The day the doorknob broke and we couldn't fix it so we chopped the door down with a mattock

Or, the blog post title with the biggest spoiler of all time.

Last week's blog post was sparked by Jessie having tonsillitis, Buzz having asymptomatosis and me having asymptomatata.  ONE of those people kissed Rex and passed it on.  It was the only person who was truly infectious and by the end of the week, tiny Rex had a husky voice, pain on sneezing, a roasting fever and diarrhoea.  Diagnosis: Tonsillitis.

On Sunday after church, we all tried for a rest.  Poor Rex was feverish but still up for a good sleep, and I tried for one too.  Woody interrupted me right up until five minutes before Rex woke up, so my sleep was poor.  But when I finally heard my baby boy crying his husky, pained cry, Woody had fallen asleep to enjoy the rest he'd robbed from me, and I graciously allowed him to live.

Jessie came to me and whispered, "Rex is crying."  I knew this.  I asked her to ask Daddy kindly if he might get Rex but Daddy was very busy killing bad guys with Buzz (I'm still working out if I should be worried when my moral-policeman-seven-year-old-son gleefully shouts things like, "I've lost the cops!!") so Rex continued to cry.

I staggered down the hallway to rescue him, turned the handle of his door and barrelled in.  Specifically, I barrelled into the door.  I smashed my head into it, and momentarily worried about my sanity.  I turned the knob properly the next time, and again smacked my face into the still-closed door.

Certain about my sanity now (Diagnosis: Stupid) I tried the knob the other way.  And the first way.  And the other way.  At some point, I realised the door wasn't opening and I yelled to Mr de Elba mid-slaughter, "Can you come and tell me if I'm not properly awake or if Rex's door won't open?"

He came, and tried the doorknob many times.  In the words of a tradesman who once did work for us:  "Diagnosis: Buggered."

So while Rex cried his poor little lungs out, we grabbed my screwdriver set and took off the screws holding the knob onto the door.  We fiddled with the mechanism.  We turned the square sticky-outy thing that works the openy-closey mechanism: no luck.  We tried to access parts further down the workings to retract the little tongue-thing from the hole-in-the-other-side thing: no luck.  We kicked the door: no luck.

Now at this point, if time hadn't been an issue, we could have called my Mum, who is Tinkerbell Incarnate.  She tinkers with stuff and it falls into place.  We could have called Justadad, the husband of my friend Justamum, who knows how things work.  We could have researched doorknob problems, we could have gone out and bought some magical tools, we could have asked the tradesman who is coming soon to work on some other doors around the house.

But it was a lazy Sunday afternoon and poor feverish Rex had screamed hard for 20 minutes so he was about to burst into flames.  We'd exhausted all the options at our disposal so there was only one option left.  It was drastic, it was destructive, and it was a whole heap of fun.

Mr de Elba chopped the door down with a mattock.

The door was cheap and the knob was rubbish, and recently Mr de Elba has been so busy at work that a bit of door-chopping was a rather welcome and therapeutic distraction.  Also, he'd just been killing bad guys so he was in the mood.

I wasn't joking.

Buzz LOVED it.  Jessie cried loudly and shouted, "Will the police have to come and see what we've done to the door?  Will we get in trouble from The Police?!?" and generally lost her head.  Woody slept through the whole thing in the next room, and Rex cried and cried.

Finally, the hole was big enough for me to crawl through and I went in to rescue my baby who had wriggled himself into a painful position all smashed up against the bars of the cot.  I handed him out to his Daddy who had lovingly chopped his door down with a mattock.

I did this for you, my son.

The cleanup was extensive.  The picture above shows only half of the final destruction, and only a quarter of the final mess.  A wheelie bin was actually brought into the house for the cleanup, the whole area was vacuumed twice with a Dyson (using both the Contact Head and the Turbo-brush) during which one of Woody's socks was sucked up (I can recommend the Dyson's suction ability, by the way) and now there is only one more thing to be done.

Buy a new door.

And a really good quality doorknob.

And get it from the shop to our house.

Somehow.

And install it.

Somehow.

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Addendum: Although the Dyson is very good, the door was spread far and wide.  We are still finding bits of door in unlikely places.

Mystery Legs

The school photos were coming up and I was trying to work out how I could get my kids looking their best.  Not looking like fashion models, just not with messy hair, old faded uniforms and Vegemite on their faces.

(I was heavily pregnant at the time.)

Among various strategies including making sure there were newish cleanish uniforms available, I decided to put Jessie in black stockings on the day.  I was expecting her legs to look a little like this in the photo, only with scrubby white sneakers as they were the only school shoes she owned at the time:

Now I will swear black and blue that I did - I DID I DID I DID - put her in black stockings on the day.   Only her school photos came back and this is what she looked like in them:

I cannot recall ANY day in her entire schooling that she has ever worn non-uniform grey and pink - PINK! - socks to school.  But there must have been one day and trust it to be school photo day.

I didn't promise it would be a particularly interesting blog post.

You can't fool me!

I received a booklet at my 36 week appointment at the hospital a fortnight ago, and it was the very same one I received three years ago containing this picture, about which I sarcastically blogged a short time later.

I laughingly tried to explain to the midwife all the objections you lovely commenters and I had to the picture back then.  However she wasn't expecting objections, and thought I was fully approving of it.  I had to use phrases like "structurally engineered bra" and "face washers for absorbancy" and "leakage to the knees" before she realised I had birthed enough children not to be taken in by the charade any longer.

And now I have another copy of the book.  Anyone want a free copy? No?

Three random things

1.  The days are flying by, and there is never much to blog about.  Buzz and Jessie head off to school each day and are enjoying it a lot, while Woody and I while away most of our days at home together.  They are good times, but there never is anything much bloggable going on.

2.  Today I had the opportunity to write three letters and as I love writing and wording things just right, I really enjoyed this.  Sure, they were letters regarding work and the Tax Office, but I enjoyed pushing and pulling the words until they were just perfect.

3.  I do really appreciate the work that The Rotary Club does in the community and I value our Rotarians greatly.  Their new project pictured below is a worthy one, but somehow, there's something terribly, badly wrong with their sign.

People Power!

I never forward email forwards.  I usually run the content by hoax-busting sites and find that it's all quite silly and a waste of time.

The forward I received today claimed that if we boycott buying our fuel from our largest supplier, they will reduce prices and so the smaller suppliers would follow suit to be competitive.  Industrial sabotage?  Snopes says it wouldn't even work.

At the end of the email it said that if 20 people were to forward it to 20 more people and so on, after 6 rounds of this, 12.8 billion people would be reached.  Unimaginable People Power!  It urged me to do the maths and see for myself!

No amount of permutations or combinations can make the current population of the Earth more than 6.9 billion though, and I am guessing that most of those people don't have email addresses.

Or cars.

The email finished with this inconsequential claim: "Twenty Five Point Six Billion people: Now that's people power!"

It certainly would be.

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If you receive an email forward, please remember that these sites are your friends.

http://www.google.com.au/

http://www.snopes.com/

http://www.hoax-slayer.com/

http://www.truthorfiction.com/

http://www.breakthechain.org/

And this button?

You can consider that one pretty much your Humiliation Button.

Have you ever superglued something to yourself?

I can honestly say I have never seen anything like this before. Words fail me.

Although I do remember doing this.  Seems we all have our Superglue disasters.

Running Away From Home

My sister has blogged recently about Harpo running away from home.  This reminded me of the time I ran away from home back when we lived in a tiny 2-bedroom weatherboard home in a small country town in Queensland.

I was about seven years old.  On the day in question, I was greatly disenfranchised by a recent parental oppression and I was angrier than usual - a tiny black thundercloud, tightly coiled and ready to unleash an as yet unthought-of explosion of fury over all who had so grievously wronged me.

I finally straightened my rage-twisted thoughts out long enough to form a cunning plan.  I would run away from home.  That would make them all sorry.

I marched straight out of the driveway and stood on the footpath.  I considered storming off up the street towards the town.  I considered stomping off the other way, towards the school.  Neither option seemed particularly safe, but my wrath boiled on and demanded an outlet.

Momentarily abandoning my plan to run away from home, I devised a master plan so cunning that you may be surprised to know that such a brilliant plan came from one so young.

I decided to sell the house.

Sure, they could send me to my room, but I could sell the house out from under them.

Storming back into the house I found a piece of cardboard, some sticky tape and a black marker.  With the marker I scrawled the words, "FOR SALE" on the card and stomped into the back yard where I found a small eight-inch wooden stake.  I used the sticky tape to stick the card onto the dirt-encrusted stake, and strode out the front again to find a good place to position the sign.

I quickly found that the ground was too hard to drive the stake in, and moved my project to the gravel driveway.  The gravel was too shallow and loose, and after balancing it vertically in a small pile of gravel for a minute, I watched as the sign itself gave up on the sale and fell down flat in the driveway.

I stood back for a minute and waited for a buyer who would come and purchase the house.  I imagined how gratifyingly remorseful my parents would be regarding their callous behaviour towards me, tearfully apologising as they carried their belongings outside in large cardboard boxes as I stood by unforgiving.  "Well Mum you should have thought of that before you told me to go to my room."

After two or three minutes it became apparent that it wasn't a seller's market, and I trudged disconsolately back to the house.  The house remained unsold and I had failed at my one and only attempt at running away from home.

To this day, I have never again tried to run away from home, or sell a house without a Real Estate Agent's license.  Which is probably for the best.

The Lesser Known Mubarak

Egypt has been in the news, specifically Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.  We've heard a lot about Hosni Mubarak in recent days, the name of Hosni Mubarak has been on everyone's lips and Hosni Mubarak has been on every news site.

I have heard the name Hosni Mubarak many times.

So why is the name Lenny Mubarak going around and around in my head like an annoying song?

Lenny?  Mubarak?  Seriously?

Does this man look like a Lenny to you?

Umm, actually yes, I think he does a little bit.

"Eh Lenny, you whack that guy?"

"What do you mean, whack that guy?  We just had a little conversation, we didn't agree, the conversation is over."

Discipline. Light at the end of the tunnel

I was chatting to someone I know today.  "How are you going?  Your kids doing well?" she asked.

"Yes, they're all fine," I answered.  "But now the summer holidays have started, I get the feeling that I am standing at the front edge of six weeks of fighting!" (for they are feisty little things, and enjoy a good knock-down fight.)

She jumped straight into Expert Mode. 

You've-Obviously-Done-It-All-Wrong-Mode. 

Let-Me-Teach-You-About-Parenting Mode.

"Oh no.  No-no-no," she warned.  "You know what you need to do?"

(Goodness!  I had no idea she knew what I hadn't tried, let alone what would work if I did!)

"When mine used to fight, I smacked them.  I smacked them hard.  I mean, I really, really smacked them hard!  Both of them, and this was when they were really little.  It only took about four times, and they didn't do it again.  They came to me with their problems instead of fighting."

Well that was interesting.  She took some small children and smacked them very hard four times, and hey presto!  For the rest of their childhoods they never fought with each other.  What's more - if I took my three children and smacked them very hard the first four times they fought, they'd never do it again.  Ever. 

Fixed.

Silly me for not thinking of that before.

Time for an extreme makeover

Me, entering the bathroom: Okay Jessie, time to hop out of the shower.
Jessie, who must have had her eyes shut: Who is that?  Is that you Dad?
Me: What?!  You can't tell from my voice?!?

It reminded me of the time that a man on a bike cycled up to me, stared at my face and said, "Hello, Richard."

A Little Bit Weird

I've been trying a bit of straw-bale gardening. It's where you get some straw bales and ... plant a garden in them.  Well, it's a bit more complex than that, but that's the idea.

I got two bales for my first attempt.  I decided that if all else fails (which it isn't) then at the end of the growing season I can take the bales and spent veggie crops apart and let it improve the soil underneath.  I've put them in a place where I would love to have veggies next year, but currently has quite poor soil.

I've put in cucumbers, capsicum, rocket and some little carrots which will certainly fail because the bales have proved to be too rich in nutrients.  The carrots see no reason at all to put down big, fat roots in search of noms.  Everything else is growing well though, and I've decided that you can't have everything.  I also put some pumpkin seeds into the ends of the bales and then had to decide which of the resulting plants were to be allowed to spread their vines out along the garden from there.

There are some tiny capsicums and cucumbers appearing ...

... and the flowers are making it look quite joyful.

But there's one weird thing.  When I started this little straw bale garden, I put the two bales standing up here in my garden ...

... with barely the space for my hand to fit between them.  Sure, there's been a lot of decomposing and squashing-down, but it also appears there's been SLIDING.  And that is totally weird.  In the picture above you can see the two bales covered in Green Things Growing, and then an expanse of dead grass clippings in between.

And that, I believe, is a Little Bit Weird.

What's on my camera card right now

Buzz and Jessie found some streamers and so we had to have a party. No food, no music, no games, and no CAKE! What  a disappointment.  Just a big mess of streamers in the kitchen. Of course.

Woody is into everything. Here he is in my "second drawer" - do you have a "second drawer"? Random weird kitchen things mostly the fault of the Evil Tupperware Empire? Where is your "second drawer" in your kitchen? In your third drawer? That would weird me out. Anyway, Woody is in the second drawer so that ...

... he can suck on sharp things, like this nasty pointy corn cob stabber thing. How glad am I that I spent money getting soft-close drawers in my kitchen reno in the old house, and moved to a new house with easy-to-open drawers? Oooh, so very happy, yes indeedy.

See the red skull and crossbones? That marks the spot where a magpie has built a nest. Everything else in the foreground is MY domain ... my roses, my lawn, my flowers, my shrubs. The magpie doesn't see it this way. You think that perhaps my garden will become very run-down over summer? I put it to you that we may be having a very small-sized roast chicken sometime soon.

On Sunday before we left for church, we put our lovely blue couch right here and we didn't take it back until the end of the day. Guess why.

Dear Gmail,

I love that you think that I need to see ads referring to content on my current page.  But quite apart from the obvious unnecessary advertisements generated from keywords in innocent emails in recent years discussing unpleasant pregnancy symptoms was the gastronomic insult appearing above my SPAM box today:

Spam Vegetable Strudel, in case you can't quite see that.

I hate a good spelling/grammatical error

This post refers to the previous post - if you're new here you'd best read the post dated 8 September first.

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Sigh.

Today I received an email from my Dad.

So - did you mean to spell "permissible" wrongly on the blog?
I'm thinking you did!
But it was a great posting!

Who knew?  For 33 years I have been thinking that permissible is one of those -able words.  It's now firmly imprinted on my brain.  When I say it, I am even thinking, "permissable" in my mind.

And it's wrong.  And I made a mistake.  In public.  On my blog.  In a post about spelling errors.

Sigh.

At least Dad was so gracious about it.  Thanks Dad, I'm glad you emailed.  (Perhaps he was gracious because I said in my post that pedants are annoying?  Sorry, pedants.)

Anyway, again I say, "Si-i-i-igh."

permissible ... permissible ... permissible ... permissible ... permissible ... permissible ... permissible ... permissible ... permissible ... permissible ... permissible ... permissible ... permissible ... permissible ...

I love a good spelling/grammatical error

I used to be a pedant. Then I realised how annoying pedants are, and I decided it was cooler to know the correct spelling and grammar but not to be all "I'm right - you're wrong" about pointing it out. 

It is however permissable to blog it.

And that is all I will say on the matter.

Wiggles Car Breaks Down: Wiggles last seen hitchhiking towards Brisbane

Achilles and my Laundry Basket

In my last post, I explained why Achilles will never catch up with a tortoise if the tortoise has any sort of head-start on the great warrior at all. It was very depressing.

Please enter the equally depressing never-ending world of my Laundry Basket.

From time to time, I find piles of dirty clothes on the floor.


But I can't put them into the clothes basket because ...


... it's full. and I can't make any room in there by putting some in the wash because ...


... the washing machine has a washed load in there that has been waiting for at least six hours to be hung out to dry. But I can't hang anything out to dry because ...


... the clothes airers are full. Usually they are full of clean dry clothes that have been waiting to be folded for anywhere up to a week. But I can't get them inside to start folding them on our bed because ...


... I already have an ever-so-slight folding project going on there as it is.

But when the folding is eventually done, you know what happens, don't you?  Oh yes.  The folded piles go back where they belong, we pull out clothes one by one, wear them, and then ...



It's enough to make you cry. Or at least put you in a blue mood with the futility of it all.

Instead of seeing this laundry problem as a finite but vicious circle motivated by our disinclination towards nudism, I have started thinking of my laundry basket as an infinite well of items to be washed.

Let's say my laundry basket is full.  It's not that big a supposition.  Now, I usually can't fit all the items in my washing machine, so I'll wash HALF the items in my basket, and leave the other half for later.

Heh.  I like that.  "Later."

While the machine is washing my clothes, I have some time available.  I walk into the bathroom and find some clothes from bath-time last night, then I head into our room, Jessie's room, Buzz's room and Woody's room, collecting items that need to be washed as I go.  I move into the kitchen and decide to freshen up the tea towels, the hand towels and face washers.

I then take the little pile into the laundry, put it in the now-vacant top half of the laundry basket, and realise that the top half of the laundry basket is no longer vacant.

It's the paradox of Achilles and My Laundry Basket.  Forget the tortoise, I have bigger fish to fry.

I wash some of the items, but by the time they're finished, there are more to wash.  By the time they're finished, there are more to wash.  And by the time they're finished ... you get my point.

The way I see it, there are two ways to halt this insanity, both of them with less-than-satisfactory outcomes.


1.  I wash everything.  Since the infinite nature of my laundry dilemma is caused by my inability to wash more than half a laundry basket of clothes at any one time, I put in a massive effort and get it all done, perhaps with the help of a maid.  Every item clean, dry, folded and returned to its place.  That Utopian scenario will remain in place for three and a half minutes, at which point Buzz will wipe his food-encrusted mouth on his shirt, Jessie will spill a drink down her front and Woody will eat something.  Anything.  And lo, the Law of the Infinite Laundry Basket will again govern all things Laundry-Related.

2.  I wash nothing.  I stop bothering.  I just stop.  At some point, every item of clothing we own will be stuffed into the laundry room, and as a family, we will embrace nudism.


Both outcomes are, as I said, less than satisfactory, and while I'm on the topic of things that are less-than satisfactory, I will mention ...


... ironing.  The number of shirts hanging there waiting to be ironed is my sister's fault.  She was, for a while, coming over every Monday morning for an "Ironwoman Morning."  She'd bring her ironing board, her iron and a pile of clothes and hangers.  We'd iron in tandem, then she'd leave.  It was great - so great that she hasn't come over for weeks now.  And it would be completely beyond me to go to her house to iron, so there we are.

But I digress.

In closing, I wanted to share with you another of Zeno's paradoxes: "The Dichotomy."  According to Zeno, in order to complete any journey, you first have to complete half the journey. Then you have to complete half the remainder. Then you have to complete half the remainder of that. Then you have to complete half the remainder of that. He said that logically, no matter how close you get to finishing your journey, there should always be some ever-decreasing distance left. (He then proposed that it was impossible to complete any journey, it was not even possible to get started, and that motion itself was impossible.  Some of the recent philosophers who have studied this e.g., George Cantor, ended their days in mental hospitals.)

So, my next question is:

When does all the laundry stop?  

Does it ever stop?  One would logically assume that my constant treadmill of laundry would be put to rest once I pop my clogs.  Snuff it.  Kick the bucket.  Shuffle off the mortal coil.  Enter my Eternal Rest.

But when will that be?

Perhaps the nature of my recent musings on infinity are in the nature of a mid-life crisis, so let's say for argument's sake that now, at the age of 33, I am truly midway through my seemingly-infinite mortal laundry toil (neglecting those blissful pre-laundry days when my poor mother did it all, with scant regard for the influence of Zeno's paradoxes and the nature of infinity as applied to laundry.)

This argument shall assume my mortal account was credited with three score years and ten, minus four due to hardship faced in the laundry room.  That's 66, in case you're lost.  I'm nearly lost, myself.

So as of this year, I have completed half my earthly laundry.  In 16½ years when I am 49½, I will have completed half of what remained.  Then 8¼ years later when I am 57 years 9 months, I will have completed half of what remained.  I could continue this example a few more times, but I don't know the alt codes for eighths and sixteenths, so I will stop there.

Suffice to say that I will keep on completing half of each new remainder and on and on I will go, getting ever closer to being 66 years old, but never quite making it and never quite popping my clogs either.

Forever to be denied my Eternal Rest from laundry, forever to decay slowly, growing ever-closer to blowing out my 66 candles but never actually making it, all the while putting piles of clothes into and taking piles of clothes out of the washing machine, putting laden airers into and taking laden airers out of the sunshine, putting piles of folded clothes away into cupboards and putting piles of dirty clothes into the laundry basket.


It's a pity it will never be finished, really.  If it WAS, I'd be able to devote my time to cleaning my kitchen.  Organising the playroom.  Doing the floors.  Bathrooms.

Ad infinitum.

Achilles and the Tortoise

Through a random but fortuitous and perhaps inspired accident, I found myself the happy borrower of the following volume from the local library:


Mulling over the writings on the paradoxical nature of infinity has given me a great insight into my recent blue mood regarding my housework. Today I will give the first of a two-part explanation on how the concept of Infinity relates to my Laundry Basket.

The Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea had a thought. Perhaps he was in the shower at the time, perhaps he was "indisposed." ("In de what?" you may ask. "Indisposed. In de ... oh nevermind.") This is how it goes:

The Greek warrior Achilles was going to have a race with a tortoise. Because he was much faster than the tortoise, he decided to give the tortoise a head-start.

Zeno, through logical reasoning, proposed that Achilles was never able to catch up to the tortoise. The reasoning follows thus:

First, Achilles must reach the tortoise's starting point. But by the time he reaches it, the tortoise has moved to a point further on. And by the time Achilles has reached that point, the tortoise has moved even further on. By the time Achilles has reached that point, the tortoise has moved even further on, and by the time Achilles has reached that point, the tortoise has moved even further on.

Zeno said that it is obvious that the series is never-ending, and that there will always be a distance, however small, between the tortoise and Achilles.

Below is a nifty little fractal sometimes used to illustrate this paradox. Achilles has been replaced by a girl. The description on Wikipedia is:

The girl is assumed to walk three times as fast as the turtle, but whenever she turns a corner the turtle will, too. Even though she is faster, she will not see the turtle within a finite number of turns.

In order for Achilles (or the girl above) to catch up to the tortoise, they have to complete an infinite number of "travels" and Zeno went on to say that you can't complete an infinite list of Things To Do in a finite time. (Those of us who have ever looked after a husband, and/or children, and/or a house, and/or a dog, and/or paid employment didn't need a philosopher to tell us that.)

Hence, Achilles will never catch up to that darn tortoise.

Richard Morris, the author of my book, makes the point:

Of course, we all know that Achilles would catch the tortoise fairly quickly, but pointing this out does not refute Zeno's argument. Zeno is saying that Achilles must complete an infinite series of acts, and this cannot be done in a finite period of time. If we choose not to believe this, we must demonstrate where the fallacy lies.

I am certain that by now, you will have seen the obvious parallels between The Paradox of Achilles and The Tortoise and my Overflowing Laundry Basket, but for those of you who can't I will post all about it another day.

Next Up: Achilles and my Laundry Basket.

An infinite number of infinities

Thankyou, Jessie.

Infinity is an interesting beast. It seems though, that people who have worked with it tend to go mad.

One such mathematician was the German, George Cantor. He defined an infinite number to be one that could be put into a one-to-one correspondence with some part of itself.

One example of this is agreeing that the list of positive integers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ... (that dot-dot-dot- means that it go on to infinity) is infinite ...?

(at this point you all nod with me and say "ye-e-e-ess...")

and that the set of square numbers (1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36 ...) is also infinite ...

(nod, nod, "ye-e-e-ess...")

and you can put them together in one-to-one correspondence ...

1...2...3...4....5....6 ...
↨...↨...↨...↨....↨....↨
1...4...9...16...25...36 ...

and they match up and go on forever ...

(a little less certainly ... "ye-e-e-ess...")

so here we have a set of numbers (positive integers) that can be put into a one-to-one correspondence with a part of itself (the subset that we call "square numbers") and hey presto, because the second set doesn't "run out", we can call them "infinite"!

(everyone go "aaahhh!!" then back away slowly.)

But Cantor, not wanting to stop there, proposed that there isn't just one Infinity. Oh no. Because where would the fun be in that? He proposed the idea that there were an infinite set of infinities. And this is how it came about.

One day in 1874 while on the toilet (I just made that part up), Cantor set out to prove that the number of points on a line were less than the number of points on a plane (or in a space of 3 or more (!) dimensions) but what do you know, he couldn't prove that. Instead he proved the opposite, that the number of points was always the same.

I don't get that. Even he didn't get that, and confessed as much in a letter to German mathematician Richard Dedekind in 1877. But I digress.

All this thinking about those infinite points on a line made him wonder if he could put the infinite series 1, 2, 3 ... into one-to-one correspondence with the infinite points on a line.

Could he do it? Do you think infinity works like that?

Huh?

Duh, no of course not! I am a speech pathologist and even I can see that you can put 1 and 2 on really really really really really reeeally close points on that line but there will ALWAYS be a point in between those where the 2 should have gone!

So he had a think while in the shower one day (I made that bit up too) and decided that the infinite number of points in the line was a greater infinity than the infinite number of positive integers in the series 1, 2, 3 ...

Thus began his cogitations on the possibility of a number of "infinities."

And how many infinities did he propose there were? An infinite number.

Of course.

An infinite number of infinities, called "transfinite" numbers. Just what I need.

And with that, I go off to bed. Good night.

Jessie's Kitchen