FC: The search is over: Robert Silensky revealed

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

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From: Paul McMasters <Pmcmasters () freedomforum org>
To: "Declan McCullagh (E-mail)" <declan () well com>
Subject: Robert Silensky revealed
Date: Sun, 8 Oct 2000 14:26:45 -0400

Declan, please pass this on to all the wonderful people on Politech who
responded to my request for help in chasing down "Robert Silensky of
California University," quoted dozens of times on the Internet for the great
quote about the fact that the Internet has proved that a million monkeys
could not replicate the works of Shakespeare.

Almost immediately after you posted the item, I started getting e-mails with
helpful hints about where and how to track down the elusive Professor
Silensky and pointing me to even more examples of the quote found on the web
-- complete with variations in the quote, the author's name and the
university. Then in a burst of several e-mails almost simultaneously, I was
informed that the person I was looking for was a Robert Wilensky, not
Silensky. Some of them, through terrific detective work, had found that he
was a professor of computer science at the University of California,
Berkeley, and even provided an e-mail address. I immediately sent an e-mail
to Professor Wilensky to see whether he was, indeed, the person I was
looking for.

Hope began to fade, however, when I had not heard back for a week. So on
Friday afternoon, I called and he picked up the phone. He confirmed that he
was the person who uttered those words but he was quick to point out that it
was just his variant on similar quotes by others. Then he pointed me to a
person on the web who has researched this whole "million monkeys" thing back
to 1913.

I'll be writing a column on all of this, and I'll let you know when that is
posted. I just wanted all the good folks with great detective skills on the
list to know that, thanks to them, the mystery has been solved.

Paul McMasters




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