Choose a Number
Numbers. How many numbers can there be on a hospital floor? Numbers for blood pressure, glucose level, heart rate, body temperature, dosages, analyses results, rooms, beds. Even for urinals and bed pans. Everything has a number stamped on it. Most of the documents are made up of numbers, with a few interspersed letters, generally acronyms.
How many numbers do we handle in our daily lives? How many phone numbers and license numbers? How many zip codes? How many passwords made up mostly of numbers? How many PIN numbers? How many document numbers, such as Social Security or National Identity Document (DNI) do we have to remember? How many of them have become useless in our daily lives, yet we still have them up there, among all the necessary ones we can't remember well? I still remember my telephone number from when I lived in Boston - twenty-five years ago. Yet I have trouble remembering my husband's present phone number.
What would we have done if the Arabs hadn't introduced their number system to Europe from their medieval kingdom of Al-Andalus? Would we have had to make do with the cumbersome Roman numerals? Or would we have devised a different system all our own, more simplified? Might it have been based on the Hebrew system? After all, numbers are simply symbols that represent an absolute value. If the symbols are easier to use, the value is easier to understand. Otherwise it becomes something only for specially trained experts, leaving everyone else out. And in daily life there must be some knowledge of absolute values. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to function in this modern world.
Numbers are a human invention. Yet, they explain the universe and its workings. They control our lives much more than words do, yet we pay little attention to them. Those little signs that sometimes look like squiggles rule over our lives from the moment we're born till we die. Though few teenagers slaving over algebra will look kindly on whomever tries to explain that to them.
How many numbers do we handle in our daily lives? How many phone numbers and license numbers? How many zip codes? How many passwords made up mostly of numbers? How many PIN numbers? How many document numbers, such as Social Security or National Identity Document (DNI) do we have to remember? How many of them have become useless in our daily lives, yet we still have them up there, among all the necessary ones we can't remember well? I still remember my telephone number from when I lived in Boston - twenty-five years ago. Yet I have trouble remembering my husband's present phone number.
What would we have done if the Arabs hadn't introduced their number system to Europe from their medieval kingdom of Al-Andalus? Would we have had to make do with the cumbersome Roman numerals? Or would we have devised a different system all our own, more simplified? Might it have been based on the Hebrew system? After all, numbers are simply symbols that represent an absolute value. If the symbols are easier to use, the value is easier to understand. Otherwise it becomes something only for specially trained experts, leaving everyone else out. And in daily life there must be some knowledge of absolute values. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to function in this modern world.
Numbers are a human invention. Yet, they explain the universe and its workings. They control our lives much more than words do, yet we pay little attention to them. Those little signs that sometimes look like squiggles rule over our lives from the moment we're born till we die. Though few teenagers slaving over algebra will look kindly on whomever tries to explain that to them.
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