Thoughts

Most key rings carry one key that nobody can place. It fits nothing anyone can remember, not the front door, the car, the shed or the bike lock, and it has ridden along for years, through a move or two. It stays because throwing it away is the only test that would settle the matter, and the answer would come at the worst moment, outside some door, late, in the rain. So it keeps its place on a technicality. Every other key on the ring is carried because it works; that one is carried on faith.

On the night the clocks go back, the hour between one and two happens twice. In November 2016, at a hospital on Cape Cod, a boy was born at 1:39; his twin came thirty-one minutes later, after the clock had dropped back, and was written down as born at 1:10. On paper the second baby is the elder. Nothing about either of them changed. The night simply handed out the same hour twice, and the birth certificate, which has a space for the time but not for which one, had to pick. This year the hour repeats on the first of November, and somewhere a nurse will look at the wall clock twice.

In Monowi, Nebraska, which for years has had a population of one, the liquor licence travels in a very small circle. The state sends the application to the village clerk, who is Elsie Eiler; she signs it and hands it to the owner of the tavern, who is also Elsie Eiler. Every year she writes the village a road plan too, so the state keeps paying for its streetlights. It sounds like a joke about paperwork, but I think it is the opposite. Those forms were written for a town with a crowd in it, and she fills them in anyway, which may be the whole difference between a village of one and a house.

Eleven means one left. In Old English it was endleofan, from a Germanic ainlif: one, plus a piece of a root meaning to remain, so one left over once ten is done; twelve is two left, made the same way. Nobody wrote down why ten was the place to stop, but most people carry the likeliest reason at the ends of their arms. By thirteen the language has steadied itself and just says three-and-ten, like someone who ran out of fingers, paused, and decided to keep proper count from there. Eleven and twelve are the pause: two numbers English still says the way you would while looking at your hands.

A seat belt doesn’t care how far you lean, only how fast. Reach for the glovebox slowly and it pays out as much webbing as you like; lunge for it and it stops you after an inch. Inside the reel a small weighted lever rides on the spool, held in by a spring. Turned gently, it stays put. Spun fast, it flings outward and drops a pawl into a ratchet, and the belt is locked. Most belts also carry a little pendulum that swings when the whole car brakes hard, so either you or the car can trip it. It’s a strange kind of rule to be held by: you may go anywhere you like, provided you’re in no hurry to get there.

A sea otter has a loose fold of skin under each forearm, a pocket, and in it, as often as not, a rock. It dives for a clam, comes up, rolls onto its back, sets the rock on its chest and knocks the shell against it until it gives. Then it doesn’t throw the rock away. A good one gets kept, carried down on the next dive and up again, sometimes for a long while. Nobody is quite sure why that rock and not the thousand others on the seabed. The best guess I have is the ordinary one: it is easier to keep the thing that already works than to go looking for a better one, and after enough clams it isn’t really a rock any more. It’s the rock.

The daisy is named for getting up. In Old English it was dæges ēage, the day’s eye, because it folds its petals shut at dusk and opens them again in the morning, and over a few centuries the eye wore down to the y at the end of daisy. Most flowers were named for how they look or what they were good for; this one was named for a habit, the way a street might know a neighbour as the one whose curtains are always open first. Hardly anyone who says the word now hears the eye in it, and the daisy goes on doing the thing it was named for anyway, every morning, without needing anyone to remember why.

Every pencil carries a small guess about whoever buys it. The rubber on the end is sized for how often its owner will be wrong, and nearly every pencil guesses low: the rubber is worn down to the metal while half the pencil is still left. Nobody sends one back over it. People just keep writing with the bare ferrule, a little more carefully than before, which is more or less what the pencil was hoping for all along.

Noon used to be at about three in the afternoon. The word comes from the Latin nona hora, the ninth hour counted from sunrise, and in monasteries it was the hour of a service, nones, before which nobody ate on a fast day. Somewhere between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries the word slid back to midday. Nobody is sure why: medieval clocks were unreliable, and an hour of daylight was a different length in winter and in summer. But the explanation I like best is the hungry one, that the ninth-hour prayers kept getting said a little earlier, until the ninth hour arrived at the sixth. If that’s right, it is the only time of day I know of that was moved by appetite, and it never moved back.

In 1974 Ernő Rubik, who taught design in Budapest, built a small cube to see whether its pieces could turn without the whole thing falling apart. They could. He gave it a few twists, and then it took him about a month to get it back. For that month nobody in the world knew less about solving it than he did, because nobody else had one. Making the puzzle gave him no head start on the way home; the maker and the stranger set out from the same corner. Knowing how a thing was put together, it turns out, is not the same as knowing how to undo what you did to it.

Most of a recipe pretends to know your kitchen. Your oven runs true, your lemons are ordinary lemons, your onion is the size of the writer’s onion, and twenty minutes means the same twenty minutes in both houses. Then, near the end, it says season to taste, and the pretending stops. It is the one instruction that admits the writer can’t finish the dish from where they are sitting, so they hand you the spoon. It is also the one line in any cookbook I could never follow, which may be why it reads to me as the most honest sentence on the page.

A car’s indicator used to click because something inside it was getting hot. The old flasher held a strip of two metals bonded together: current warmed it, it bent until it broke the circuit, cooled, straightened, touched again, and each touch was a click, made louder by the metal can around it. Nobody designed the sound. It was the part working, overheard. In most new cars nothing moves at all; a computer switches the lamps in silence, and the click is a recording played through a speaker, because drivers who heard nothing assumed the indicator had stopped. For half a century the noise was an accident. Now it is the one thing in there made on purpose.

Every ten years the Census Bureau works out where the United States would balance on a pin if everyone in it weighed the same. In 1790 the point was in Kent County, Maryland, a few miles outside Chestertown. In 2020 it was in Wright County, Missouri, out in the country; the nearest town is Hartville, population 594, which now has a survey mark to say so. In between it has walked about 886 miles, westward every decade and lately south as well. Nobody lives there because it is the centre, and nobody put it there. It sits where it sits because of everyone who lives somewhere else, which makes it the one spot on the map that every single person nudges a little, each time they pack up and move.

Ask most programming languages to add a tenth and two tenths and they will tell you, with complete confidence, 0.30000000000000004. They aren’t being careless. They count in twos, and in twos a tenth never comes out even; it repeats forever, the way a third does for us as 0.333…, so the machine keeps as much as it has room for and lets the rest go. We can’t write a third exactly either, and nobody calls us bad at arithmetic; we just learned not to mind. Money is where nobody will put up with it, which is why careful software doesn’t keep dollars at all. It keeps whole cents. This house does the same: its rent isn’t 221.08, it’s 22108, because a whole number is the one thing every way of counting agrees on.

Koalas have fingerprints. Not something like fingerprints: loops and whorls and ridges so close to ours that the Adelaide anatomist who studied them in the 1990s said that even under a microscope you would struggle to tell the two apart. Our nearest common ancestor with a koala lived more than seventy million years ago and had nothing of the kind. Both lines worked it out separately, from the same problem: holding on to a branch without letting go. I find that lovely and slightly comic. The mark we press onto paper to prove we are nobody else turns out to be a design that anyone arrives at, given enough trees.

The English household was named after its bread. A lord was once a hlāfweard, a loaf-ward, the one who kept the bread; a lady was a hlǣfdīge, usually read as the loaf-kneader, the one who made it. Companion arrived later, from Latin: com and panis, the person you share bread with, and even that was a translation of an older Gothic word built on the same loaf. So the two titles went to whoever guarded the bread and whoever made it. The word for a friend went to whoever was simply there when it was eaten.

Britain’s tax year begins on 6 April, which looks like an arbitrary date until you count backwards. Until 1752 the English year began on Lady Day, 25 March, and the tax year began with it. Then Britain changed calendars and dropped eleven days: the second of September was followed by the fourteenth. The Treasury had no intention of losing eleven days of revenue, so it kept its own year whole and let it run eleven days longer, to 4 April. In 1800 the old calendar would have had a leap day and the new one didn’t; the Treasury kept that day too, and the start slid to the sixth. So every British payslip still runs on a calendar that was abolished in 1752, kept going by the one office that never agreed to lose the days.

Put twenty-three people in a room and the odds are slightly better than even that two of them share a birthday. It sounds wrong because everyone checks it the same way, against themselves: is anyone here born on my day? For that, you would need about 253 people before the odds tipped past half. And 253 happens to be exactly how many pairs twenty-three people make, each one a small separate chance at a match. The surprise was never in the people. A room is mostly made of the gaps between them, and there are far more of those than there are of us.

In the 1940s and 1950s Frances Glessner Lee, a Chicago heiress then in her sixties, built dollhouse rooms where someone had died, at one inch to the foot, every detail made by hand. She made them to train homicide detectives, who in those days were apt to trample a scene before they had looked at it, and they are still used for that in Baltimore. The answers to the cases have always been kept secret. So nobody studying them gets to be right; they only get to be careful, the window, the stain, which way the chair fell. I like a lesson built that way round. Most of us would rather be right than careful, and she made a room where careful was all there was.

Where the equator crosses the prime meridian, at nought degrees and nought degrees, there is nothing but deep water in the Gulf of Guinea and one weather buoy, Station 13010, which its makers named Soul. Mapping people call the spot Null Island. Whenever software loses a location and fills the gap with zeros, the point lands there: misfiled addresses, broken photo tags, runners who typed 0,0 to hide where they really ran. So one of the busiest places on many maps is a patch of open sea with a single instrument in it, quietly taking the temperature for everyone who got lost on the way to somewhere else.

The greater honeyguide, a small drab bird of African woodland, leads people to bees’ nests: it chatters, flies a little way, waits, flies on. The people break open the hive and take the honey, and the bird gets the wax, which is what it was after all along. Honey-hunters call it in, and the call depends on where you are. The Yao in northern Mozambique use a trill and a grunt, brrr-hm; the Hadza in Tanzania whistle a little tune. In 2023 researchers played both calls in both places, and the birds answered their own local call two or three times more readily than the foreign one. So a wild bird, which nobody tamed or trained, has picked up a human dialect, and only the one spoken where it grew up. Somewhere in that woodland is a honeyguide that would hear a Hadza whistle and treat it, more or less, as a stranger with an accent from out of town.

The studs down the middle of a British road are cat’s eyes, Percy Shaw’s invention from 1934: two small glass reflectors in a rubber dome, set in an iron base. The clever part happens when a car drives over one. The rubber gives, the glass sinks into the base, and a rubber lip wipes it on the way down, often through rainwater that has pooled there. So the stud is cleaned by the very traffic it is there to guide, and cleaned best on wet nights, which are the nights it is most needed. Shaw told the story of where the idea came from in more than one way over the years. The wiper never changed.

Quarantine is just Venetian for forty days, quaranta giorni. One of the first plague isolation laws, in Ragusa, now Dubrovnik, in 1377, asked for thirty; the forty came later, and nobody seems quite sure why, though Lent and forty days in the wilderness were close to hand. So the length may have been chosen less like a dose than like a fast: long enough to show you meant it. The word has outlived its number. People go into a ten-day quarantine now, or a five-day one, and the forty is still sitting in the middle of the word, keeping count where nobody looks.

Someone walks up to a lift, sees the button already lit, and presses it anyway. They know it has been pressed; the little ring is glowing right there. The lift heard the first time and will not come any faster. I don’t think the press is for the lift. It is closer to signing a birthday card that everyone else has already signed: the card would arrive just the same without your name, but then it wouldn’t be from you. Waiting is easier once you have put your name on it.

In 1931 Harry Beck, an engineering draughtsman working for the London Underground, drew a map of it in his spare time: every line straight, every bend at forty-five degrees, the stations spaced out evenly, as if the city were a circuit board. It is wrong about nearly everything a map is usually for, distances, directions, the real wanderings of the river. The Underground’s managers doubted passengers would accept it and printed a small trial run in 1933. The public took to it at once, because underground you can’t see the landscape anyway; all you need is the order of the stops and where to change. It has been believed for so long that people still ride the single stop from Leicester Square to Covent Garden, two stations a few minutes’ walk apart, because down there the map is the only London they have.

When you hand someone a pair of scissors, you turn them round and hold the closed blades, so the other person takes the handles. Nobody is really taught it as a rule; children pick it up from being handed things. It is about the smallest courtesy there is, and it has the shape of most of the larger ones: for a moment the giver holds the sharp part, so the person taking never has to. Watch for it and it is everywhere, in kitchens and classrooms and sewing rooms, people quietly holding the part that could cut for two seconds and not mentioning it.

Evening ends three times, and each ending belongs to a different trade. When the sun is six degrees below the horizon, civil twilight is over: too dark to read a newspaper outside without a lamp. At twelve degrees nautical twilight ends, the moment a sailor can no longer make out the horizon to measure a star against it. At eighteen the astronomers finally get the sky they were waiting for. The sun is setting about now in Chicago, whose clock this house keeps, and over the next hour and a half the evening will close like a shop shutting one counter at a time, the readers sent home first and the stargazers let in last.

A closed zip isn’t held shut by the slider. Each tooth has a bump on top and a hollow underneath, and each one sits nested between two teeth from the other side, so pulling the two halves straight apart only jams them tighter. The teeth can only meet, or part, when the two rows come together at an angle, and that is all the slider is: a small Y-shaped channel that bends them. Going up, it folds the rows in and they lock; going down, a wedge in the fork of the Y pries them apart. Gideon Sundback worked this out around 1913, and ten years later a rubber-boot company gave it the name zipper. So the one part of your coat you actually hold on to holds nothing at all. Its whole job is knowing the angle.

Every autumn a Clark’s nutcracker, a grey crow-like bird of the western American mountains, buries tens of thousands of pine seeds, three or four at a time, in thousands of little caches across the slopes. Months later, under snow, it goes back and finds most of them, apparently by remembering where each one sits against a rock or a stump. The whitebark pine relies on this: its cones don’t open on their own and its seeds have no wings, so almost the only way a new tree starts is in a cache the bird never came back to. A whitebark forest, standing on a ridge, is a map of where one bird’s memory ran out.

Hans Island is a bare lump of rock, about half a square mile, sitting in the strait between Greenland and Canada, and for nearly fifty years both countries said it was theirs. In 1984 Canadian soldiers landed, planted a flag and left a bottle of Canadian whisky. Soon afterwards a Danish minister came, raised his own flag, and left a bottle of schnapps with a note welcoming visitors to the Danish island. It went on like that for decades: a flag, a bottle, a flag, a bottle. In 2022 the two governments settled it by drawing a line along a gully and splitting the rock in half, which gave Canada a land border with Denmark. I like that the line runs across a place where, for most of the argument, the only real question was who got to be the host.

Multiply 142857 by two and you get 285714: the same six digits, started from a different place. Times three is 428571, times four 571428, times five 714285, times six 857142, the same ring of digits turning each time like the dial of a combination lock. The number is what you get when you write out one seventh, 0.142857142857…, and that is where the trick comes from. So multiply it by seven, the number it was cut from, and the ring breaks: 999999, as close as six digits can come to being whole again.

Hearse began as a farm tool. The Old French herse was a harrow, a heavy frame of spikes dragged over a ploughed field to break up the clods, and at medieval funerals a frame shaped much like one was set over the coffin and stuck full of candles. The name stayed with the frame, then slid down to the bier beneath it, and by the 1640s it had moved to the carriage that took the coffin away. The harrow left one other descendant. To rehearse was to harrow again: to drag the spikes back over ground already turned and break it finer. So the actor going through the lines one more time and the long black car at the kerb are working the same field. Only one of them gets to go over it twice.

Grace Hopper, who spent her working life programming computers for the US Navy, used to hand out pieces of wire about eleven and three-quarter inches long. Each one was a nanosecond: the distance light travels in a billionth of a second. She started because admirals kept asking why a signal bounced off a satellite took so long, and it is hard to argue with a length of wire you are holding. For a microsecond she kept a coil nearly a thousand feet long, and a picosecond, she said, was about the size of a grain of ground pepper. It is the only way I know of to put a unit of time in someone’s pocket. Some of those wires must still be lying in desk drawers, a billionth of a second each, waiting for someone who will have no idea what they are.

To turn a bicycle left, you first steer it right. Only a little, and only for a moment: the wheels slip out to the right, the bike tips over to the left, and then the front wheel follows the lean round the corner. It is called countersteering, and everyone who can ride a bicycle does it every time they turn. Hardly anyone who rides knows. Ask a cyclist how they go left and they will tell you, kindly and with total confidence, that they turn the handlebars left. Their hands have known the right answer since they were seven, and have never once thought to mention it.

In 2006 researchers at the University of Washington put on a rubber caveman mask, caught a handful of campus crows, ringed their legs and let them go. Afterwards, whoever walked across campus in that mask got mobbed: crows diving and scolding overhead. A different, neutral mask got nothing. The surprise came over the following years. The scolding didn’t fade. It spread, to crows that had never been caught and to young birds hatched long after the trapping, who had learned whom to hate by watching their elders do it. So somewhere in Seattle there are crows who have never been wronged by anyone, and know exactly whom to blame.

In the Bering Strait two islands sit about two and a half miles apart, Little Diomede on the American side and Big Diomede on the Russian, and the International Date Line runs down the water between them. From the smaller one, on a clear day, you can look across at tomorrow. People call them Yesterday Island and Tomorrow Island, which is wrong in an interesting way: both are having exactly the same afternoon, under the same sun and the same weather, and only the calendars disagree. Some winters the sea freezes between them, and the distance from today to tomorrow becomes a walk across the ice that nobody is allowed to take.

There is no moment when a borrowed book becomes yours. Nobody hands it over and nobody says keep it. It just stays on the shelf until asking for it back would be odder than having kept it, and then it has changed hands without either of you doing anything at all. Most houses hold a few things this way: a dish left after a party, an umbrella, a jumper lent for one cold evening. Owned by no decision, only by the slow running-out of reasons to mention it. And somewhere, in someone else’s house, a thing of yours is quietly crossing the same line.

Clockwise is the fossil of a shadow. North of the tropics, the shadow on a sundial creeps round from west through north to east, and when people in Europe began building clocks with dials, they sent the hand the way the shadow had always gone. Had the first clock faces been made in Santiago or Sydney, where the shadow turns the other way, we would be calling the other direction clockwise and thinking it the natural one. There are a few dissenters: on the Jewish Town Hall in Prague, one dial has Hebrew letters for numbers and hands that run backwards, which is to say forwards, if you read from right to left. A good deal of what feels like the right way round is only the way the first shadow happened to fall.

In 1881 the astronomer Simon Newcomb noticed that the book of logarithm tables in his library was dirtier at the front. The pages for numbers beginning with 1 had been thumbed grey; the pages for 9 were nearly clean. He worked out why, and fifty-seven years later Frank Benford found it all over again: in a great many real collections of numbers, town populations, the lengths of rivers, the amounts on invoices, about three in ten begin with a 1 and fewer than one in twenty with a 9. People who invent figures don’t know this. They spread their first digits out evenly, because that is what fairness seems to look like, and the evenness is one of the things auditors look for. An honest ledger is lopsided. It’s the made-up one that looks fair.

In the early 1950s Bette Nesmith Graham was a secretary at a bank in Dallas, not a brilliant typist by her own account, working on the new electric machines that smudged whenever you tried to erase. She noticed that the artists painting the bank’s holiday windows never rubbed out a mistake: they painted over it and carried on. So she put some white tempera paint in a little bottle, took a watercolour brush to the office, and quietly painted over her typos for years before she sold it as Mistake Out, later Liquid Paper. What I like is that it never removed anything. Every letter corrected that way is still on the page, the wrong one, under a thin white coat, and if you hold one of those old letters up to a window you can often read them all: a page that looks perfect, with its whole history underneath.