November 25, 1996

From dna@tdv.com Mon Nov 25 10:36:07 1996 Date: Mon, 25 Nov 1996 12:26:38 +0000 From: Douglas Adams To: “Dan Osborn ” Subject: Re: Hamlet and Probabilities

A little something here for your amusement: the probability of a monkey
typing Shakespeare’s _Hamlet_ by random selection of keys is: 1 chance in
35^27,000 or aprox. 10^40,000.

This comes from: Philip J. Davis, _The_Lore_of_Large_Numbers_, copyright
1961, Published by: Random House and Yale University for the Monograph
Project of the School Mathematics Study Group.

I had the opportunity to ask you a question once at a book fair, in Miami
of all places. I have had the fortune of MISSING your appearances in
Tucson Arizona due to your mishaps in probablility. (I seem to recall that
one of them involved snow and Texas.) The question I asked you was: Do
you like the music of _Pink_Floyd_?

Yes I do. In fact I played one number with the band on the penultimate night of their last tour.

The question I wish I had asked was:
who is Nancy Milestone Jennings, a.k.a. the worst poetry writer in the
known universe. I am just curious if she is a complete fabrication or if
she might, as I suppose, be someone who beat you in a poetry writing
contest and this was simply your way of saying, “Na, na, na, na, naaaa,
naaaa. You won but I’m rich and famous!”

It was based on someone I knew, but that wasn’t his name. And I wasn’t rich and famous when I wrote it.

Best,

D

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Douglas Adams

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