Wretchard,

Rather OT.

You wrote (not entirely seriously!):

Personally, I think al Qaeda should resort to enumerating their plans along the real number line, so that they will never run out designations for their successive and hare brained bloodthirsty schemes…

…which put me in mind of my struggles to learn analysis (the formal underpinnings of calculus, for non-math-mavens).

I’ll never forget how excited I was with my first glimpse of the understanding — a formal, complete and detailed understanding — of a certain kind of infinity, an example of which is the proof that there is no smallest real number which, when squared, exceeds 2, and no greatest real number which, when squared, is less than 2.

Jamie Irons