set theory joke

[phoenixthoth]

there's this castle and in the basement only a few people go in there are thousands of spiders madly spinning webs. they think they're holding the castle up. every so often a flood washes through and the spiders spin new webs.

the castle is mathematics.
the spiders are metamathematicians.
the webs are metamathematical theorems.
one such flood was russel's paradox.
some of the new webs include axiomatic set theory to replace naive set theory.

cheers,
phoenix