Design Kompany | Brand Marketing by Graphic Design studio in Seattle

I had this dream last night about sailboats. And babies. There were at first, two sailboats and one baby, then these began to multiply very quickly.

The numerous emerging sailboats came in all varieties of colors, and you kept seeing more and more babies of different ages. Except, you couldn’t keep track of all the things that were happening. Everything was changing in quantity so extremely quickly, it was getting totally out of hand. Yes. The quantities of the sailboats and babies were increasing at such a rate, it was all becoming much too much to think about.

I think the reason for this dream was a short conversation yesterday morning about “countable versus uncountable” things.

Countable sets can contain a lot of items, but they’re all accounted for with the counting numbers. You can count ‘em, even if it takes a long time. Uncountable sets, however, you just can’t keep up with because there are way too many things going on and you can’t match a counting number to the number of items in the set.

Want to know the mathy definition?

Here’s what Dr. Michael P. Frank of the University of Florida’s computer and information science and engineering department says about it:

Module #14 - Countability
Countable versus Uncountable

* For any set S, if S is finite or if |S|=|N|, we say S is countable. Else, S is uncountable.
* Intuition behind “countable:” we can enumerate (sequentially list) elements of S in such a way that any individual element of S will eventually be counted in the enumeration. Examples: N, Z.
* Uncountable means: No series of elements of S (even an infinite series) can include all of S’s elements. Examples: R, R^2, P(N) —Dr. Michael P. Frank of the University of Florida

Anyway, all this talk about countability made me think about babies and boats. And things our brains are incapable of conceiving in real, tangible terms. A rock we can hold, touch and understand. Infinity, that’s a little harder.

Then there’s infinity to the infinite power. Wrap your head around that

So we got to talking about stuff that’s hard to picture. Which made me think of Flatland, the book about a two-dimensional world whose main character intuits a third dimension.

Math and philosophy people—this book’s for you.

Oh, and about the sailboats. I’m going to post more about that pretty soon.