Not a Number

Have you ever stepped back and thought about how numbers work? No, I don’t mean, like, “Doesn’t math suck?” I mean the actual fact that numbers are things and we just roll with it. We take a series of interconnected lines, give them a name, and now they represent a quantity of something. I know there is a history of why the number 5 means the quantity that it does, but isn’t it interesting that if you move or remove one line segment from a 5, it now means something else, or nothing at all? This was me playing around with what could be a number, but is not.