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Earlier this year, my favorite former player on my favorite baseball team — Rickey Henderson of the Oakland Athletics — was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
His plaque looks like this:
In case that picture is unreadable or has been taken down by the time you're reading this, the main text says:
Aside from the generally slapdash quality of the prose, what most intrigues me about this text is the word that's missing: "other". It does not say that Rickey stole more bases than any other player in history; it says he stole more bases than any player in history. Which includes himself.
You can think of that as an editing error if you like, but I prefer to think of it as a metaphysical conundrum. If God is omnipotent, is he able to create a stone so heavy that He cannot lift it?
How fast is Rickey? Rickey is so fast that he can steal more bases than Rickey. (And nobody steals more bases than Rickey.)
12:16:08 AM [permalink] comment []