> ... like monkeys typing the collected works of William
> Shakespeare. I'm pretty clever, but in a base of a million there
> are probably 10,000 more clever than I.

JT> I thought that usenet had proved the monkeys and typewriters
JT> all wrong? There have been many more than a million monkeys,
JT> and many more than a million typewriters, and none of them have
JT> even come close...

 You have to use real monkeys.

 Speaking of monkeys, I saw a silly thing on QUANTUM the other night
about left and right brains.

 Marmosets are either left or right-handed, equally, and in those who
are left handed the right brain dominates. They are nervous,
pessimistic, and unadventurous. The right-handed marmosets hooked up
to the left brain are adventurous, optimistic, and take risks. Tests
on birds show a similar result, with left and right eyes which see
things differently (being on opposite sides of the head). Cover up
the left eye, and the bird is a happy dickhead; cover the right eye
and it goes around expected a hawk to swoop. Teh professor decided
that this was a survival trait. If all moneys were optimists, they'd
end up dead but it all were pessimeists they'd miss out on new food
sources and also die off. You need a mix of both to survive as a
species... 

 The professor wondered if human beings showed similar tendencies...
but human beings aren't like birds or marmosets; a left-handed person
can have the right brain dominant and we use both eyes anyway, so they
hooked people up to a brain tester to find which side of the brain
had the most activity and then asked them about attitudes.

 Lo! Those whose left brain was dominant were more optimistic,
creative and adventourous. The right-brainers were expecting the worst
and easily stressed when things went wrong.

 So... and here comes what I consider to be crazy... the professor
concluded that those people hooked up to the right brain were made
pessimistic.

 Is she kidding?

 She has two known facts:

1.  People are not like marmosets and birds - we are not hard-wired.
2.  Those with active left-brain are optimists.

 Conclusion... we are hard wired.

 To me, the only sensible conclusion form those two facts is that
people who are optimistic use their left brain. It's not the brain
that makes us optimistic. We are not monkeys. I am not an animal!
Even if I look like an elephant.

Regards,
Bob

--- BQWK Alpha 0.5