The New Math

From the Ceeb via Lono, an astounding quote from The Chairman:

He said a competing network will lead to other benefits, but "it is not possible to quantify the benefits exactly because the number is so huge and so enormous that you cannot quantify it. It is in the hundreds, and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars," Williams told the legislature.

Ok. Let's see here.

The benefits are not quantifiable. That is, they cannot be measured. Yet The Chairman knows that the benefits are (a) huge enough to be not quantifiable, and (b) in the hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of millions of dollars. That is to say, they are at least three hundred million dollars (hundreds and hundreds and hundreds), and possibly even up to $1.9-billion, being nineteen hundreds of millions. (If the figure were $2-billion or more, one presumes The Chairman's Smallwoodesque flight of purple-prosed accounting would be "billions of dollars", not "hundreds, and hundreds and hundreds of millions".)

So, the benefits manage to be simultaneously quantified as not-quantifiable, and in the hundreds (and hundreds and hundreds) of millions of dollars. They can't be quantified, yet they have been. And though not quantifiable, they are quantified enough that The Chairman can predict that they are not quantifiable. That is, having measured, he has determined that they cannot be measured.

The whole concept of differently-large infinities is wierd enough. But this new Dannymath... something else altogether.