-166,665.8

Unusual number today: minus one hundred and sixty six thousand six hundred and sixty five point eight, an adventure deep into negative territory.

The concept of minus numbers in mathematics has been around since 100BC according to wikipedia, but I'd be willing to bet the idea of owning negative possessions goes back to the dawn of civilisation. When people first began living their lives in terms longer than day to day subsistance, people would no doubt find themselves borrowing against crops that would not be harvested for months to come. And this is pretty much the main reason negative numbers exist - to account for how much debt we are all in.

Much as we all hate debt, its a fine illustration of one of the most important developments in human cognitive evolution: the ablity to build future versions of reality inside our heads and borrow money from them.

So, do negative numbers not exist beyond human mental constructs and the ramblings of senile calculators? The only natural negatives I can think of (that don't arise from our own habit of sticking zero in the wrong place) occur in the relative charges of particals: matter and anti-matter. Every positive partical has its negative or anti-matter equivalent. There's no difference between them, you could have whole galaxies, planets and people happily living on them, all made out of anti-matter. But should you ever bump into your anti-matter twin, for god's sake don't bump into them - the explosion resulting from me colliding with anti-Cyriak would be the equivalent of a 1,680 megaton thermonuclear bomb.