An unsatisfying resolution

[simont]

I've not been posting here in a while, and it seems to me that one reason why not is that I increasingly don't feel as if I have the brain-space to put together a long and well thought-out post about anything.

Perhaps, therefore, I should begin to fix this by posting short and/or inconsequential things. To kick off with, here's one that is both.

I lost a sock the other week. I did it in the way you normally lose socks: at one time I had N socks, and at a time considerably later I had N-1, and there were a lot of things that happened in between, so I don't know which was responsible.

(That's what makes the sock lost, of course – if I could narrow down to one event, I could have just gone and got the sock back from wherever that one happened.)

I looked for it everywhere, and it didn't turn up. I resigned myself to having only N-1 of those socks – until I did the laundry yesterday, and found that when I came to hang everything up, I inexplicably had N of them again.

So I found the sock in the same way as I lost it: I don't know what thing I did caused it to reappear.

That's the worst way to find a sock. The problem is solved, but in a way that sheds no light on the mystery! Arrrgh!

Comments

[wildeabandon]

Is it definitely the case that you now have N of them, and not N-2?

I just assume that a certain number of socks disappear into the black hole which mixes them with teaspoons and biros in order to generate tupperware lids and wire coathangers.

[simont]

Yes, definitely – these are sports socks of which I only had two pairs to begin with, so I'd know the difference if I now only had N-2!

(I think sports socks are more easily lost in general, because you tend to use them in ways that violate the Fundamental Principle of Sock Safety, that being that any sock leaving your house does so on one of your feet and stays on that foot until it comes back into your house, thus guaranteeing that any lost sock can only ever get lost inside the house and does not require you to search the rest of the world to find it again. Engaging in sports is therefore fundamentally dangerous, in that it involves going somewhere else and changing your socks :-)

[ptc24]

I was going to make a joke about you being a hoopy frood who really knows how many socks he has (I have little idea how many ordinary everyday socks I have), but if it's only two pairs of special socks, that's a bit different.

[simont]

Oh yes, for normal socks I certainly couldn't tell. My usual scheme is to buy in bulk, gradually throw socks away one by one as they become too worn out and holey to wear, and when it's starting to look as if I've only just got enough left to get between laundry days, buy more. (And to buy them all identical, avoiding the need to tediously pair things up.)

[jack]

I was going to suggest exactly this, but it seems like you're ahead of me.

I'll also add, at some point I invented a category for "hard to figure out but not very illuminating when you" for things like "maybe it was caught inside the washing machine, or in a pillow case, or left behind in the laundry basket, and if you'd searched thoroughly you would have found it, but it's too much work to do so," and have been more relaxed that I don't have to understand *every* puzzle.