Bob's Junkmail, 1999/11/27

More Junk Mail from Bob!
Saturday, November 27, 1999

Good morning, and welcome to even MORE junk mail! I realize that you probably have lots to read every day and don't want your email box cluttered up with meaningless tripe, so erase some of your work, school, or personal email to make room for this important stuff. If you're new to junk mail and for some odd reason you want to read some more of the past junk mails, or if you want to sign up someone to receive this, go to junkmail. You'd really be warped if you did, though.

Yesterday in 1865 Alice in Wonderland was published. One hundred years later, France launched its first satellite. Yesterday, 34 years after that, Pioneer announced the first recording DVD player in Japan. Think these events are unrelated? You're right!

When you fly an airplane into a high-altitude airport, it takes a longer distance to land and takeoff than it does at sea level. If you fly a non-turbocharged piston-engine plane into a high-altitude airport, the engine has a lot less power than it normally does so you really need to pay attention. The Santa Fe airport is 6348' above sea level. It has nice long runways though, so most small planes have no problem getting in and out. But at this altitude, you even have to be careful in the bathroom. Here's a picture I took at the La Quinta Inn in Santa Fe last week:

bathtub.jpg

I looked all over the room and on my airplane maps and everywhere, but I never could find the elevation of the bathtub. I guess I was lucky I didn't overrun the tub and end up in the toilet.

Bill Gates wrote an email to his employees recently suggesting that they donate $5,000 to Microsoft's Political Action Committee. He also mentioned that employee spouses are allowed to donate another $5,000 each. There are 5,000 or so millionaires at Microsoft, so it looks like they're going to be doing some pretty heavy campaigning this year. Hmm... I wonder if they could possibly want something from the government. Can our politicians be bought?

Of course, why stop with the USA? Microsoft is negotiating to buy 60% of the second biggest cable-TV company in Japan. I guess they figure the Japanese government isn't too strict on monopolies. When asked about Microsoft's apparent global domination, Bill Gates responded, "Gee, I only want to be king. What's the big deal?"

The Picture of Today is Triton, the coldest place in the solar system, with a surface temperature of -390 Fahrenheit. This was taken by the Voyager 2 spacecraft:

triton.jpg

It's so cold its volcanoes are liquid nitrogen! For more info:

http://www.solarviews.com/eng/triton.htm

Y2K Update: A guy named Mike Zieper thought he'd make a fake video for fun and to advertise his filmmaking prowess. It's about some undercover people planning to incite riots in Manhattan on New Year's Eve so the military will have to be called in to take control, kind of like the movie Under Siege. It's a 6-minute video. He put it on his web site. It's nothing too exciting, just some guy talking about the plan along with some scenes of New York City.

The FBI heard about this and asked him to take it off his web site. He said he didn't want to. Then the FBI and the US Attorney's Office went to his web hosting company and asked them to take it off his web site, a little more persuasively. They said OK.

So, being the nice guy he is, Zieper sent around some copies of his video. Now it's everywhere on the internet, getting a lot more publicity than it ever would have otherwise. After all, everyone wants to see the video that the FBI tried to crush, even me. The FBI really messed up on this one -- they made it an overnight hit instead of getting rid of it. It doesn't amount to much. I don't see why they were worried about it in the first place. But more importantly, why is the FBI in the business of censoring what's on the web?

Here it is in RealVideo. It's about 2.6 megabytes. (It has some naughty words in it so don't listen if you're under 41):

http://moxy.wtower.com/mirrors/timesq.ram

RealNetworks will be happy to survey your hard drive as you watch it. (Remember their privacy problems in junkmail 13? (..\junk13\junk13.htm#rn ))

The Other Picture of Today is from Denali National Park in Alaska a couple of years ago. The road was closed so I biked in:

denali2.jpg

If you download MIRC (http://www.mirc.co.uk/get.html) you can chat online about any topic under the sun, some nice and some not so nice. Some of the more popular chat channels in the past have been warez rooms. That's where you can download commercial software free -- pirated software.

On November 17, US Marshals seized five computers in California and Michigan, and 25 people were charged with pirating software on an IRC channel called warez4cable. They face fines but no jail time. For some reason there aren't as many warez channels on IRC today.

A week later, an Oregon college student got 22 months probation for having a bunch of MP3 files on his web site. That seems pretty severe to me, but as the first MP3 conviction under the No Electronic Theft (NET) Act, he could have spent some time in jail. Seems like you're safer robbing liquor stores than dealing with the recording industry.

The No Electronic Theft Act is important because now (for the last couple of years) you can be convicted and jailed for copying software (and music) even if you don't make any money from it. That's kind of scary. For more info on the NET law:

http://www.iupui.edu/~copyinfo/noetheft.html

Quote from NASA:

"An international team of astronomers has discovered the most distant galaxy found in the universe to date. The galaxy is so far away that its light is only reaching us now from a time when the universe was but 7% of its current age of approximately 14 billion years."

Quote (or misquote) from some movie:

"If you have a room full of monkeys pressing typewriter keys at random long enough, you will eventually end up with the complete works of Shakespeare."

How long would that take? The answer is, of course, "It depends." It depends on how fast the monkeys type and how many letters in the alphabet. Yes, I know that there are 26 letters in the English alphabet. But do we consider upper and lower case? Do we consider special characters like " , . ? and spaces? Let's just say there are a-z, all lower case, ".,? and space. That's 31 characters in our alphabet.

Now some statistics. There are 31 possible characters for the first character position in our random Shakespeare. Only one is correct. So, on average, the monkeys will get the first key correct once every 31 tries. There are 31 possible combinations for the second letter, too. The monkeys will get the first two correct once every 31*31 or 961 tries.

How long are the complete works of Shakespeare? I'm not sure, so let's try something else instead. How about that quote from NASA above? It's 266 characters long if I counted right. Our monkeys will get that right once every 31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*
31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*
31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*
31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*
31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*
31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*
31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*
31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*
31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31*31 or 31^266 tries.

How many is that? Well, when I put it into Excel to see, Excel didn't like it because the number is too big. So let's take only the second sentence, "The galaxy is so far away that its light is only reaching us now from a time when the universe was but 7% of its current age of approximately 14 billion years." I count 159 characters in that sentence. Our monkeys will have to make 31 times itself 158 times, or 31^159, or 1.33816393088799.E+237 tries to get this one simple sentence right.

In other words, there are 1.33816393088799.E+237 possible 159-character sentences with our 31-character alphabet.

Back to our original question, how long will it take our monkeys to come up with the complete works of Shakespeare? I don't know. A long time. Let's make the problem simpler and say how long for our randomly typing monkeys to end up with this sentence: "The galaxy is so far away that its light is only reaching us now from a time when the universe was but 7% of its current age of approximately 14 billion years."

We need to satisfy our other "It depends," which is "How fast do they type?" One character per second is pretty slow. Let's say there are 50 monkeys and each monkey can type 60 characters per second. Have you ever heard a 60-cycle hum over a radio or stereo? 60 characters per second is a LOT faster than mere humans can type. That's a lot of typing. They can try almost 19 sentences every second.

Even at this rate, it will take a long time to come up with our sentence. At this rate of more than 259 million possible sentences every day, it will take about 1.41346187171816E+226 or 14134618717181600000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 years to come up with our sentence. (This number is rounded off. Remember this if you use it for your own time planning.)

To put this all in perspective, let's assume the universe really is 14,000,000,000 years old. Without getting into debates with Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, Moslem, Hindu, Shinto, Buddhist, and Microsoft religions, each of whom have one or more different estimates for the age of the universe, let's pretend that the age of the universe is what the scientific data implies -- 14 billion years or so. (We won't be able to prove that until the earth stops rotating on New Year's Eve because of Y2K problems.)

1.41346187171816E+226 years is 100961562265583000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 times LONGER than the age of the universe.

The chances are that our monkeys would hit the right combination in about half this time. Also, I'm ignoring the fact that the space key is bigger, it takes two key presses for the question mark, and we don't have % or the numerals 0-9 in our alphabet. But I think this is somewhere in the neighborhood.

So, to answer our original question, it will take a REALLY LONG TIME for our monkeys to come up with the complete works of Shakespeare. Incidentally, I did all these calculations myself without cheating so there are probably some mistakes. If you happen to be a mathematical type, let me know what I did wrong.

(c) Copyright 1923, no rights reserved. Unauthorized copying of this junk mail will be laughed at. As usual, if you don't want to receive any more of these fine collections of bits, change your email address. Or contact Microsoft and send them $5000.