Reasons to be cheerful – Part 7

One of the things that most often makes me cheerful is people going and showing off. I don’t mean this in a horrible ‘look at me’ kind of way, I mean it in relation to when a person creates a space that allows smart people room to show how clever they are. And especially one that requires those people to explain things in a way that makes sense to people who aren’t supposed to be experts in their area.

One of the great new areas of the internet is question and answer sites. The network I like the most is stackexchange. This gives you a taste of the kind of thing it covers: somebody wandered onto the maths stackexchange site and asked, “Given an infinite number of monkeys and an infinite amount of time would one of them write Hamlet?”. Now in a lot of places, a question like that would just be ignored or worse, shouted down, but if you read the answers to the question they really are intricate and fascinating. I love the effort that these super smart people have put in to something that is solely about giving a guy the answer to a kind of joke question.

http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/17152/given-an-infinite-number-of-monkeys-and-an-infinite-amount-of-time-would-one-of