When I first started this blog, I was under the impression that Spider Monkeys are intelligent creatures, able to recognise legal moves in a game of Spider Solitaire and play at lightning-fast speed – albeit with less than optimal strategy. But Wikipedia says I wasn’t even close. In fact, I wasn’t even aware that Spider Monkeys are a thing, and I only found out by complete accident when trying to lit-review a subject I know very little about, but my supervisor wants me to look at.
Toward Agent-Based Models for Investment is the title of a paper by J. Doyne Farmer in the 2001 AIMR Conference proceedings. The important bit appears near the end of page 2. It says:
“The same principles apply in blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah spider monkeys. Blah blah blah monkeys blah blah blah blah blah”
At least I have learnt that spider monkeys are New World monkeys belonging to the genus Ateles, part of the subfamily Atelinae, family Atelidae. Reading the rest of the Wikipedia article and summarising the important bits in a paragraph or two is left as an exercise for the reader.
Anyways, that’s enough digressing for now. Back to the game …
Edifying Thoughts of a Spider Solitaire Addict 
I knew about Spider Monkeys, but it didn’t bother me. English is full of ambiguities, and unless the other meaning is in very poor taste or obscene, we just go right on… (Example: “Please take advantage of the chambermaid”). I finished reading Bill Bryson’s “A short history of nearly everything” and was pleased to realize that in terms of the basic facts about the universe, I pretty much knew them. The “human interest” side of things was very interesting all around…. (Marie Curie’s notebooks are still too radioactive to examine without special radiation protection). I did not know that plate tectonics didn’t really start until a few billion years had gone by — before that the earth was just too hot, and there’s this idea of the “boring billion” years after microscopic plant life and nothing else happening. And I was amazed that people can track previous plate movements in such great detail, such as: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_iEWvtKcuQ.
LikeLike