News: Ian is promoting my Chicago talk, lots of details, feel free to link to this page if sharing with others, in addition to whatever official Pycon literature: http://mentor.sociality.tv/groups/pycontest/wiki/20372/Python_for_Teachers.h... I did some good work with the XO today, working for 4D Studios: http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2009/01/saving-children.html Maths: I've got Midhat Gazale's 'Number' out from Multnomah Library again, wanting to get his "cardination" versus "ordination" distinction more clearly, been relying on memory. Cardination: establishment of one-to-one correspondence, or matching, "consists of pairing objects or groups of objects". "Nomen est numen" says the Latin adage (pg 11), meaning that to name is to know. Link to "right brain" for heuristical purposes. Ordination: i.e. counting, requires a notion of succession or sequence, Latin root "computare" (compter, conter). "According to studies conducted by Charles J. Brainerd and others, the faculty of ordination (establishing an asymmetrical relation of transitivity between three balls of increasing weight, or three sticks of increasing length **) is more fundamental than that of cardination or matching. Page 14: Says Tobias Dantzig, "Correspondence and succession, the two principles permeate all mathematics -- nay, all realms of exact thought -- are woven into the very fabric of number system."2 For all we know, and that does not amount to much, they are perhaps woven into the very fabric of our brain hemispheres... My comments: philosophically, "ordination" relates to "ranking" i.e. better versus worse, as in "the fall" into good versus evil (knowlege of). Cardination is "beyond good and evil" (more primitive than) in the sense of "noticing differences without judgment" e.g. in Python we have the integer type, string type, fraction type, but don't have to say "which we like better" (give some better examples?). All moral judgments aside, there's also the obvious hierarchy of "containership" as in "what contains what". We say Q > Z (rationals > integers) because the set of all rationals *contains* the set of all integers. This takes us to the ancient greek concept of "atoms" i.e. "that which everything contains" (relates to later talk of bosons, leptons etc.). Another obvious source of sequencing or ordination (left brain in Midhat's analogy) is temporal, what happens *after* or *before* what else in some given scenario. N < W < Z < Q < R < C is likewise temporal, especially if we use Roman Numerals to illustrate N, add zero from Baghdad (Algebra City) via Fibonacci of Pisa, to get W, then Z. My thanks to Juaquin, Ram's Head (McMenamins), for a fantastic lunch, complete with Bloody Mary. I'm on chauffeur duty for Quakers, one of my several routine gigs. Kirby Cc: 4dsp ** a nod to Gattegno, also Egyptian http://www.internationalpubmarket.com/clients/auc/books/AuthorDetail.aspx?id... http://www.linkedin.com/pub/5/b9/308