lets see, to start it is pretty late(4:15am) and i was pondering
previous insinuations that merlyn is not of this earth.
i started thinking really hard about this and came to the conclusion
that the only way to find out if our dear merlyn was an alien
was to get him to confess or to disect him, the later not being
to much fun for merlyn or the disector. ok so maybe the disector would like it. ;-)
so i figured that i would do the next best thing, thats right
folks, i modified Drakes equation to come up with the number
of possible extra-terrestrial merlyn's.

$N=$R*$Fp*$Ne*$Fre*$Flw*$Fdp*$L;
[download]

Where,
$N = The number of merlyn's in The Milky Way Galaxy whose code is detectable.
$R = The rate of formation of stars suitable for the development of Perl.
$Fp= The fraction of those stars with planetary systems.
$Ne= The number of planets, per solar system, with an environment suitable for Perl programmers.
$Fre= The fraction of suitable planets on which regular expressions actually appear.
$Flw= The fraction of life bearing planets on which Larry Wall emerges.
$Fdp= The fraction of Larry Wall's that develop Perl and Randal Schwartz's that use/teach it for the good of the civilazation.
L = The length of code written by Randal Schwartz's that get read by the fine people of a possible perlmonks.org.


i don't know, could work, what do you think? so this is something
for you to ponder when it is to late to write useable code and the
glow of your seti@home display hipnotizes you.

happy hunting!

josh :)
ohh, BTW, i do not support www.cramazon.com, that is the image that imbd had.

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.