my favorite April Fool's joke

People have been sending out April Fool's emails all day. But nothing can measure up to my all-time favorite, from Peter Norvig in 2004:

In related news, Google today announced the soft launch of a new chain of restaurants called TG-TF-IDF. (We wanted to use the catchier "Thank God its Term Frequency - Inverse Document Frequency", but that domain was taken by a cybersquatter.)

Whereas traditional restaurants feature hard-to-use menu systems, the TG-TF-IDF restaurants will allocate a gigacalorie of food to each diner. Diners then enter keyword ingredients and are instantly presented with a list of meals. "If a user has a problem with food, so do we," said Sergey Brin, Google co-founder and president of technology, in a statement. The service will be free, but will feature targeted ads printed on the right hand side of the food.

"And while developing TG-TF-IDF was a bit more complicated than we anticipated, we're pleased to be able to offer it to the diner who asked for it."

Google's system was designed by one of its engineers as a "20 percent" project - the scheme which gives Google employees one day a week in which to work on projects that interest them, the company said.

In contrast to the 1Gcal of free food offered by TG-TF-IDF, McDonalds offers a maximum meal size of 1190 cal for $4.99.