Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Implausibility and Semantic Possibility

Academics can be so amusing. I'm reading a paper on machine learning late last night called "Hierarchical Topic Models and the Nested Chinese Restaurant Process" and I stop dead at the following sentence:

Suppose that there are an infinite number of infinite-table Chinese restaurants in a city.

Yes, and further suppose:

...that the Dim Sum cart could move at light speed...
...that the Szechuan sauce was infinitely hot...
...that Mr. Ying could only sit to the left of any member of the Yuan family...
...that you could get take-away delivered after 10PM...

It all goes to show the remarkable creativity of language. Quoting Pynchon: A screaming comes across the sky.

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