Chapter 2
The Value of Abstraction

Abstractions are with us every step of our every day lives, where they usually go unnoticed, at least until a boundary is (b)reached. Numbers are among the most widely employed abstractions taken for granted today. However, numbers alone do not carry sufficient information without contexts, as a very simple example of how little bare numbers are helpful can illustrate, which is known to all who have travelled or communicated beyond their habitual time zone. Given only the information something is to happen at 11 o’clock is not helpful. Only when also supplying the notion which timezone it corresponds to, even if simply given as “localtime” along with a location, is the numerical value actually useful.