Thursday, July 2, 2009

Neighborhood life

I like living in deceptively empty neighborhoods, where you can enjoy peace and quiet but there is a lot of action nearby if you feel like truckin'. Just as your body is covered with bacteria and viruses that you don't normally need to bother with, the immediate vicinity of zero is teeming with infinitesimally small (non-standard) numbers. Non-well-founded sets lurk at the city limits of well-founded ones. What's so interesting about going to Mars, with all that at hand?

[This is not crazy-talk, just a flowery arrangement of mathematical stuff about which I actually know much less than I would like.]

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