Talking with Karyn in the education center, she explained how they begin to teach children about classifying insects.
"We get them to count the number of body parts of an ant, then the number of body parts of a spider and then we ask them, 'Are they different?'"
At a such brute level, its amazing to think that just two small numbers could come to signify the enormous difference of character and behaviour that we observe between the ant and the spider.
Afterwards, Ben was telling me about some recently discovered evidence of aboriginal habitation in Tasmania.
"Guess how old they have dated the remains at?" he asked.
Wanting to pick a figure that left room for him to impress me I replied hesitantly "Ummm... 60,000 years?"
"Oh yeah, well it was 40,000 years" he said, clearly a bit deflated.
We agreed that 40,000 years was still a very impressive figure, and clearly eclipsed the 200 odd years of european settlement in Australia. Still, it struck me as slightly odd that once again the difference between two numbers could come to signify so much.
