The Blind guys solves the mystery of missing socks.
It’s a common joke, but it is true. Socks disappear. And how gives insight into a human process.
It seems a mystery. Your socks spend time on your feet, in the sock drawer, the hamper and washing machine. Inside your home.
But it’s no mystery, it’s obvious if you understand the changing state of your sock drawer over time.
What factors contribute to sock attrition?
1) A pair of socks are inherently separable. The only time they’re connected is in your sock drawer.
2) You tend to add additional socks of different sizes, color, manufacture, materials. It takes effort for you to match them after separation in the wash. Socks go missing & you end up pairing mismatched socks.
Wait, but why are socks missing?
Over time, you break up pairs of socks and add new pairs of socks different from the previous pairs. This is why socks disappear. The process is slow, events isolated over time, the change of state creeping, your mind is unable to follow it. When you add new socks, this becomes a “Gradual Churn” or “Glacial Churn”.
Because, over time, socks wear out & you throw them away. One at a time. Or 2 singles. Or 3. Doing so orphans the surviving socks which are paired, mismatched, together.
If you’re one of those people who only wear 2 specific socks, white & black, the same thing STILL happens. It changes nothing.
Because new socks arrive as a pair, but once tossed into the hamper are forever separated, with no way of matching since all socks appear identical. As a result, you incur a distribution where some socks are worn frequently & others seldom. When this happens, your identical socks become heterogenous by wear & tear and you have no good way of knowing that.
When you throw out a single sock, this causes your total number to be odd, then after throwing another away, even. Meaning, you have socks without partners, or missing.
Mystery solved. Find another worthier one to wonder about.
Leave a Reply