h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Oh puuuleeease, the monkeys weren't monkeys at all but apes who traded in their Greater Kudu femurs for spacestations in fits of exhilaration after they grew weary of bashing old, bleached leopard skulls into bone meal, correct?

And Synchronicity isn't a town near anywhere. It's a property of the Void that allows spontaneous, albeit temporary, creation of matter-antimatter particle pairs that can be traced in bubbles or smashed by clever apes or bozos with highly accelerated bosons, and not a typewriter in sight.

Your all a bunch of looneys!









Ok so I am a looney as well, but I am happy Looney!

Who p....d off the Meter Maid?

Nobody pissed off the meter maid. I was just making a sly reference to 2001 because some other looney did and looneys must fluff feathers together during this season so there are more looneys next season. But we won't go into that right now. If you're terribly curious, ask your mother.

And where's your evidence?

Whoa, wrong thread- try . We were talking about synchronicity, weren't we? By a huge coincidence I remember.

Only 'shades ' of 2001
Therefore the synchronicity of apes given monoliths,
Monkeys being given word processors.

That is a wrong thread, cl. I had no idea you consorted with dumpster drippings.

Furthermore I was shocked to learn that your boot logs show a power on self test failure in the first bank of random access memory. One would wonder how you even managed to type your message in your wordprocessor without concerted and deliberate simian assistance. I'm afraid coincidence simply doesn't account for it.

Consequently, I, like Hasselfree, would insist on seeing your proof just to satisfy myself that none of this is deliberate on your part but only coincidental.

Who is to say perhaps that it is I who sort through the infinite output of orangatang (sp?) outpourings and choose this deathless prose? (In one of them they could spell better, but I like this effect.) Would that make me the hand of God or of fate?

That would make you the hand of god, like everybody else

Your deathless prose is actuly a issluion cause by the passage of time, you must rember to keep your monkey using typewriters. Mainly as Typewriters make a nicer noise and monkeys are unmodern.

Well, more like the collator of god I guess. But if everyone is the instrument of a higher power, is free will an illusion? A Grand Plan is one thing, but if we can choose inside that plan how can it stay the course?

I didn't say you were an instrument

Instrument is a good metaphor. Maybe God or somebody should give the tuning note. Don't bother waiting for me. I'm tone deaf, or more accurately just deaf.

Rita if you are deaf and use sign language I am happy to know you (well I am anyway..). I have been associated with several deaf people and have always been amazed at the grace and art of sign language. *A tuning note*? is perhaps the wrong metaphor. The graceful dance of hands and facial expression is many times more expressive. No gang of monkeys with their typing could ever hope to express thought better than sign language. Perhaps the hand of (fate, god, chance) is talking to us in gestures rather than in act.

Yes, seeing fate, life the universe, is about spotting the signs.
We all use body language, which sometimes tells us something that isn't in the talk
that's why internet conversations can be confusing. we can't see the body signs.
That's why we've had to come up with

No we come up with to allow for the lack of semophore, asisatily, emotions, puns, sarcasum, palendromes, etc not just body langwage

Body language incorporates all of those, otherwise what does body language say?

Signing also probably predates spoken language. Babies learn it more easily and more quickly than spoken language. Written language for the most part is merely spoken language coded. Manual English is also like that but American Sign Language is a natural language and not merely a manual code for American English. I'm glad to note that it is finally being recognized as such.

It's chief advantages over spoken English or indeed any spoken language is it doesn't have to be sequencial like auditory code. You can express the essential meaning of an entire English phrase or sentence with just one or two signs sometimes, simultaneously. The grammar and syntax are space oriented not time oriented. You can also communicate across a football field without yelling. These are but two advantages of visual communication or auditory. Heck, you can even "sing" if you want.

What do monkeys after all need typewriters for? They can communicate with each other and us if we remember our manual linguistic roots without resort to such contraptions. Of course they can't walk and talk at the same time like we can. That's why chimpanzees are preferred in experiments with teaching sign to other species. They tend to be able to walk upright for longer periods than monkeys and so they have their hands free to sign. That may be significant in the evolution of complex language in human beings.

Most people would assert that freeing the hands broke through a technological barrier allowing the use of tools aka weapons, but it also may have facilitated an even more important development, the development of complex language through signing which in turn allowed for cooperation and the formation of bands with shared cultures.

Don't get me wrong. Being able to hear is definitely an advantage as far as I can tell but being deaf isn't necessarily a handicap. You rely more on visual and tactile signals, you can't appreciate a Mozart aria but you can feel the beat and see the colors of a Monet or notice that a statue of Abraham Lincoln is spelling his initials with the hands.

And it's not such a stigma anymore to sign in public. People are less hostile, and less likely to think you're an idiot but you still can't get many jobs, especially ones involving working on the telephone. Cellphones are useless unless they provide text messaging but computers are quite useful. Silent films are especially fun and there's really no such thing as a foreign film for a deaf person as long as it's subtitled not dubbed.

Of course there's a persistant feeling of being left out of conversations which makes you feel sort of isolated. Even if you read lips there's only about 16 recognizable mouth positions to express 36 phonemes in English so it's sort of ambiguous what's being said a lot of times unless the speaker can cue you with hand signs.

And it's especially difficult when a blind person approaches you on the street asking for directions. But you get by. ;-D

If you don't mind I'd like to quote that last line to some friends- brilliant!