Make it count

Apparently Cantonese is one of the fastest languages for counting in, because all of the numbers are single syllables. One of my co-workers passed me this information, gleaned from Malcolm Gladwell, "or somebody like that".   Shame that English never adopted this approach, or I could count faster. I figure in a race to the number six, there's not much in it.
If it is Gladwell that came up with this wonderful insight into how to count aloud (were the lives of countless operational researchers sacrificed to glean this knowledge?) it still seems a step down from "things can be really complicated when lots of people are involved".

Or was he the one with some black swans?

It's getting hard to keep up with all the gurus these days. We need some sort of wise-person-aggregator to collect and distribute all this knowledge. If only there was some way to communicate vast amounts of information, in an easily searchable way. Some sort of interlinking network of data that would contain ... Oh, hang on.

Bugger.