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.

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.

She was caught in an artificial web and her intelligence is tied to artificial brains that think instances instead of causes, numbers instead of stories.

Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.

Let's be precise about the terminology here. When we talk about the computer “seeing” the differences between documents, that is not to imply that the computer actually understands those differences in a literal sense. Perhaps a better way of putting it is that the computer “registers” the distinction between The Shining and the Apple manual, because it can describe that distinction numerically. The numbers reveal something about the meaning of each document, even if that revelation is an oblique one, like a low-frequency tone shimmering in a puddle. The computer can't hear the meaning directly, but it can catch glimpses of it in its statistical reflections.