(Hmmm. I was all ready to write a little post about how we talk like counting is the easiest thing to do, but really, it’s pretty hard, and was going to use examples based on cognitive science and applied computing… But then I realized that the word ‘hard’ in ‘counting is hard’ has a pretty different meaning than the word ‘hard’ in ‘quantum electrodynamics is hard’. So I’d have to lay down a whole epistemological breadcrumb trail for you to be able to follow me through my little forest and back out again.
Instead, I’ll just ask you to watch this and read this and see if you see what I mean. And I don’t really mean this, but you can read that if you want anyway, because it’s not totally unrelated.)