Do the rules of basketball ever seem arbitrary to you? For instance, have you ever thought about where we get five and ten as the number of seconds for violations? They're certainly not empirically determined values like 0.3 seconds for a last-second shot. If we had more or fewer fingers, would the seconds be correspondingly greater or smaller?

Or is it related to our base 10 number system? We take our mathematical abilities for granted; we ought not. We owe much of our numerical prowess to the India Indians and the American Indians, though the oldest known "zero" was found in Babylon. While it may seem like nothing (pun intended), modern math would be completely broken without it.

Then there are the Arabs. During Europe's Dark Ages, they were busy studying math, science, astronomy, the arts — and more. If Europeans hadn't gone Crusading and seen how the enlightened half of the world lived, we might still be living in mud huts and working out long division using Roman Numerals.

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