Why do we call something a “number”?: Well, perhaps because it has a—direct—relationship with several things that have hitherto been called number; and this can be said to give it an indirect relationship to other things we call the same name.

And we extend our concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fiber on fiber. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fiber runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of the fibers.

Try counting, but skip all numbers that have anything other than a 1 and a 0 in them. You end up with the following: 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, 111, etc. Those are the respective binary representations for the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, etc.

Plato defined man thus: “Man is a two-legged animal without feathers;” and was much praised for the definition; so Diogenes plucked a cock and brought it into his school, and said, “This is Plato's man.” On which account this addition was made to the definition, “With broad flat nails.”

Skill at chess [as opposed to that in other fields] can be measured, broken into components, subjected to laboratory experiments and readily observed in its natural environment, the tournament hall. It is for those reasons that chess has served as the greatest single test bed for theories of thinking—the “Drosophila of cognitive science,” as it has been called.

Wit is educated insolence.