glenn Close play Hamlet's mother, since the two actors are so close in age.
But if you want a really fun Shakespeare experience, look no further than Gilligan's Island, with its episode where the castaways performed Hamlet to the music of the opera "Carmen" (plus one or two other pieces):
You're being reasonable. As a former Deputy Returning Officer, I saw numerous ways people had of spoiling their ballots. The thing is, people figure that doing this will "send a message" that they disapprove of what the previous government has done or what they expect the incoming government to do. What they don't realize is that the only people who ever see these spoiled ballots are the Deputy Returning Officers and maybe a scrutineer if (s)he decides to challenge the DRO's decision to declare a ballot as spoiled.
I assure you, the thoughts that go through a DRO's mind isn't "OMG, this person is really upset with the government/party/candidate, and this will really be effective in telling them/it off!".
The actual thoughts are, "What an idiot. Can't even follow instructions to make an X."
I don't know what the system is in your country, but here it's a perfectly valid option to sign in, get your name crossed off the list as having been given a ballot... and then declining to vote. It's what I plan to do at least in part for the municipal vote coming up in October. The premier has tacked on a couple of extra ballots, voting on Daylight Saving Time and voting for a potential senator-in-waiting for Alberta.
This Senate vote is beyond stupid, because our Senate is appointed by the Prime Minister. No senator is actually elected, and to hold this vote means Jason Kenney thinks people have such short memories that we don't recall the same thing happening in the '90s, when the Reform Party was yapping about a "Triple-E Senate". So they tacked on a senate ballot during the municipal elections, and most people didn't bother. They cared about the mayor, council, school board, and the hospital board (back when we had municipal hospital boards). It didn't matter then, and it doesn't matter now who wins this senate ballot, because the PM is under no obligation whatsoever to actually appoint that person.
Ferocitus
Deity
It's like he anticipated the GOP!
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