764: One Two
From the book One, Two, Three, Infinity by George Gamow
Chapter one Big Numbers How high can you count?
There is a story about two Hungarian aristocrats who decided to play a game in which the one who calls the largest number wins. "Well," said one of them,"you name your number first." After a few minutes of hard mental work the second aristocrat finally named the largest number he could think of. "Three," he said. Now it was the turn of the first one to do the thinking, but after a quarter of an hour he finally gave up. "You've won,"he agreed. Of course the two Hungarian aristocrats do not represent a very high degree of intelligence and the story is probably just a malicious slander, but such a conversation might actually have taken place if the two men had been, not Hungarians, but Hottentots. We have it indeed on the authority of African explores that many Hottentot tribes do not have in their vocabulary the names for numbers larger than three. Ask a native down there how man sons he has or how many enemies he has slain, and if the number is more than three he will answer "many." Thus in the Hottentot country in the art of counting fierce warriors would be beaten by an American child of kindergarten age who could boast the ability to count up to ten!
One, Two, Three, Infinity is available as a free pdf download. (Use here is also considered fair use under US copyright)
Mouse over text:
Cue letters from anthropology majors complaining that this view of numerolinguistic development perpetuates a widespread myth. They get to write letters like that because when you're not getting a real science degree you have a lot of free time
The comic contains the dialog that parodies an American children's TV show known as Sesame Street. The character is known as the Count who helps with counting numbers in sequence. The character of the Count usually has a laugh after counting numbers that is directed to be an innocent version of the sinister laugh that is a stereotype of old Hollywood horror films. In the book One, Two, Three, Infinity the Hottentots can count to three but do not count numbers higher than three. The TV Count instead of continuing the number sequence to three says many in place of three.
Randall in his mouse over text mocks the anthropology majors for what is possibly considered a widespread myth among current anthropology majors about primitive tribes and their ability to count. Randall makes a jab at the anthropologists saying they would have time to write letters to complain about things because they don't have to spend time doing real science and thus real research.
