about us

millionth monkey is owned and operated by Michael Huber, who has been an editor and staff writer at The Chicago Sun-Times, The (Louisville) Courier-Journal, and The Miami Herald. Michael also has extensive experience as an educator. He was a journalism professor at Florida International University and associate director of the Knight Foundation's Project for Writing in Journalism. He is co-author (with Kevin Hall) of the college textbook Words Into Flesh: How to Think Like a Writer. He holds B.A., M.A. and J.D. (magna cum laude) degrees. Michael is a licensed attorney and was a partner at a Miami law firm. He was executive editor of The Daily Business Review and editor-in-chief of The University of Miami Law Review.

Michael has won a number of awards for his writing and editing:

View Michael’s curriculum vitae on LinkedIn.
View samples of Michael’s published writing here.
View Michael’s profile at the Editorial Freelancers Association.
View Michael’s profile at the National Association of Independent Writers and Editors.

millionth monkey?

“Imagine a million monkeys randomly hitting typewriter keys and that, under the supervision of illiterate foremen, these monkey typists work hard ten hours a day with a million typewriters. The illiterate foremen gather the pages and bind them. And after a year, they would find that these volumes contain exact copies of books of all kinds and of all languages stored in the richest libraries in the world.”

— Émile Borel, “Mécanique Statistique et Irréversibilité,” J. Phys. 5e série, vol. 3, 1913 (excerpt trans. by M. Huber).

“Ford!” he said, “there's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked out.”

— Douglas Adams. The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy, London: Pan, 1979.

Give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, the theory goes, and they will eventually produce prose the likes of Shakespeare. Give six monkeys one computer for a month, and they will
make a mess.

Researchers at Plymouth University in England reported this week that primates left alone with a computer attacked the machine and failed to produce a single word.

“They pressed a lot of S’s,” researcher Mike Phillips said Friday. “Obviously, English isn't their first language.”

A group of faculty and students in the university’s media program left a computer in the monkey enclosure at Paignton Zoo in southwest England, home to six Sulawesi crested macaques. Then, they waited. At first, said Phillips, “the lead male got a stone and started bashing the hell out of it.”

“Another thing they were interested in was in defecating and urinating all over the keyboard,” added Phillips.

— “Monkeys Don't Write Shakespeare,” Associated Press, May 9, 2003.