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:ID:       f9cb9224-843c-430f-9d9b-b6272e942bad
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#+title: Counting Infinity

I got very curious when I knew that numbers are infinite. How can anybody be sure there isn't a finite largest number! I had just 
finished my first year at school, and my six year-old classmates were capable of counting up to ten.. while I had no difficulty reaching one hundred and even more.. If any body can do the job.. It's me!!

So very simply I spent a big part of my vacation counting, from one onand until I reach a conclusion.. hours every day.

Armed with the principle of decimal places, and my skill of putting the pronounced number on paper; I wrote down the number I reached before I went to sleep to avoid starting from the beginning each morning. And it made the task more difficult that the piece of paper had a tendency of disappearance, especially when the number on it was big. In such cases, my scientific honesty had to beat every other desire: I must start again!

After a while, my dad noticed my unquestionable dedication to the process. One day he came back from work carrying a square with wooden sticks, and inside each stick were nine coloured beads . When he explained to me that this thing he called 'Abacus' can help me to count faster, I had already reached the place of ten thousands which made pronouncing numbers very tiring.

So I was able to count 65924 in less than a second! In addition, finding my Abacus each morning was much more guaranteed than the piece of paper, all I had to do was put it in a safe quiet place so no one can manipulate with the research.

The task has become so easy to the extent that the new capabilities incited me to stop pronouncing the numbers and be satisfied with moving my lips with every number.. Even muttering wastes some time! I finished the six decimal places of the Abacus in a week's time feeling ashamed of how easy things went, I even thought I've done some kind of deceit. It appeared to me that the number nine hundred ninety nine thousand and nine hundred ninety nine was so huge. I knew there was one million.. but I stopped counting as comfortably as I started.

Amr Gharbeia 1995
