Monday, January 21, 2008

Finals always cause me to make terrible puns

Sadly, they all only make sense to computer science types, because I don't have time to take fun courses. I do distinctly recall in yon days making terrible puns during the aural part of my music final... but alas, nevermore.

As an example: when I elided part of a proof in my class on Languages & Type Systems, I wrote "I'm tired of this, so I'm going to stop typing," which is funny, because I may have been referring to typing at my keyboard, or the activity of typing a program.

Or, just this moment, which inspired me to make this post, I made a positively inane joke, which relies on the fact that a tree is a graph that has like 50 or so (I exagerrate, but there are seriously a lot) definitions, or, anyways, necessary and sufficient properties, one of which is that it is a connected graph where all nodes are connected by a unique path.

"the path is unique because we live in Treeville [the professors gave the town this name in the problem. I'm not completely crazy. Right?], where every path is unique, the well-known Montessori school of urban development"

My favorite thing about this torturous pun is that it contains within itself yet another pun, urban development vs. child development, as well as the fact that I am given to suspect on no solid basis whatsoever that most Montessori schools are in urban areas (or maybe suburban? Anyways, not rural), which is even worse than the original pun. Eventually I will manage a meta-metapun, to encode within a pun a pun about encoding puns in puns. With any luck, it will be while discussing either language, puns, or encodings. I will then be filled with a beatific calm at the orderly, self-referential, complete structure of the universe. Then either a car horn will honk, a window slam, or a little kid will do something very unstructured and capricious, like burn a house down because she hasn't yet learned that fire burns things, and I will be glad that that grotesque sham of reality is just the overambitious dream of a generally overwhelmed little brain. I'll be more glad for a fire extinguisher, but the metaphysical shock is welcome.

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