This morning I saw a tweet from Tony Mann about Berry’s Paradox, formulated by Tony as “The smallest integer not identifiable in a tweet“. (A paradox, of course, because that phrase identifies a specific integer.)
This reminds me that I have noticed a few times recently people online reciting the joke that goes like: “I hold the world record (jointly) for least world records (this one)”. (Here’s an arbitrary example found through Twitter search.)
Accept for the moment that such a record exists. Then someone who held one world record for something else (most socks being worn by people spinning plates in a leisure centre, or something) would also jointly hold one world record, so would share the world record for least, so would hold two, so wouldn’t share the record…
But they’d probably also share the ‘most shared world record’ world record, making two world records. So, Sergei Bubka (for instance) would have them beat on the first count, and they’d lose out on the ‘fewest world records’ world record — and be stripped of the most shared one as well.
But only temporarily, because once someone counts…
My eyes have gone wibbly. Someone call Douglas R Hofstadter.