title: Bonsai

text: Japanese bonsai exhibitions and catalogs frequently refer to the size of individual bonsai specimens by assigning them to size classes (see table below). Not all sources agree on the exact sizes or names for these size ranges, but the concept of the ranges is well-established and useful to both the cultivation and the aesthetic understanding of the trees. A photograph of a bonsai may not give the viewer an accurate impression of the tree's real size, so printed documents may complement a photograph by naming the bonsai's size class. The size class implies the height and weight of the tree in its container.


title: Bonsai

text: In the very largest size ranges, a recognized Japanese practice is to name the trees "two-handed", "four-handed", and so on, based on the number of men required to move the tree and pot. These trees will have dozens of branches and can closely simulate a full-size tree. The very largest size, called "imperial", is named after the enormous potted trees of Japan's Imperial Palace.


title: Bonsai

text: At the other end of the size spectrum, there are a number of specific techniques and styles associated solely with the smallest common sizes, "mame" and "shito". These techniques take advantage of the bonsai's minute dimensions and compensate for the limited number of branches and leaves that can appear on a tree this small.


title: Bonsai

text: The Japanese tradition of bonsai does not include indoor bonsai, and bonsai appearing at Japanese exhibitions or in catalogs have been grown outdoors for their entire lives. In less-traditional settings, including climates more severe than Japan's, indoor bonsai may appear in the form of potted trees cultivated for the indoor environment.


title: Bonsai

text: Traditionally, bonsai are temperate climate trees grown outdoors in containers. Kept in the artificial environment of a home, these trees weaken and die. However, a number of tropical and sub-tropical tree species will survive and grow indoors.


title: Autonomic nervous system

text: The autonomic nervous system (ANS), formerly referred to as the vegetative nervous system, is a division of the peripheral nervous system that supplies internal organs, smooth muscle and glands. The autonomic nervous system is a control system that acts largely unconsciously and regulates bodily functions, such as the heart rate, its force of contraction, digestion, respiratory rate, pupillary response, urination, and sexual arousal. This system is the primary mechanism in control of the fight-or-flight response.


title: Autonomic nervous system

text: The autonomic nervous system is regulated by integrated reflexes through the brainstem to the spinal cord and organs. Autonomic functions include control of respiration, cardiac regulation (the cardiac control center), vasomotor activity (the vasomotor center), and certain reflex actions such as coughing, sneezing, swallowing and vomiting. Those are then subdivided into other areas and are also linked to autonomic subsystems and the peripheral nervous system. The hypothalamus, just above the brain stem, acts as an integrator for autonomic functions, receiving autonomic regulatory input from the limbic system.


title: Autonomic nervous system

text: Although conflicting reports about its subdivisions exist in the literature, the autonomic nervous system has four branches: the sympathetic nervous system, the parasympathetic nervous system, the visceral sensory nervous system and the enteric nervous system. Some textbooks do not include the enteric nervous system as part of this system. The sympathetic nervous system is often considered the "fight or flight" system, while the parasympathetic nervous system is often considered the "rest and digest" or "feed and breed" system. In many cases, both of these systems have "opposite" actions where one system activates a physiological response and the other inhibits it. An older simplification of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems as "excitatory" and "inhibitory" was overturned due to the many exceptions found. A more modern characterization is that the sympathetic nervous system is a "quick response mobilizing system" and the parasympathetic is a "more slowly activated dampening system", but even this has exceptions, such as in sexual arousal and orgasm, wherein both play a role.


title: Autonomic nervous system

text: There are inhibitory and excitatory synapses between neurons. A third subsystem of neurons has been named as non-noradrenergic, non-cholinergic transmitters (because they use nitric oxide as a neurotransmitter) and are integral in autonomic function, in particular in the gut and the lungs.


title: Autonomic nervous system

text: Interestingly, although the ANS is also known as the visceral nervous system and although most of its fibers carry non-somatic information to the CNS, many authors still consider it only connected with the motor side. Most autonomous functions are involuntary but they can often work in conjunction with the somatic nervous system which provides voluntary control.


title: Autonomic nervous system

text: The autonomic nervous system is divided into the sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic division emerges from the spinal cord in the thoracic and lumbar areas, terminating around L2-3. The parasympathetic division has craniosacral “outflow”, meaning that the neurons begin at the cranial nerves (specifically the oculomotor nerve, facial nerve, glossopharyngeal nerve and vagus nerve) and sacral (S2-S4) spinal cord.


title: Autonomic nervous system

text: The autonomic nervous system is unique in that it requires a sequential two-neuron efferent pathway; the preganglionic neuron must first synapse onto a postganglionic neuron before innervating the target organ. The preganglionic, or first, neuron will begin at the “outflow” and will synapse at the postganglionic, or second, neuron's cell body. The postganglionic neuron will then synapse at the target organ.


title: Autonomic nervous system

text: The sympathetic nervous system consists of cells with bodies in the lateral grey column from T1 to L2/3. These cell bodies are "GVE" (general visceral efferent) neurons and are the preganglionic neurons. There are several locations upon which preganglionic neurons can synapse for their postganglionic neurons:


title: Autonomic nervous system

text: These ganglia provide the postganglionic neurons from which innervation of target organs follows. Examples of splanchnic (visceral) nerves are:


title: Autonomic nervous system

text: These all contain afferent (sensory) nerves as well, known as GVA (general visceral afferent) neurons.


title: Autonomic nervous system

text: The parasympathetic nervous system consists of cells with bodies in one of two locations: the brainstem (Cranial Nerves III, VII, IX, X) or the sacral spinal cord (S2, S3, S4). These are the preganglionic neurons, which synapse with postganglionic neurons in these locations:


title: Autonomic nervous system

text: These ganglia provide the postganglionic neurons from which innervations of target organs follows. Examples are:


title: Autonomic nervous system

text: The sensory arm is composed of primary visceral sensory neurons found in the peripheral nervous system (PNS), in cranial sensory ganglia: the geniculate, petrosal and nodose ganglia, appended respectively to cranial nerves VII, IX and X. These sensory neurons monitor the levels of carbon dioxide, oxygen and sugar in the blood, arterial pressure and the chemical composition of the stomach and gut content. They also convey the sense of taste and smell, which, unlike most functions of the ANS, is a conscious perception. Blood oxygen and carbon dioxide are in fact directly sensed by the carotid body, a small collection of chemosensors at the bifurcation of the carotid artery, innervated by the petrosal (IXth) ganglion.


title: Autonomic nervous system

text: Primary sensory neurons project (synapse) onto “second order” visceral sensory neurons located in the medulla oblongata, forming the nucleus of the solitary tract (nTS), that integrates all visceral information. The nTS also receives input from a nearby chemosensory center, the area postrema, that detects toxins in the blood and the cerebrospinal fluid and is essential for chemically induced vomiting or conditional taste aversion (the memory that ensures that an animal that has been poisoned by a food never touches it again). All this visceral sensory information constantly and unconsciously modulates the activity of the motor neurons of the ANS.


title: Autonomic nervous system

text: Autonomic nerves travel to organs throughout the body. Most organs receive parasympathetic supply by the vagus nerve and sympathetic supply by splanchnic nerves. The sensory part of the latter reaches the spinal column at certain spinal segments. Pain in any internal organ is perceived as referred pain, more specifically as pain from the dermatome corresponding to the spinal segment.


title: Autonomic nervous system

text: Motor neurons of the autonomic nervous system are found in ‘’autonomic ganglia’’. Those of the parasympathetic branch are located close to the target organ whilst the ganglia of the sympathetic branch are located close to the spinal cord.


title: Autonomic nervous system

text: The sympathetic ganglia here, are found in two chains: the pre-vertebral and pre-aortic chains. The activity of autonomic ganglionic neurons is modulated by “preganglionic neurons” located in the central nervous system. Preganglionic sympathetic neurons are located in the spinal cord, at the thorax and upper lumbar levels. Preganglionic parasympathetic neurons are found in the medulla oblongata where they form visceral motor nuclei; the dorsal motor nucleus of the vagus nerve; the nucleus ambiguus, the salivatory nuclei, and in the sacral region of the spinal cord.


title: Autonomic nervous system

text: Sympathetic and parasympathetic divisions typically function in opposition to each other. But this opposition is better termed complementary in nature rather than antagonistic. For an analogy, one may think of the sympathetic division as the accelerator and the parasympathetic division as the brake. The sympathetic division typically functions in actions requiring quick responses. The parasympathetic division functions with actions that do not require immediate reaction. The sympathetic system is often considered the "fight or flight" system, while the parasympathetic system is often considered the "rest and digest" or "feed and breed" system.


title: Autonomic nervous system

text: However, many instances of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity cannot be ascribed to "fight" or "rest" situations. For example, standing up from a reclining or sitting position would entail an unsustainable drop in blood pressure if not for a compensatory increase in the arterial sympathetic tonus. Another example is the constant, second-to-second, modulation of heart rate by sympathetic and parasympathetic influences, as a function of the respiratory cycles. In general, these two systems should be seen as permanently modulating vital functions, in a usually antagonistic fashion, to achieve homeostasis.


title: Autonomic nervous system

text: Higher organisms maintain their integrity via homeostasis which relies on negative feedback regulation which, in turn, typically depends on the autonomic nervous system. Some typical actions of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems are listed below.


title: Autonomic nervous system

text: Promotes a fight-or-flight response, corresponds with arousal and energy generation, and inhibits digestion


title: Autonomic nervous system

text: The pattern of innervation of the sweat gland—namely, the postganglionic sympathetic nerve fibers—allows clinicians and researchers to use sudomotor function testing to assess dysfunction of the autonomic nervous systems, through electrochemical skin conductance.


title: Autonomic nervous system

text: The parasympathetic nervous system has been said to promote a "rest and digest" response, promotes calming of the nerves return to regular function, and enhancing digestion. Functions of nerves within the parasympathetic nervous system include:


title: Autonomic nervous system

text: The enteric nervous system is the intrinsic nervous system of the gastrointestinal system. It has been described as "the Second Brain of the Human Body". Its functions include:


title: Autonomic nervous system

text: At the effector organs, sympathetic ganglionic neurons release noradrenaline (norepinephrine), along with other cotransmitters such as ATP, to act on adrenergic receptors, with the exception of the sweat glands and the adrenal medulla:


title: Autonomic nervous system

text: Recent studies indicate that ANS activation is critical for regulating the local and systemic immune-inflammatory responses and may influence acute stroke outcomes. Therapeutic approaches modulating the activation of the ANS or the immune-inflammatory response could promote neurologic recovery after stroke.


title: Autonomic nervous system

text: In 1665, Thomas Willis used the terminology, and in 1900, John Newport Langley used the term, defining the two divisions as the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems.


title: Autonomic nervous system

text: Caffeine is a bioactive ingredient found in commonly consumed beverages such as coffee, tea, and sodas. Short-term physiological effects of caffeine include increased blood pressure and sympathetic nerve outflow. Habitual consumption of caffeine may inhibit physiological short-term effects. Consumption of caffeinated espresso increases parasympathetic activity in habitual caffeine consumers; however, decaffeinated espresso inhibits parasympathetic activity in habitual caffeine consumers. It is possible that other bioactive ingredients in decaffeinated espresso may also contribute to the inhibition of parasympathetic activity in habitual caffeine consumers.


title: Autonomic nervous system

text: Caffeine is capable of increasing work capacity while individuals perform strenuous tasks. In one study, caffeine provoked a greater maximum heart rate while a strenuous task was being performed compared to a placebo. This tendency is likely due to caffeine's ability to increase sympathetic nerve outflow. Furthermore, this study found that recovery after intense exercise was slower when caffeine was consumed prior to exercise. This finding is indicative of caffeine's tendency to inhibit parasympathetic activity in non-habitual consumers. The caffeine-stimulated increase in nerve activity is likely to evoke other physiological effects as the body attempts to maintain homeostasis.


title: Autonomic nervous system

text: The effects of caffeine on parasympathetic activity may vary depending on the position of the individual when autonomic responses are measured. One study found that the seated position inhibited autonomic activity after caffeine consumption (75 mg); however, parasympathetic activity increased in the supine position. This finding may explain why some habitual caffeine consumers (75 mg or less) do not experience short-term effects of caffeine if their routine requires many hours in a seated position. It is important to note that the data supporting increased parasympathetic activity in the supine position was derived from an experiment involving participants between the ages of 25 and 30 who were considered healthy and sedentary. Caffeine may influence autonomic activity differently for individuals who are more active or elderly.


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare. In fact, the monkey would almost surely type every possible finite text an infinite number of times. However, the probability that monkeys filling the entire observable universe would type a single complete work, such as Shakespeare's "Hamlet", is so tiny that the chance of it occurring during a period of time hundreds of thousands of orders of magnitude longer than the age of the universe is "extremely" low (but technically not zero). The theorem can be generalized to state that any sequence of events which has a non-zero probability of happening will almost certainly eventually occur, given enough time.


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: In this context, "almost surely" is a mathematical term meaning the event happens with probability 1, and the "monkey" is not an actual monkey, but a metaphor for an abstract device that produces an endless random sequence of letters and symbols. One of the earliest instances of the use of the "monkey metaphor" is that of French mathematician Émile Borel in 1913, but the first instance may have been even earlier.


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: Variants of the theorem include multiple and even infinitely many typists, and the target text varies between an entire library and a single sentence. Jorge Luis Borges traced the history of this idea from Aristotle's "On Generation and Corruption" and Cicero's "De Natura Deorum" (On the Nature of the Gods), through Blaise Pascal and Jonathan Swift, up to modern statements with their iconic simians and typewriters. In the early 20th century, Borel and Arthur Eddington used the theorem to illustrate the timescales implicit in the foundations of statistical mechanics.


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: There is a straightforward proof of this theorem. As an introduction, recall that if two events are statistically independent, then the probability of both happening equals the product of the probabilities of each one happening independently. For example, if the chance of rain in Moscow on a particular day in the future is 0.4 and the chance of an earthquake in San Francisco on any particular day is 0.00003, then the chance of both happening on the same day is , assuming that they are indeed independent.


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: Consider the probability of typing the word "banana" on a typewriter with 50 keys. Suppose that the keys are pressed randomly and independently, meaning that each key has an equal chance of being pressed regardless of what keys had been pressed previously. The chance that the first letter typed is 'b' is 1/50, and the chance that the second letter typed is 'a' is also 1/50, and so on. Therefore, the probability of the first six letters spelling "banana" is


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: From the above, the chance of "not" typing "banana" in a given block of 6 letters is 1 − (1/50). Because each block is typed independently, the chance "X" of not typing "banana" in any of the first "n" blocks of 6 letters is


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: As "n" grows, "X" gets smaller. For "n" = 1 million, "X" is roughly 0.9999, but for "n" = 10 billion "X" is roughly 0.53 and for "n" = 100 billion it is roughly 0.0017. As "n" approaches infinity, the probability "X" approaches zero; that is, by making "n" large enough, "X" can be made as small as is desired, and the chance of typing "banana" approaches 100%. Thus, the probability of the word "banana" appearing at some point in an infinite sequence of keystrokes is equal to one.


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: The same argument applies if we replace one monkey typing "n" consecutive blocks of text with "n" monkeys each typing one block (simultaneously and independently). In this case, "X" = (1 − (1/50)) is the probability that none of the first "n" monkeys types "banana" correctly on their first try. Therefore, at least one of infinitely many monkeys will ("with probability equal to one") produce a text as quickly as it would be produced by a perfectly accurate human typist copying it from the original.


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: This can be stated more generally and compactly in terms of strings, which are sequences of characters chosen from some finite alphabet:


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: Both follow easily from the second Borel–Cantelli lemma. For the second theorem, let "E" be the event that the "k"th string begins with the given text. Because this has some fixed nonzero probability "p" of occurring, the "E" are independent, and the below sum diverges,


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: the probability that infinitely many of the "E" occur is 1. The first theorem is shown similarly; one can divide the random string into nonoverlapping blocks matching the size of the desired text, and make "E" the event where the "k"th block equals the desired string.


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: However, for physically meaningful numbers of monkeys typing for physically meaningful lengths of time the results are reversed. If there were as many monkeys as there are atoms in the observable universe typing extremely fast for trillions of times the life of the universe, the probability of the monkeys replicating even a "single page" of Shakespeare is unfathomably small.


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: Ignoring punctuation, spacing, and capitalization, a monkey typing letters uniformly at random has a chance of one in 26 of correctly typing the first letter of "Hamlet." It has a chance of one in 676 (26 × 26) of typing the first two letters. Because the probability shrinks exponentially, at 20 letters it already has only a chance of one in 26 = 19,928,148,895,209,409,152,340,197,376 (almost 2 × 10). In the case of the entire text of "Hamlet", the probabilities are so vanishingly small as to be inconceivable. The text of "Hamlet" contains approximately 130,000 letters. Thus there is a probability of one in 3.4 × 10 to get the text right at the first trial. The average number of letters that needs to be typed until the text appears is also 3.4 × 10, or including punctuation, 4.4 × 10.


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: Even if every proton in the observable universe (which is estimated at roughly 10) were a monkey with a typewriter, typing from the Big Bang until the end of the universe (when protons might no longer exist), they would still need a far greater amount of time – more than three hundred and sixty thousand "orders of magnitude" longer – to have even a 1 in 10 chance of success. To put it another way, for a one in a trillion chance of success, there would need to be 10 observable universes made of protonic monkeys. As Kittel and Kroemer put it in their textbook on thermodynamics, the field whose statistical foundations motivated the first known expositions of typing monkeys, "The probability of "Hamlet" is therefore zero in any operational sense of an event ...", and the statement that the monkeys must eventually succeed "gives a misleading conclusion about very, very large numbers."


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: In fact there is less than a one in a trillion chance of success that such a universe made of monkeys could type any particular document a mere 79 characters long.


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: The probability that an infinite randomly generated string of text will contain a particular finite substring is 1. However, this does not mean the substring's absence is "impossible", despite the absence having a prior probability of 0. For example, the immortal monkey "could" randomly type G as its first letter, G as its second, and G as every single letter thereafter, producing an infinite string of Gs; at no point must the monkey be "compelled" to type anything else. (To assume otherwise implies the gambler's fallacy.) However long a randomly generated finite string is, there is a small but nonzero chance that it will turn out to consist of the same character repeated throughout; this chance approaches zero as the string's length approaches infinity. There is nothing special about such a monotonous sequence except that it is easy to describe; the same fact applies to any nameable specific sequence, such as "RGRGRG" repeated forever, or "a-b-aa-bb-aaa-bbb-...", or "Three, Six, Nine, Twelve…".


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: If the hypothetical monkey has a typewriter with 90 equally likely keys that include numerals and punctuation, then the first typed keys might be "3.14" (the first three digits of pi) with a probability of (1/90), which is 1/65,610,000. Equally probable is any other string of four characters allowed by the typewriter, such as "GGGG", "mATh", or "q%8e". The probability that 100 randomly typed keys will consist of the first 99 digits of pi (including the separator key), or any other "particular" sequence of that length, is much lower: (1/90). If the monkey's allotted length of text is infinite, the chance of typing only the digits of pi is 0, which is just as "possible" (mathematically probable) as typing nothing but Gs (also probability 0).


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: The same applies to the event of typing a particular version of "Hamlet" followed by endless copies of itself; or "Hamlet" immediately followed by all the digits of pi; these specific strings are equally infinite in length, they are not prohibited by the terms of the thought problem, and they each have a prior probability of 0. In fact, "any" particular infinite sequence the immortal monkey types will have "had" a prior probability of 0, even though the monkey must type something.


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: This is an extension of the principle that a finite string of random text has a lower and lower probability of "being" a particular string the longer it is (though all specific strings are equally unlikely). This probability approaches 0 as the string approaches infinity. Thus, the probability of the monkey typing an endlessly long string, such as all of the digits of pi in order, on a 90-key keyboard is (1/90) which equals (1/∞) which is essentially 0. At the same time, the probability that the sequence "contains" a particular subsequence (such as the word MONKEY, or the 12th through 999th digits of pi, or a version of the King James Bible) increases as the total string increases. This probability approaches 1 as the total string approaches infinity, and thus the original theorem is correct.


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: In a simplification of the thought experiment, the monkey could have a typewriter with just two keys: 1 and 0. The infinitely long string thusly produced would correspond to the binary digits of a particular real number between 0 and 1. A countably infinite set of possible strings end in infinite repetitions, which means the corresponding real number is rational. Examples include the strings corresponding to one-third (010101...), five-sixths (11010101...) and five-eighths (1010000...). Only a subset of such real number strings (albeit a countably infinite subset) contains the entirety of "Hamlet" (assuming that the text is subjected to a numerical encoding, such as ASCII).


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: Meanwhile, there is an "uncountably" infinite set of strings which do not end in such repetition; these correspond to the irrational numbers. These can be sorted into two uncountably infinite subsets: those which contain "Hamlet" and those which do not. However, the "largest" subset of all the real numbers are those which not only contain "Hamlet", but which contain every other possible string of any length, and with equal distribution of such strings. These irrational numbers are called normal. Because almost all numbers are normal, almost all possible strings contain all possible finite substrings. Hence, the probability of the monkey typing a normal number is 1. The same principles apply regardless of the number of keys from which the monkey can choose; a 90-key keyboard can be seen as a generator of numbers written in base 90.


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: In one of the forms in which probabilists now know this theorem, with its "dactylographic" [i.e., typewriting] monkeys (; the French word "singe" covers both the monkeys and the apes), appeared in Émile Borel's 1913 article ""Mécanique Statistique et Irréversibilité"" ("Statistical mechanics and irreversibility"), and in his book "Le Hasard" in 1914. His "monkeys" are not actual monkeys; rather, they are a metaphor for an imaginary way to produce a large, random sequence of letters. Borel said that if a million monkeys typed ten hours a day, it was extremely unlikely that their output would exactly equal all the books of the richest libraries of the world; and yet, in comparison, it was even more unlikely that the laws of statistical mechanics would ever be violated, even briefly.


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: The physicist Arthur Eddington drew on Borel's image further in "The Nature of the Physical World" (1928), writing:


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: These images invite the reader to consider the incredible improbability of a large but finite number of monkeys working for a large but finite amount of time producing a significant work, and compare this with the even greater improbability of certain physical events. Any physical process that is even less likely than such monkeys' success is effectively impossible, and it may safely be said that such a process will never happen. It is clear from the context that Eddington is not suggesting that the probability of this happening is worthy of serious consideration. On the contrary, it was a rhetorical illustration of the fact that below certain levels of probability, the term "improbable" is functionally equivalent to "impossible".


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: In a 1939 essay entitled "The Total Library", Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges traced the infinite-monkey concept back to Aristotle's "Metaphysics." Explaining the views of Leucippus, who held that the world arose through the random combination of atoms, Aristotle notes that the atoms themselves are homogeneous and their possible arrangements only differ in shape, position and ordering. In "On Generation and Corruption", the Greek philosopher compares this to the way that a tragedy and a comedy consist of the same "atoms", "i.e.", alphabetic characters. Three centuries later, Cicero's "De natura deorum" ("On the Nature of the Gods") argued against the atomist worldview:


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: Borges follows the history of this argument through Blaise Pascal and Jonathan Swift, then observes that in his own time, the vocabulary had changed. By 1939, the idiom was "that a half-dozen monkeys provided with typewriters would, in a few eternities, produce all the books in the British Museum." (To which Borges adds, "Strictly speaking, one immortal monkey would suffice.") Borges then imagines the contents of the Total Library which this enterprise would produce if carried to its fullest extreme:


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: Borges' total library concept was the main theme of his widely read 1941 short story "The Library of Babel", which describes an unimaginably vast library consisting of interlocking hexagonal chambers, together containing every possible volume that could be composed from the letters of the alphabet and some punctuation characters.


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: In 2002, lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth MediaLab Arts course used a £2,000 grant from the Arts Council to study the literary output of real monkeys. They left a computer keyboard in the enclosure of six Celebes crested macaques in Paignton Zoo in Devon, England for a month, with a radio link to broadcast the results on a website.


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five total pages largely consisting of the letter "S", the lead male began striking the keyboard with a stone, and other monkeys followed by soiling it. Mike Phillips, director of the university's Institute of Digital Arts and Technology (i-DAT), said that the artist-funded project was primarily performance art, and they had learned "an awful lot" from it. He concluded that monkeys "are not random generators. They're more complex than that. ... They were quite interested in the screen, and they saw that when they typed a letter, something happened. There was a level of intention there."


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: In his 1931 book "The Mysterious Universe", Eddington's rival James Jeans attributed the monkey parable to a "Huxley", presumably meaning Thomas Henry Huxley. This attribution is incorrect. Today, it is sometimes further reported that Huxley applied the example in a now-legendary debate over Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" with the Anglican Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, held at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Oxford on 30 June 1860. This story suffers not only from a lack of evidence, but the fact that in 1860 the typewriter itself had yet to emerge.


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: Despite the original mix-up, monkey-and-typewriter arguments are now common in arguments over evolution. As an example of Christian apologetics Doug Powell argued that even if a monkey accidentally types the letters of "Hamlet", it has failed to produce "Hamlet" because it lacked the intention to communicate. His parallel implication is that natural laws could not produce the information content in DNA. A more common argument is represented by Reverend John F. MacArthur, who claimed that the genetic mutations necessary to produce a tapeworm from an amoeba are as unlikely as a monkey typing Hamlet's soliloquy, and hence the odds against the evolution of all life are impossible to overcome.


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins employs the typing monkey concept in his book "The Blind Watchmaker" to demonstrate the ability of natural selection to produce biological complexity out of random mutations. In a simulation experiment Dawkins has his weasel program produce the Hamlet phrase "METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL", starting from a randomly typed parent, by "breeding" subsequent generations and always choosing the closest match from progeny that are copies of the parent, with random mutations. The chance of the target phrase appearing in a single step is extremely small, yet Dawkins showed that it could be produced rapidly (in about 40 generations) using cumulative selection of phrases. The random choices furnish raw material, while cumulative selection imparts information. As Dawkins acknowledges, however, the weasel program is an imperfect analogy for evolution, as "offspring" phrases were selected "according to the criterion of resemblance to a "distant ideal" target." In contrast, Dawkins affirms, evolution has no long-term plans and does not progress toward some distant goal (such as humans). The weasel program is instead meant to illustrate the difference between non-random cumulative selection, and random single-step selection. In terms of the typing monkey analogy, this means that "Romeo and Juliet" could be produced relatively quickly if placed under the constraints of a nonrandom, Darwinian-type selection because the fitness function will tend to preserve in place any letters that happen to match the target text, improving each successive generation of typing monkeys.


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: A different avenue for exploring the analogy between evolution and an unconstrained monkey lies in the problem that the monkey types only one letter at a time, independently of the other letters. Hugh Petrie argues that a more sophisticated setup is required, in his case not for biological evolution but the evolution of ideas:


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: James W. Valentine, while admitting that the classic monkey's task is impossible, finds that there is a worthwhile analogy between written English and the metazoan genome in this other sense: both have "combinatorial, hierarchical structures" that greatly constrain the immense number of combinations at the alphabet level.


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: R. G. Collingwood argued in 1938 that art cannot be produced by accident, and wrote as a sarcastic aside to his critics,


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: Nelson Goodman took the contrary position, illustrating his point along with Catherine Elgin by the example of Borges' "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote",


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: In another writing, Goodman elaborates, "That the monkey may be supposed to have produced his copy randomly makes no difference. It is the same text, and it is open to all the same interpretations. ..." Gérard Genette dismisses Goodman's argument as begging the question.


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: For Jorge J. E. Gracia, the question of the identity of texts leads to a different question, that of author. If a monkey is capable of typing "Hamlet", despite having no intention of meaning and therefore disqualifying itself as an author, then it appears that texts do not require authors. Possible solutions include saying that whoever finds the text and identifies it as "Hamlet" is the author; or that Shakespeare is the author, the monkey his agent, and the finder merely a user of the text. These solutions have their own difficulties, in that the text appears to have a meaning separate from the other agents: What if the monkey operates before Shakespeare is born, or if Shakespeare is never born, or if no one ever finds the monkey's typescript?


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: The theorem concerns a thought experiment which cannot be fully carried out in practice, since it is predicted to require prohibitive amounts of time and resources. Nonetheless, it has inspired efforts in finite random text generation.


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: One computer program run by Dan Oliver of Scottsdale, Arizona, according to an article in "The New Yorker", came up with a result on 4 August 2004: After the group had worked for 42,162,500,000 billion billion monkey-years, one of the "monkeys" typed, "<samp>VALENTINE. Cease toIdor:eFLP0FRjWK78aXzVOwm)-‘;8.t</samp>" The first 19 letters of this sequence can be found in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona". Other teams have reproduced 18 characters from "Timon of Athens", 17 from "Troilus and Cressida", and 16 from "Richard II".


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: A website entitled "The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator", launched on 1 July 2003, contained a Java applet that simulated a large population of monkeys typing randomly, with the stated intention of seeing how long it takes the virtual monkeys to produce a complete Shakespearean play from beginning to end. For example, it produced this partial line from "Henry IV, Part 2", reporting that it took "2,737,850 million billion billion billion monkey-years" to reach 24 matching characters:


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: Due to processing power limitations, the program used a probabilistic model (by using a random number generator or RNG) instead of actually generating random text and comparing it to Shakespeare. When the simulator "detected a match" (that is, the RNG generated a certain value or a value within a certain range), the simulator simulated the match by generating matched text.


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: More sophisticated methods are used in practice for natural language generation. If instead of simply generating random characters one restricts the generator to a meaningful vocabulary and conservatively following grammar rules, like using a context-free grammar, then a random document generated this way can even fool some humans (at least on a cursory reading) as shown in the experiments with SCIgen, snarXiv, and the Postmodernism Generator.


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: In February 2019, the OpenAI group published the Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2 (GPT-2) artificial intelligence to GitHub, which is able to produce a fully plausible news article given a two sentence input from a human hand. The AI was so effective that instead of publishing the full code, the group chose to publish a scaled-back version and released a statement regarding ""concerns about large language models being used to generate deceptive, biased, or abusive language at scale.""


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: Questions about the statistics describing how often an ideal monkey is expected to type certain strings translate into practical tests for random-number generators; these range from the simple to the "quite sophisticated". Computer-science professors George Marsaglia and Arif Zaman report that they used to call one such category of tests "overlapping m-tuple tests" in lectures, since they concern overlapping m-tuples of successive elements in a random sequence. But they found that calling them "monkey tests" helped to motivate the idea with students. They published a report on the class of tests and their results for various RNGs in 1993.


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: The infinite monkey theorem and its associated imagery is considered a popular and proverbial illustration of the mathematics of probability, widely known to the general public because of its transmission through popular culture rather than through formal education. This is helped by the innate humor stemming from the image of literal monkeys rattling away on a set of typewriters, and is a popular visual gag.


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: A quotation attributed to a 1996 speech by Robert Wilensky stated, "We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true."


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: The enduring, widespread popularity of the theorem was noted in the introduction to a 2001 paper, "Monkeys, Typewriters and Networks: The Internet in the Light of the Theory of Accidental Excellence". In 2002, an article in "The Washington Post" said, "Plenty of people have had fun with the famous notion that an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters and an infinite amount of time could eventually write the works of Shakespeare". In 2003, the previously mentioned Arts Council funded experiment involving real monkeys and a computer keyboard received widespread press coverage. In 2007, the theorem was listed by "Wired" magazine in a list of eight classic thought experiments.


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: American playwright David Ives' short one-act play "Words, Words, Words", from the collection "All in the Timing", pokes fun of the concept of the infinite monkey theorem.


title: Infinite monkey theorem

text: In 2015 Balanced Software released Monkey Typewriter on the Microsoft Store. The software generates random text using the Infinite Monkey theorem string formula. The software queries the generated text for user inputted phrases. However the software should not be considered true to life representation of the theory. This is a more of a practical presentation of the theory rather than scientific model on how to randomly generate text.


title: Empiricism

text: In philosophy, empiricism is an epistemological theory that holds that knowledge or justification comes only or primarily from sensory experience. It is one of several views within epistemology, along with rationalism and skepticism. Empiricism emphasizes the central role of empirical evidence in the formation of ideas, rather than innate ideas or traditions. However, empiricists may argue that traditions (or customs) arise due to relations of previous sensory experiences.


title: Empiricism

text: Historically, empiricism was associated with the "blank slate" concept ("tabula rasa"), according to which the human mind is "blank" at birth and develops its thoughts only through experience.


title: Empiricism

text: Empiricism in the philosophy of science emphasizes evidence, especially as discovered in experiments. It is a fundamental part of the scientific method that all hypotheses and theories must be tested against observations of the natural world rather than resting solely on "a priori" reasoning, intuition, or revelation.


title: Empiricism

text: Empiricism, often used by natural scientists, says that "knowledge is based on experience" and that "knowledge is tentative and probabilistic, subject to continued revision and falsification". Empirical research, including experiments and validated measurement tools, guides the scientific method.


title: Empiricism

text: The English term "empirical" derives from the Ancient Greek word ἐμπειρία, "empeiria", which is cognate with and translates to the Latin "experientia", from which the words "experience" and "experiment" are derived.


title: Empiricism

text: A central concept in science and the scientific method is that conclusions must be "empirically" based on the evidence of the senses. Both natural and social sciences use working hypotheses that are testable by observation and experiment. The term "semi-empirical" is sometimes used to describe theoretical methods that make use of basic axioms, established scientific laws, and previous experimental results in order to engage in reasoned model building and theoretical inquiry.


title: Empiricism

text: Philosophical empiricists hold no knowledge to be properly inferred or deduced unless it is derived from one's sense-based experience. This view is commonly contrasted with rationalism, which states that knowledge may be derived from reason independently of the senses. For example, John Locke held that some knowledge (e.g. knowledge of God's existence) could be arrived at through intuition and reasoning alone. Similarly Robert Boyle, a prominent advocate of the experimental method, held that we have innate ideas. The main continental rationalists (Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz) were also advocates of the empirical "scientific method".


title: Empiricism

text: Between 600 and 200 BCE, the Vaisheshika school of Hindu philosophy, founded by the ancient Indian philosopher Kanada, accepted perception and inference as the only two reliable sources of knowledge. This is enumerated in his work "Vaiśeṣika Sūtra". The Charvaka school held similar beliefs, asserting that perception is the only reliable source of knowledge while inference obtains knowledge with uncertainty.


title: Empiricism

text: The earliest Western proto-empiricists were the empiric school of ancient Greek medical practitioners, founded in 330 BCE. Its members rejected the doctrines of the dogmatic school, preferring to rely on the observation of "phantasiai" (i.e., phenomena, the appearances). The Empiric school was closely allied with the Pyrrhonist school of philosophy, which made the philosophical case for their proto-empiricism.


title: Empiricism

text: The notion of "tabula rasa" ("clean slate" or "blank tablet") connotes a view of mind as an originally blank or empty recorder (Locke used the words "white paper") on which experience leaves marks. This denies that humans have innate ideas. The notion dates back to Aristotle, c. 350 BC:


title: Empiricism

text: What the mind ("nous") thinks must be in it in the same sense as letters are on a tablet ("grammateion") which bears no actual writing ("grammenon"); this is just what happens in the case of the mind. (Aristotle, "On the Soul", 3.4.4301).


title: Empiricism

text: Aristotle's explanation of how this was possible was not strictly empiricist in a modern sense, but rather based on his theory of potentiality and actuality, and experience of sense perceptions still requires the help of the active "nous". These notions contrasted with Platonic notions of the human mind as an entity that pre-existed somewhere in the heavens, before being sent down to join a body on Earth (see Plato's "Phaedo" and "Apology", as well as others). Aristotle was considered to give a more important position to sense perception than Plato, and commentators in the Middle Ages summarized one of his positions as ""nihil in intellectu nisi prius fuerit in sensu"" (Latin for "nothing in the intellect without first being in the senses").


title: Empiricism

text: This idea was later developed in ancient philosophy by the Stoic school, from about 330 BCE. Stoic epistemology generally emphasized that the mind starts blank, but acquires knowledge as the outside world is impressed upon it. The doxographer Aetius summarizes this view as "When a man is born, the Stoics say, he has the commanding part of his soul like a sheet of paper ready for writing upon."


title: Empiricism

text: During the Middle Ages (from the 5th to the 15th century CE) Aristotle's theory of "tabula rasa" was developed by Islamic philosophers starting with Al Farabi (c. 872 – 951 CE), developing into an elaborate theory by Avicenna (c. 980 – 1037) and demonstrated as a thought experiment by Ibn Tufail. For Avicenna (Ibn Sina), for example, the "tabula rasa" is a pure potentiality that is actualized through education, and knowledge is attained through "empirical familiarity with objects in this world from which one abstracts universal concepts" developed through a "syllogistic method of reasoning in which observations lead to propositional statements which when compounded lead to further abstract concepts". The intellect itself develops from a material intellect ("al-'aql al-hayulani"), which is a potentiality "that can acquire knowledge to the active intellect ("al-'aql al-fa'il"), the state of the human intellect in conjunction with the perfect source of knowledge". So the immaterial "active intellect", separate from any individual person, is still essential for understanding to occur.


title: Empiricism

text: In the 12th century CE, the Andalusian Muslim philosopher and novelist Abu Bakr Ibn Tufail (known as "Abubacer" or "Ebn Tophail" in the West) included the theory of "tabula rasa" as a thought experiment in his Arabic philosophical novel, "Hayy ibn Yaqdhan" in which he depicted the development of the mind of a feral child "from a "tabula rasa" to that of an adult, in complete isolation from society" on a desert island, through experience alone. The Latin translation of his philosophical novel, entitled "Philosophus Autodidactus", published by Edward Pococke the Younger in 1671, had an influence on John Locke's formulation of "tabula rasa" in "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding".


title: Empiricism

text: A similar Islamic theological novel, "Theologus Autodidactus", was written by the Arab theologian and physician Ibn al-Nafis in the 13th century. It also dealt with the theme of empiricism through the story of a feral child on a desert island, but departed from its predecessor by depicting the development of the protagonist's mind through contact with society rather than in isolation from society.


title: Empiricism

text: During the 13th century Thomas Aquinas adopted into scholasticism the Aristotelian position that the senses are essential to the mind. Bonaventure (1221–1274), one of Aquinas' strongest intellectual opponents, offered some of the strongest arguments in favour of the Platonic idea of the mind.


title: Empiricism

text: In the late renaissance various writers began to question the medieval and classical understanding of knowledge acquisition in a more fundamental way. In political and historical writing Niccolò Machiavelli and his friend Francesco Guicciardini initiated a new realistic style of writing. Machiavelli in particular was scornful of writers on politics who judged everything in comparison to mental ideals and demanded that people should study the "effectual truth" instead. Their contemporary, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) said, "If you find from your own experience that something is a fact and it contradicts what some authority has written down, then you must abandon the authority and base your reasoning on your own findings."


title: Empiricism

text: Significantly, an empirical metaphysical system was developed by the Italian philosopher Bernardino Telesio which had an enormous impact on the development of later Italian thinkers, including Telesio's students Antonio Persio and , his contemporaries Thomas Campanella and Giordano Bruno, and later British philosophers such as Francis Bacon, who regarded Telesio as "the first of the moderns.” Telesio's influence can also be seen on the French philosophers René Descartes and Pierre Gassendi.


title: Empiricism

text: The decidedly anti-Aristotelian and anti-clerical music theorist Vincenzo Galilei (c. 1520 – 1591), father of Galileo and the inventor of monody, made use of the method in successfully solving musical problems, firstly, of tuning such as the relationship of pitch to string tension and mass in stringed instruments, and to volume of air in wind instruments; and secondly to composition, by his various suggestions to composers in his "Dialogo della musica antica e moderna" (Florence, 1581). The Italian word he used for "experiment" was "esperienza". It is known that he was the essential pedagogical influence upon the young Galileo, his eldest son (cf. Coelho, ed. "Music and Science in the Age of Galileo Galilei"), arguably one of the most influential empiricists in history. Vincenzo, through his tuning research, found the underlying truth at the heart of the misunderstood myth of 'Pythagoras' hammers' (the square of the numbers concerned yielded those musical intervals, not the actual numbers, as believed), and through this and other discoveries that demonstrated the fallibility of traditional authorities, a radically empirical attitude developed, passed on to Galileo, which regarded "experience and demonstration" as the "sine qua non" of valid rational enquiry.


title: Empiricism

text: British empiricism, a retrospective characterization, emerged during the 17th century as an approach to early modern philosophy and modern science. Although both integral to this overarching transition, Francis Bacon, in England, advised empiricism at 1620, whereas René Descartes, in France, upheld rationalism around 1640, a distinction drawn by Immanuel Kant, in Germany, near 1780. (Bacon's natural philosophy was influenced by Italian philosopher Bernardino Telesio and by Swiss physician Paracelsus.) Contributing later in the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza are retrospectively identified likewise as an empiricist and a rationalist, respectively. In the Enlightenment during the 18th century, both George Berkeley, in England, and David Hume, in Scotland, became leading exponents of empiricism, a lead precedented in the late 17th century by John Locke, also in England, hence the dominance of empiricism in British philosophy.


title: Empiricism

text: In response to the early-to-mid-17th century "continental rationalism," John Locke (1632–1704) proposed in "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (1689) a very influential view wherein the "only" knowledge humans can have is "a posteriori", i.e., based upon experience. Locke is famously attributed with holding the proposition that the human mind is a "tabula rasa", a "blank tablet", in Locke's words "white paper", on which the experiences derived from sense impressions as a person's life proceeds are written. There are two sources of our ideas: sensation and reflection. In both cases, a distinction is made between simple and complex ideas. The former are unanalysable, and are broken down into primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities are essential for the object in question to be what it is. Without specific primary qualities, an object would not be what it is. For example, an apple is an apple because of the arrangement of its atomic structure. If an apple were structured differently, it would cease to be an apple. Secondary qualities are the sensory information we can perceive from its primary qualities. For example, an apple can be perceived in various colours, sizes, and textures but it is still identified as an apple. Therefore, its primary qualities dictate what the object essentially is, while its secondary qualities define its attributes. Complex ideas combine simple ones, and divide into substances, modes, and relations. According to Locke, our knowledge of things is a perception of ideas that are in accordance or discordance with each other, which is very different from the quest for certainty of Descartes.


title: Empiricism

text: A generation later, the Irish Anglican bishop, George Berkeley (1685–1753), determined that Locke's view immediately opened a door that would lead to eventual atheism. In response to Locke, he put forth in his "Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge" (1710) an important challenge to empiricism in which things "only" exist either as a "result" of their being perceived, or by virtue of the fact that they are an entity doing the perceiving. (For Berkeley, God fills in for humans by doing the perceiving whenever humans are not around to do it.) In his text "Alciphron", Berkeley maintained that any order humans may see in nature is the language or handwriting of God. Berkeley's approach to empiricism would later come to be called subjective idealism.


title: Empiricism

text: The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) responded to Berkeley's criticisms of Locke, as well as other differences between early modern philosophers, and moved empiricism to a new level of skepticism. Hume argued in keeping with the empiricist view that all knowledge derives from sense experience, but he accepted that this has implications not normally acceptable to philosophers. He wrote for example, "Locke divides all arguments into demonstrative and probable. On this view, we must say that it is only probable that all men must die or that the sun will rise to-morrow, because neither of these can be demonstrated. But to conform our language more to common use, we ought to divide arguments into demonstrations, proofs, and probabilities—by ‘proofs’ meaning arguments from experience that leave no room for doubt or opposition." And,


title: Empiricism

text: Hume divided all of human knowledge into two categories: "relations of ideas" and "matters of fact" (see also Kant's analytic-synthetic distinction). Mathematical and logical propositions (e.g. "that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the two sides") are examples of the first, while propositions involving some contingent observation of the world (e.g. "the sun rises in the East") are examples of the second. All of people's "ideas", in turn, are derived from their "impressions". For Hume, an "impression" corresponds roughly with what we call a sensation. To remember or to imagine such impressions is to have an "idea". Ideas are therefore the faint copies of sensations.


title: Empiricism

text: Hume maintained that no knowledge, even the most basic beliefs about the natural world, can be conclusively established by reason. Rather, he maintained, our beliefs are more a result of accumulated "habits", developed in response to accumulated sense experiences. Among his many arguments Hume also added another important slant to the debate about scientific method—that of the problem of induction. Hume argued that it requires inductive reasoning to arrive at the premises for the principle of inductive reasoning, and therefore the justification for inductive reasoning is a circular argument. Among Hume's conclusions regarding the problem of induction is that there is no certainty that the future will resemble the past. Thus, as a simple instance posed by Hume, we cannot know with certainty by inductive reasoning that the sun will continue to rise in the East, but instead come to expect it to do so because it has repeatedly done so in the past.


title: Empiricism

text: Hume concluded that such things as belief in an external world and belief in the existence of the self were not rationally justifiable. According to Hume these beliefs were to be accepted nonetheless because of their profound basis in instinct and custom. Hume's lasting legacy, however, was the doubt that his skeptical arguments cast on the legitimacy of inductive reasoning, allowing many skeptics who followed to cast similar doubt.


title: Empiricism

text: Most of Hume's followers have disagreed with his conclusion that belief in an external world is "rationally" unjustifiable, contending that Hume's own principles implicitly contained the rational justification for such a belief, that is, beyond being content to let the issue rest on human instinct, custom and habit. According to an extreme empiricist theory known as phenomenalism, anticipated by the arguments of both Hume and George Berkeley, a physical object is a kind of construction out of our experiences. Phenomenalism is the view that physical objects, properties, events (whatever is physical) are reducible to mental objects, properties, events. Ultimately, only mental objects, properties, events, exist—hence the closely related term subjective idealism. By the phenomenalistic line of thinking, to have a visual experience of a real physical thing is to have an experience of a certain kind of group of experiences. This type of set of experiences possesses a constancy and coherence that is lacking in the set of experiences of which hallucinations, for example, are a part. As John Stuart Mill put it in the mid-19th century, matter is the "permanent possibility of sensation".


title: Empiricism

text: Mill's empiricism went a significant step beyond Hume in still another respect: in maintaining that induction is necessary for "all" meaningful knowledge including mathematics. As summarized by D.W. Hamlin:


title: Empiricism

text: Mill's empiricism thus held that knowledge of any kind is not from direct experience but an inductive inference from direct experience. The problems other philosophers have had with Mill's position center around the following issues: Firstly, Mill's formulation encounters difficulty when it describes what direct experience is by differentiating only between actual and possible sensations. This misses some key discussion concerning conditions under which such "groups of permanent possibilities of sensation" might exist in the first place. Berkeley put God in that gap; the phenomenalists, including Mill, essentially left the question unanswered. In the end, lacking an acknowledgement of an aspect of "reality" that goes beyond mere "possibilities of sensation", such a position leads to a version of subjective idealism. Questions of how floor beams continue to support a floor while unobserved, how trees continue to grow while unobserved and untouched by human hands, etc., remain unanswered, and perhaps unanswerable in these terms. Secondly, Mill's formulation leaves open the unsettling possibility that the "gap-filling entities are purely possibilities and not actualities at all". Thirdly, Mill's position, by calling mathematics merely another species of inductive inference, misapprehends mathematics. It fails to fully consider the structure and method of mathematical science, the products of which are arrived at through an internally consistent deductive set of procedures which do not, either today or at the time Mill wrote, fall under the agreed meaning of induction.


title: Empiricism

text: The phenomenalist phase of post-Humean empiricism ended by the 1940s, for by that time it had become obvious that statements about physical things could not be translated into statements about actual and possible sense data. If a physical object statement is to be translatable into a sense-data statement, the former must be at least deducible from the latter. But it came to be realized that there is no finite set of statements about actual and possible sense-data from which we can deduce even a single physical-object statement. The translating or paraphrasing statement must be couched in terms of normal observers in normal conditions of observation. There is, however, no "finite" set of statements that are couched in purely sensory terms and can express the satisfaction of the condition of the presence of a normal observer. According to phenomenalism, to say that a normal observer is present is to make the hypothetical statement that were a doctor to inspect the observer, the observer would appear to the doctor to be normal. But, of course, the doctor himself must be a normal observer. If we are to specify this doctor's normality in sensory terms, we must make reference to a second doctor who, when inspecting the sense organs of the first doctor, would himself have to have the sense data a normal observer has when inspecting the sense organs of a subject who is a normal observer. And if we are to specify in sensory terms that the second doctor is a normal observer, we must refer to a third doctor, and so on (also see the third man).


title: Empiricism

text: Logical empiricism (also "logical positivism" or "neopositivism") was an early 20th-century attempt to synthesize the essential ideas of British empiricism (e.g. a strong emphasis on sensory experience as the basis for knowledge) with certain insights from mathematical logic that had been developed by Gottlob Frege and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Some of the key figures in this movement were Otto Neurath, Moritz Schlick and the rest of the Vienna Circle, along with A.J. Ayer, Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach.


title: Empiricism

text: The neopositivists subscribed to a notion of philosophy as the conceptual clarification of the methods, insights and discoveries of the sciences. They saw in the logical symbolism elaborated by Frege (1848–1925) and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) a powerful instrument that could rationally reconstruct all scientific discourse into an ideal, logically perfect, language that would be free of the ambiguities and deformations of natural language. This gave rise to what they saw as metaphysical pseudoproblems and other conceptual confusions. By combining Frege's thesis that all mathematical truths are logical with the early Wittgenstein's idea that all logical truths are mere linguistic tautologies, they arrived at a twofold classification of all propositions: the "analytic" ("a priori") and the "synthetic" ("a posteriori"). On this basis, they formulated a strong principle of demarcation between sentences that have sense and those that do not: the so-called "verification principle". Any sentence that is not purely logical, or is unverifiable, is devoid of meaning. As a result, most metaphysical, ethical, aesthetic and other traditional philosophical problems came to be considered pseudoproblems.


title: Empiricism

text: In the extreme empiricism of the neopositivists—at least before the 1930s—any genuinely synthetic assertion must be reducible to an ultimate assertion (or set of ultimate assertions) that expresses direct observations or perceptions. In later years, Carnap and Neurath abandoned this sort of "phenomenalism" in favor of a rational reconstruction of knowledge into the language of an objective spatio-temporal physics. That is, instead of translating sentences about physical objects into sense-data, such sentences were to be translated into so-called "protocol sentences", for example, ""X" at location "Y" and at time "T" observes such and such". The central theses of logical positivism (verificationism, the analytic–synthetic distinction, reductionism, etc.) came under sharp attack after World War II by thinkers such as Nelson Goodman, W.V. Quine, Hilary Putnam, Karl Popper, and Richard Rorty. By the late 1960s, it had become evident to most philosophers that the movement had pretty much run its course, though its influence is still significant among contemporary analytic philosophers such as Michael Dummett and other anti-realists.


title: Empiricism

text: In the late 19th and early 20th century, several forms of pragmatic philosophy arose. The ideas of pragmatism, in its various forms, developed mainly from discussions between Charles Sanders Peirce and William James when both men were at Harvard in the 1870s. James popularized the term "pragmatism", giving Peirce full credit for its patrimony, but Peirce later demurred from the tangents that the movement was taking, and redubbed what he regarded as the original idea with the name of "pragmaticism". Along with its "pragmatic theory of truth", this perspective integrates the basic insights of empirical (experience-based) and rational (concept-based) thinking.


title: Empiricism

text: Charles Peirce (1839–1914) was highly influential in laying the groundwork for today's empirical scientific method. Although Peirce severely criticized many elements of Descartes' peculiar brand of rationalism, he did not reject rationalism outright. Indeed, he concurred with the main ideas of rationalism, most importantly the idea that rational concepts can be meaningful and the idea that rational concepts necessarily go beyond the data given by empirical observation. In later years he even emphasized the concept-driven side of the then ongoing debate between strict empiricism and strict rationalism, in part to counterbalance the excesses to which some of his cohorts had taken pragmatism under the "data-driven" strict-empiricist view.


title: Empiricism

text: Among Peirce's major contributions was to place inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning in a complementary rather than competitive mode, the latter of which had been the primary trend among the educated since David Hume wrote a century before. To this, Peirce added the concept of abductive reasoning. The combined three forms of reasoning serve as a primary conceptual foundation for the empirically based scientific method today. Peirce's approach "presupposes that (1) the objects of knowledge are real things, (2) the characters (properties) of real things do not depend on our perceptions of them, and (3) everyone who has sufficient experience of real things will agree on the truth about them. According to Peirce's doctrine of fallibilism, the conclusions of science are always tentative. The rationality of the scientific method does not depend on the certainty of its conclusions, but on its self-corrective character: by continued application of the method science can detect and correct its own mistakes, and thus eventually lead to the discovery of truth".


title: Empiricism

text: In his Harvard "Lectures on Pragmatism" (1903), Peirce enumerated what he called the "three cotary propositions of pragmatism" (L: "cos, cotis" whetstone), saying that they "put the edge on the maxim of pragmatism". First among these, he listed the peripatetic-thomist observation mentioned above, but he further observed that this link between sensory perception and intellectual conception is a two-way street. That is, it can be taken to say that whatever we find in the intellect is also incipiently in the senses. Hence, if theories are theory-laden then so are the senses, and perception itself can be seen as a species of abductive inference, its difference being that it is beyond control and hence beyond critique—in a word, incorrigible. This in no way conflicts with the fallibility and revisability of scientific concepts, since it is only the immediate percept in its unique individuality or "thisness"—what the Scholastics called its "haecceity"—that stands beyond control and correction. Scientific concepts, on the other hand, are general in nature, and transient sensations do in another sense find correction within them. This notion of perception as abduction has received periodic revivals in artificial intelligence and cognitive science research, most recently for instance with the work of Irvin Rock on "indirect perception".


title: Empiricism

text: Around the beginning of the 20th century, William James (1842–1910) coined the term "radical empiricism" to describe an offshoot of his form of pragmatism, which he argued could be dealt with separately from his pragmatism—though in fact the two concepts are intertwined in James's published lectures. James maintained that the empirically observed "directly apprehended universe needs ... no extraneous trans-empirical connective support", by which he meant to rule out the perception that there can be any value added by seeking supernatural explanations for natural phenomena. James' "radical empiricism" is thus "not" radical in the context of the term "empiricism", but is instead fairly consistent with the modern use of the term "empirical". His method of argument in arriving at this view, however, still readily encounters debate within philosophy even today.


title: Empiricism

text: John Dewey (1859–1952) modified James' pragmatism to form a theory known as instrumentalism. The role of sense experience in Dewey's theory is crucial, in that he saw experience as unified totality of things through which everything else is interrelated. Dewey's basic thought, in accordance with empiricism, was that reality is determined by past experience. Therefore, humans adapt their past experiences of things to perform experiments upon and test the pragmatic values of such experience. The value of such experience is measured experientially and scientifically, and the results of such tests generate ideas that serve as instruments for future experimentation, in physical sciences as in ethics. Thus, ideas in Dewey's system retain their empiricist flavour in that they are only known "a posteriori".


title: Jagged Little Pill

text: Jagged Little Pill is the third studio album by Canadian singer Alanis Morissette, released on June 13, 1995, through Maverick. It was her first album to be released worldwide. It marked a stylistic departure from the dance-pop sound of her first two albums, "Alanis" (1991) and "Now Is the Time" (1992). Morissette began work on the album after moving from her hometown Ottawa to Los Angeles, where she met producer Glen Ballard. Morissette and Ballard had an instant connection and began co-writing and experimenting with sounds. The experimentation resulted in an alternative rock album that takes influence from post-grunge and pop rock, and features guitars, keyboards, drum machines, and harmonica. The lyrics touch upon themes of aggression and unsuccessful relationships, while Ballard introduced a pop sensibility to Morissette's angst. The title of the album is taken from a line in the first verse of the song "You Learn".


title: Jagged Little Pill

text: "Jagged Little Pill" was a worldwide commercial success, topping the charts in thirteen countries. With sales of over 33 million copies worldwide, it is one of the best-selling albums of all time and made Morissette the first Canadian to achieve double diamond sales. "Jagged Little Pill" was nominated for nine Grammy Awards, winning five, including Album of the Year, making the then 21-year-old Morissette the youngest artist to win the top honor up to that point. "Rolling Stone" ranked "Jagged Little Pill" at number 69 on its 2020 list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time".


title: Jagged Little Pill

text: The album has been re-released twice: on October 30, 2015, in a 2-disc deluxe edition and a 4-disc collector's edition commemorating its 20th anniversary; and on June 26, 2020, in a 25th anniversary deluxe edition. An acoustic re-recording of the album was released on June 13, 2005, to mark its 10th anniversary. A musical stage production based on the album premiered at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge on May 5, 2018; it transferred to Broadway the following year, and was nominated for 15 Tony Awards including Best Musical. A world tour celebrating the 25th anniversary of "Jagged Little Pill" began in early 2020 but was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.


title: Jagged Little Pill

text: In 1991, MCA Records Canada released Morissette's debut studio album "Alanis", which went Platinum in Canada. Her second album "Now Is the Time" sold a little more than half the copies of her first album. With her two-album deal complete, Morissette was left without a recording contract. In 1993, Morissette's publisher Leeds Levy at MCA Music Publishing introduced her to manager Scott Welch. Welch told HitQuarters he was impressed by her "spectacular voice", her character and her lyrics. At the time she was still living with her parents in Ottawa. Together they decided it would be best for her career to move to Toronto and start writing with other people.


title: Jagged Little Pill

text: After graduating from high school, Morissette made the move. Her publisher funded part of her development and when she met producer and songwriter Glen Ballard, he believed in her talent enough to let her use his studio. The two wrote and recorded Morissette's first internationally released album, "Jagged Little Pill", and by the spring of 1995, she had signed a deal with Maverick Records. According to Welch, every label they approached passed on Morissette apart from Maverick.


title: Jagged Little Pill

text: Morissette co-wrote the album solely with Glen Ballard, who also produced the album. The demo recording sessions started in 1994 at Ballard's home studio and included only Morissette and the producer, who recorded the songs as they were being written. Ballard provided the rough tracks, playing the guitars, keyboards, and programming drum machines, and Morissette played harmonica. The duo sought to write and record one song a day, in twelve- or sixteen-hour shifts, with minimal overdubbing later. All of Morissette's singing on the album respects that rule, each recorded in one or two takes. The tracks that were redone later in a professional studio used the original demo vocals.


title: Jagged Little Pill

text: Ballard met Morissette in 1994 when his publishing company matched them up. According to Ballard, the connection was "instant", and within 30 minutes of meeting each other they had begun experimenting with different sounds in Ballard's home studio in San Fernando Valley, California. Ballard also declared to "Rolling Stone" that, "I just connected with her as a person, and, almost parenthetically, it was like 'Wow, you're 19?' She was so intelligent and ready to take a chance on doing something that might have no commercial application. Although there was some question about what she wanted to do musically, she knew what she didn't want to do, which was anything that wasn't authentic and from her heart." The first track the pair wrote was "The Bottom Line", which was not included on the album's initial release, but was included on the album's 2015 re-release. The song was written in one hour, immediately after they met.


title: Jagged Little Pill

text: The album's most successful single "Ironic" was the third track to be written for the album. In an interview with Christopher Walsh of "Billboard", Ballard explained how he and Morissette met, and how "Ironic" was written. He commented: "I'm telling you, within 15 minutes we were at it — just writing. 'Ironic' was the third song we wrote. Oh God, we were just having fun. I thought 'I don't know what this is — what genre it is — who knows? It's just good."


title: Jagged Little Pill

text: The lead single, "You Oughta Know", has guitar by Dave Navarro and bass by Flea of Red Hot Chili Peppers. The song was written with a different instrumentation; the pair were then asked to re-write the music – something Navarro described as being "A lot like a remix ... The structure of the song was in place but there were no guide tracks, we just had the vocal to work from. It was just a good time and we basically jammed until we found something we were both happy with. Alanis was happy too."


title: Jagged Little Pill

text: The first song to be shown to A&R and record company people was "Perfect", with a simple arrangement containing only Morissette's vocals and Ballard's acoustic guitar. In December 1994, before Morissette penned a deal with Maverick Records, the duo took the demos to a studio and began working on full band arrangements for 5 songs: You Oughta Know, Right Through You, Forgiven, Wake Up and Mary Jane. Los Angeles engineer Chris Fogel engineered the sessions.


title: Jagged Little Pill

text: "Jagged Little Pill" departed from Morissette's previous releases – "Alanis" and "Now Is the Time" – that predominantly featured dance-pop. Most of the lyrics were written by Morissette and Glen Ballard. The album opens with "All I Really Want". It features harmonica, swirly guitars and canned drums, and is in a grunge-pop vein. The lyrics talk about "intellectual intercourse" and a mental connection with another angry, frustrated, frightened, uncomfortable soul. The lyrics of "You Oughta Know" have been described as exploring themes of "raw anger and frank portrayal of female sexuality".


title: Jagged Little Pill

text: "Hand in My Pocket" is a cataloging of contradictions set over fuzzy guitar and a '90s drum machine. It portrays a lighter side to Morissette, with lyrics that touch upon themes of her self-effacing and hopeful side. "Right Through You" is a grunge song with angry lyrics about sleazy record bosses who prey on female artists who they want to "Wine dine and sixty-nine" rather than actually supporting their musical careers.


title: Jagged Little Pill

text: "Forgiven" draws on Morissette's Catholic upbringing. "I was told," she recalled, "that if I wasn't a virgin when I was a teenager, I must be a real whore. I believed that if I had sex I would be damned in hell forever." "You Learn" is a mid-tempo self-help rock song, with Morissette giving out advice; "Ditch the fear, open your heart, speak your mind, and when the going gets tough, walk around the house naked." "Head Over Feet" is a ballad that contains guitar and drum box backing, with plainspoken vocals. The lyrics talk about Morissette being a "handful", and that she's not the type to get emotional.


title: Jagged Little Pill

text: "Mary Jane" is built over a ballad's tense and ringing electric guitar, and sees Morissette trying to reassure a friend who's having a rough time. In 2010 a writer suggested it was an example of an anti-rhetorical argument about taking action. Though the name "Mary Jane" is another name for marijuana, the song seems not to be about the drug.


title: Jagged Little Pill

text: "Ironic" is a pop rock song, set in the time signature of common time, composed in a moderate tempo of eighty-two beats per minute. The song's use of situational irony led to some fascination with whether it is a correct application of the term "ironic". According to the "Oxford English Dictionary" "irony" is "a figure of speech in which the intended meaning is the opposite of that expressed by the words used" making lyrics such as "It's like rain on your wedding day" not ironic.


title: Jagged Little Pill

text: Maverick Records released "Jagged Little Pill" internationally in 1995. The album was expected only to sell enough for Morissette to make a follow-up, but the situation changed quickly when KROQ-FM, an influential Los Angeles modern rock radio station, began playing "You Oughta Know", the album's lead single. The song instantly garnered attention for its scathing, explicit lyrics, a subsequent music video went into heavy rotation on MTV and MuchMusic in Canada, and the song rapidly ascended the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart peaking at No. 1 for five weeks, the most ever by a female artist to that date. Soon after US Top 40 and Album Rock radio stations began playing the song and it reached No. 7 and No. 3 on the Mainstream Top 40 and Album Rock Track charts, respectively.


title: Jagged Little Pill

text: After the success of "You Oughta Know", the album's other hits helped send "Jagged Little Pill" to the top of the Billboard Album Chart. "Hand in My Pocket" was the next track released; it topped the Modern Rock chart and reached No. 8 and No. 4 on the Mainstream Top 40 and Album Rock Track charts, respectively. While top 40 and album rock stations were still catching up to modern rock radio stations on playing the first two tracks, "All I Really Want" was promoted at modern rock stations and reached No. 14 on the Modern Rock chart. The fourth U.S. single, "Ironic", became Morissette's biggest hit, partly due to the unique music video featuring four identical but differently dressed Alanises driving around in the same car. The video was nominated for six MTV Video Music Awards in 1996 winning three including "Best Female Video". "Ironic", which was released as a physical single, therefore, becoming the first track off "Jagged Little Pill" eligible for the Billboard Hot 100, peaked at No. 4 on the Hot 100, while also hitting No. 1 on the Modern Rock and Mainstream Top 40 charts. "You Learn" and "Head over Feet", the fifth and sixth singles, also topped the Mainstream Top 40 chart, reached No. 7 and No. 25 on the Modern Rock chart, but were not picked up by Mainstream Rock stations, instead charting highly on the Adult Alternative ("You Learn" No. 2; "Head Over Feet" No. 11) and Adult Top 40 charts ("Head Over Feet" No. 1: "You Learn" No. 3), with a single of "You Learn" backed with Morissette's Grammy Award performance of "You Oughta Know" peaking at No. 6 on the Hot 100. The parade of singles kept "Jagged Little Pill" (1995) in the top 10 on the "Billboard" 200 albums chart for 72 weeks.


title: Jagged Little Pill

text: Morissette toured "Jagged Little Pill" worldwide for 18 months, supported by Radiohead. A live video was released on VHS and DVD, "Jagged Little Pill, Live", and won a Grammy Award for Best Long Form Music Video.


title: Jagged Little Pill

text: On the album's tenth anniversary in 2005, Morissette released an acoustic version of the album, "Jagged Little Pill Acoustic". This album was originally sold through Starbucks' Hear Music brand in an exclusive six-week deal that ended on July 26, 2005. For the duration of this partnership, music retailer HMV boycotted the sale of Morissette's entire catalogue in Canada. The album was released on June 15, 2005, ten years to the day after the original United States release. The artwork of the acoustic version is similar to the original version, but is sepia-tinted instead. On October 30, 2015, "Jagged Little Pill" was reissued by Rhino Records and Warner Music Group to mark its 20th anniversary. A two-disc deluxe edition contains a newly remastered version of the album, appended with ten demo recordings, two of which were previously released on the "Joining You" single in 1999. A limited four-disc collector's edition also adds 2005's "Acoustic" album and a full live concert recorded in London at Subterranea on September 28, 1995. As with the "Acoustic" release, this edition also updated the cover artwork; this time presented in white and gold and labeled as "Jagged Little Pill • Collector's Edition".


title: Jagged Little Pill

text: "Jagged Little Pill" received generally positive reviews from music critics. "Los Angeles Times" writer Steve Hochman found that few artists explored "extreme emotional games" as "strikingly" as Morissette, whom he viewed as "a fresh talent—somewhere between, say, Sinéad O'Connor and Liz Phair—who's determined to let her feelings out, whether with a snarl or a smile." Anne Ayers of "USA Today" said that Morissette "compels with mature, assured songcraft and pointed writing", while "Philadelphia Inquirer" critic Tom Moon described her as "wise beyond her years, determined to expose the hypocrisy she encounters at every turn." "The Village Voice"s Robert Christgau wrote that Morissette is "happy to help 15 million girls of many ages stick a basic feminist truth in our faces: privileged phonies have identity problems too. Not to mention man problems." In a retrospective review, Stephen Thomas Erlewine from AllMusic highlighted the intensely personal nature of Morissette's lyrics and found it "remarkable" that the album "struck a sympathetic chord with millions of listeners, because it's so doggedly, determinedly insular." Erlewine concludes, "As slick as the music is, the lyrics are unvarnished and Morissette unflinchingly explores emotions so common, most people would be ashamed to articulate them."


title: Jagged Little Pill

text: Other critics were less favorable. David Browne of "Entertainment Weekly" was intrigued by "You Oughta Know" but found the rest of "Jagged Little Pill" "much harder to swallow", continuing, "What sounds arresting on a single grows wearing over a full album. Producer-co-songwriter Glen Ballard's arrangements are clunky mixtures of alternative mood music and hammy arena rock, and the 21-year-old Morissette tends to wildly oversing every other line." Greg Kot of the "Chicago Tribune" wrote that Morissette "strives for catharsis but often merely sounds histrionic".


title: Jagged Little Pill

text: When listing the album at 45 on the "100 Best Albums of the Nineties", "Rolling Stone" commented: ""Jagged Little Pill" is like a Nineties version of Carole King's "Tapestry": a woman using her plain soft-rock voice to sift through the emotional wreckage of her youth, with enough heart and songcraft to make countless listeners feel the earth move".


title: Jagged Little Pill

text: "Jagged Little Pill" is one of the most successful albums of the 1990s. In the US, it debuted at No. 117 on the "Billboard" 200 and peaked at No. 1 in October 1995, almost four months after it was released, remaining in that position for twelve weeks in total. It was the first album to reach both 12 million (in February 1997) and 13 million (in August 1998) in sales in the US since 1991, when Nielsen SoundScan started tracking music sales. It was certified 16× Platinum for shipments of 16 million copies. Morissette held the record as the youngest artist—she was 21 at the time—to be certified diamond in the US, until Britney Spears claimed that title with her debut album "...Baby One More Time" certified diamond in December 1999 as she turned 18. The album recorded a further 350,000 units sold through BMG Music Club. On the week ending June 21, 2015, the album sold 5,000 copies, bringing its sales to just over 15 million, making it one of only three albums to have sold at least 15 million copies in the United States since Nielsen Music began tracking data in 1991. It also peaked at No. 1 on the Canadian Albums Chart, and was certified 2× Diamond for selling over 2 million copies.


title: Jagged Little Pill

text: "Jagged Little Pill" was very successful worldwide. In Oceania, the album debuted at No. 46 in Australia and rose to peak at No. 1, staying there for 10 non-consecutive weeks. It was certified 14× Platinum, selling over 980,000 copies there. The album debuted at No. 46 in New Zealand, then rose to No. 1, staying there for 11 non-consecutive weeks. In Europe, it peaked at No. 6 on the French Albums Chart, staying in the charts for 37 weeks, and was eventually certified Platinum in that country. In Italy, the album has shipped half a million copies. The album debuted at No. 76 in the United Kingdom and later reached No. 1, spending a total of 221 weeks on the charts. The album was certified 10× Platinum, shipping over 3 million copies.


title: Jagged Little Pill

text: With 18.7 million copies sold globally in 1996, "Jagged Little Pill" was the best-selling album of that year. It sold 500,000 or more copies during more than 15 non-consecutive weeks. , it has sold 33 million copies worldwide. Overall, the album is one of the most successful albums in music history and one of the best-selling albums worldwide.


title: Jagged Little Pill

text: The album received numerous awards and accolades. Morissette and the album won five Juno Awards in 1996, including the Album of the Year, Single of the Year for "You Oughta Know", Female Vocalist of the Year, Songwriter of the Year and Best Rock Album.


title: Jagged Little Pill

text: At the 1996 Grammy Awards, she won Best Female Rock Vocal Performance, Best Rock Song (both for "You Oughta Know"), Best Rock Album and Album of the Year. "Ironic" was nominated for two 1997 Grammy Awards—Record of the Year and Best Music Video, Short Form—and won Single of the Year at the 1997 Juno Awards, where Morissette also won Songwriter of the Year and the International Achievement Award. The video "Jagged Little Pill, Live", which was co-directed by Morissette and chronicled the bulk of her tour, won a 1998 Grammy Award for Best Music Video, Long Form.


title: Jagged Little Pill

text: In 2000 it was voted No. 51 in Colin Larkin's "All Time Top 1000 Albums". In October 2002, "Rolling Stone" ranked it No. 31 on its "Women In Rock – The 50 Essential Albums" list, and in 2003 the magazine ranked it No. 327 on its list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time" (while left out of the 2012 update, the album's rank shot up to number 69 in the 2020 reboot of the list). The album was included in the book "1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die". The album also appears on the National Association of Recording Merchandisers' "Definitive 200" list at No. 26. The album ranked at No. 50 on "Rolling Stone"s 2012 list of "Women Who Rock: The 50 Greatest Albums of All Time".


title: Jagged Little Pill

text: The album was included on "Billboard"s "Best Selling Pop album of the 1990s", where it was placed at No. 1. The album peaked at No. 1 on the US "Billboard" 200, making Morissette the first Canadian woman to top the chart.


title: Jagged Little Pill

text: Morissette's success with "Jagged Little Pill" (1995) was credited with leading to the introduction of female singers such as Shakira, Tracy Bonham, Meredith Brooks, and in the early 2000s, Pink, Michelle Branch, and fellow Canadian Avril Lavigne. American singer Katy Perry cites "Jagged Little Pill" as a significant musical inspiration, and opted to work with Morissette's frequent collaborator Ballard as a result. Perry stated, ""Jagged Little Pill" was the most perfect female record ever made. There's a song for anyone on that record; I relate to all those songs. They're still so timeless." Grammy Award winner Kelly Clarkson said of the album, "It made me a better writer. It made me a better singer." Avril Lavigne cited "Jagged Little Pill" as one of her all-time favorite albums, stating: "It is an album I can revisit over and over, belt every song, and never get sick of." In 2018, the album won the Polaris Heritage Prize Audience Award in the 1986–1995 category.


title: Jagged Little Pill

text: In August 2021, Morissette began a tour for the album's 26th anniversary. The tour was scheduled to begin in 2020 for the album's 25th anniversary, but was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Garbage and Cat Power were the two supporting acts on the tour.


title: Jagged Little Pill

text: In 2015, for its sixth and final season, American TV series "Glee" paid tribute to this album, alongside Carole King's "Tapestry", in its episode "Jagged Little Tapestry" airing January 16, 2015. Three songs from the album are performed in a mashup with one of the songs from "Tapestry": "Hand in My Pocket" is mashed up with "I Feel the Earth Move", "Head Over Feet" with "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?", and "You Learn" with "You've Got a Friend". The episode was watched by 1.98 million viewers and received a 0.7/2 in the adult 18-49 demographic.


title: Jagged Little Pill

text: In November 2013, it was revealed that a theatre adaption of "Jagged Little Pill" was being adapted for the stage with Tom Kitt attached to arrange the orchestrations. In May 2017, it was announced that the stage adaption would receive its world premiere in May 2018, 23 years after the album was released.


title: Jagged Little Pill

text: "Jagged Little Pill" began a limited run of performances opening May 5, 2018, at the Loeb Drama Center, within the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, closing July 15, 2018. Notable casting for the show included Elizabeth Stanley as Mary Jane, Derek Klena as Nick, Lauren Patten as Jo, Sean Allan Krill as Steve and Celia Gooding as Frankie. The show has a book by Diablo Cody, with direction by Diane Paulus, choreography by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, set design by Riccardo Hernandez, costume design by Emily Rebholz, lighting design by Justin Townsend, and video design by Finn Ross. Music and lyrics are by Alanis Morissette and Glen Ballard, with musical direction by Bryan Perri, sound design by Jonathan Deans and orchestration by Tom Kitt.


title: Jagged Little Pill

text: Note: You Oughta Know" (Jimmy the Saint Blend) / "Your House (a cappella)" only appears on the CD release and does not appear on the original 1995 vinyl release.


title: Hudson's Bay Company

text: The Hudson's Bay Company (HBC; ) is a Canadian retail business group. A fur trading business for much of its existence, HBC now owns and operates retail stores in Canada. The company's namesake business division is Hudson's Bay, commonly referred to as The Bay ( in French).


title: Hudson's Bay Company

text: After incorporation by English royal charter in 1670, the company functioned as the "de facto" government in parts of North America for nearly 200 years until the HBC sold the land it owned (the entire Hudson Bay drainage basin, known as Rupert's Land) to Canada in 1869 as part of the Deed of Surrender, authorized by the Rupert's Land Act 1868. At its peak, the company controlled the fur trade throughout much of the English- and later British-controlled North America. By the mid-19th century, the company evolved into a mercantile business selling a wide variety of products from furs to fine homeware in a small number of sales shops (as opposed to trading posts) across Canada. These shops were the first step towards the department stores the company owns today.


title: Hudson's Bay Company

text: In 2006, an American businessman, Jerry Zucker, bought HBC for US$1.1 billion. In 2008, HBC was acquired by NRDC Equity Partners, which also owned the upmarket American department store Lord & Taylor. From 2008 to 2012, the HBC was run through a holding company of NRDC, Hudson's Bay Trading Company, which was dissolved in early 2012. HBC's Canadian headquarters are located in Toronto and its U.S. headquarters are in New York. The company spun off most of its European operations by August 2019 and its remaining stores there, in the Netherlands, were sold by the end of 2019.


title: Hudson's Bay Company

text: Until March 2020, the company was listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol "HBC.TO" until Richard Baker and a group of shareholders took the company private. HBC is, as of 2022, the majority owner of eCommerce companies Saks and Saks Off 5th, both established as separate operating companies in 2021. HBC wholly owns SFA, the entity that operates Saks Fifth Avenue's physical locations; O5, the operating company for Saks Off 5th stores; The Bay, an eCommerce marketplace and Hudson’s Bay, the operating company for Hudson’s Bay’s brick-and-mortar stores.


title: Hudson's Bay Company

text: HBC owns or controls approximately of gross leasable real estate through its real estate and investment arm, HBC Properties and Investments, established in October 2020.