Рецензия на «Quantum Theory of Lotteries» (Clittary Hilton)

"The Babel fish," said The Hitch Hiker"s Guide to the Galaxy
quietly, "is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the
oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy not
from its carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all
unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to
nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its
carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious
thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech
centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical
upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear
you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of
language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the
brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel
fish.

"Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything
so mindboggingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that
some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching
proof of the non-existence of God.

"The argument goes something like this: `I refuse to prove that I
exist," says God, `for proof denies faith, and without faith I am
nothing."

"`But," says Man, `The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn"t it?
It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so
therefore, by your own arguments, you don"t. QED."

"`Oh dear," says God, `I hadn"t thought of that," and promptly
vanished in a puff of logic.

"`Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to
prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next
zebra crossing.


Douglas Adams, "The Hitch Hiker"s Guide to the Galaxy"



Yours sincerely,

Carapax   20.03.2004   •   Заявить о нарушении