BWL,

I greatly admir eyour confidence in the certainty of numbers. However, I submit that the whole question of the container within the thing contained, if we were to ever sovle that mystery, would ALSO illuminate the question of why three is always 3, and why the five-ness of five APPEARS to be so replicable...not to mention more complex propositions lie 8,888 or the square root of pi (1.772453851, more or less).

If you can explain in-ness and out-ness and break the death-grip of "within" and "without" on our beleaguered psyches, I am sure you can also cut through the Gordian knot of the five-ness of 5 and so on.

A