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Thanksgiving turduckenen-duckenen

Forget turducken... I'm stuffing my turkey with two ducks, stuffed with four hens, stuffed with eight quail eggs. Honestly, I do not recommend trying this yourself. So what's your favourite naming scheme: breadth-first, depth-first, or inordered binary tree traversal? Mathed Potatoes: http://youtu.be/F5RyVWI4Onk Green Bean Matherole: http://youtu.be/XwIs1nlDQ2I Borromean Onion Rings: http://youtu.be/4tsjCND2ZfM. Created by Vi Hart.

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Video transcript

You may have heard of turkducken, a turkey stuffed with a duck, stuffed with a chicken. Yeah, it's a cute idea, but mathematically uninspiring. Much more interesting would be some sort of fractal-fowl arrangement. Say the turkey were stuffed with two ducks, and say each duck were stuffed with two hens. You'd get a turduckduckenenenen, or turduckenenduckenen. I'm not sure yet. Then each hen could be stuffed with two quails, or whatever. And by the time you get down to sparrows, you have a whole flock of them in there. That sounds fun and practical. Let's do it! But being an extremely practical person who realizes that exponential quails will not fit inside of one turkey, I am using tiny unborn quails. Eight of them inside four hens, inside two ducks, inside one turkey. This structure is much more interesting because birds belong in trees, binary trees, that is. Obviously this is superior to the old linear bird-stuffing paradigm, and while you're deboning seven birds, you have lots of time to consider the question of binary bird stuffing nomenclature. How do you traverse this tree of syllables? Unless you can say lots of words that once, like turduckenail, you'll have to say the syllables in a linear order. You could go layer by layer, biggest birds first, like turduckenenenenailailailailailailailail. Or, you could go down through the layers, like turduckenailailenailailduckenailailenailail. The second one is certainly more complicated to say, but I like the way the structure of it suggests the structure of the whole. And say you've made two of these and put them in a goose. In the first scheme, the new bird names get inserted into the name to get gooturturduckduckduckenenenenenenenenailailailailailailailailailailailailailailailail, while for the second, you start with goose and then just repeat the old word twice to get gooturduckenailailenailailduckenailailenailailturduckenailailenailailduckenailailenailail. So it's nice that part of it stays the same. Of course, those aren't the only possible naming schemes. Maybe you go from left to right on the tree. So this would be, quailenquailduckquailenquailkeyquailenquailduckquailenquail ooh, [? abba cabba ?] pattern. OK, so in 1807, a guy roasted a bustard-- whatever that is-- stuffed with a turkey, stuffed with a goose, stuffed with a pheasant, chicken, duck, guinea fowl, teal, woodcock, partridge, plover, lapwing quail, thrush, lark, bunting, and warbler to get at buskeygooseantenduckneatealcockridgeerwingailusharktinbler. But say he had done this with the new exponential bird-stuffing paradigm. I mean, you'd need over 100,000 birds to do it, but the world has a lot of birds in it. And if you can consistently say four syllables a second, you can say the name of it in only like nine hours. It might seem like a lot, but it's really not compared to if you used, say just twice as many kinds of birds. Then you'd need over 8.5 billion individual birds. And if you started naming it as soon as you learned to talk and take breaks to sleep at night, you'd still probably die before you finish. So I can't say I recommend it, buy hey, maybe with advances in medicine, it will become a more feasible goal. And even there it is-- two quail eggs in each hen, two hens in each duck, two ducks in this turkey-- if I can close it. Eventually I had to go for sewing up the turkey most of the way with the one duckenailailenailail, and then stuffing the other duckenailailenailail in. Now you can arrange it nicely with the original legs, and wings, and stuffing to make it look perfectly natural. There. Anyway, once you've got that, you're pretty much good to go as far as Thanksgiving is concerned. You should already have your gelatinous cranberry cylinder, bread spheres with butter prism, masked potatoes with organic hyperbolic plain, string bean vector field with Borromean onion rings on top, double helix cut ham, pi, tau, and so on. And now, finally, you've got your turduckenailailenailailduckenailailenailail, or quailenquailduckquailenquailkeyquailenquailduckquailenquail, or turduckduckenenenenailailailailailailailail whatever. Each slice gives a different cross section of this binary bird. Here, you can see a quail egg wrapped in the light meat of the hen, wrapped in the darker meat of the duck, wrapped in the light meat of the turkey. Another cross section shows two eggs. Now you can sit down, eat your mathematically-inspired food and be thankful that no matter how crazy people are, at least mathematics is always there for you, making sense, and truth, and beauty, and birds. Lots of birds.