He looks at the five dials on the stove, says “off” five times. Goes out and locks the door, thinking, “I’m locking the door.”
He doesn’t like taking the time to put on his seat belt before he gets the car moving, so he attaches it while he’s rolling down the driveway and turning onto the street. His Toyota Corolla complains more about this than his old Ford Escort did. If he delays his seat belt long enough, the Corolla will beep eight times, once per second, then fifty times, twice per second. The first eight beeps group themselves naturally into twos, and thus the following faster beeps seem to come in groups of four. But since there are fifty beeps instead of forty-eight, the final two sound like a mistake.
It fascinates him, how convincing the illusion is that the first of every four beeps is louder than the others. But it is an illusion. If he blocks out several beeps and then “resets” his attention, the following beeps always fall into groups of four with convincing first-beat emphasis, regardless of where they actually are in the sequence. Might this stem from the fact that most Western music is in 2/4 or 4/4, so his brain is conditioned to hearing repetitive sounds in those groupings? Might that also be the reason people hear a “tick-tock” in clocks and a “ping-pong” in a Ping-Pong game? Older pendulum clocks really did sound “tick-tock,” since the escapement mechanism had two distinct stages. Maybe people hear “tick-tock” in electric clocks because the old phrase “tick-tock” conditions them to hear it. An interesting example, if true, of language influencing apprehension.
The weather has warmed again, almost up to the freezing point, with patches of pale blue sky and pinpricks of snow in the air. On the way to campus, he passes a spot in the steep terrain of his neighborhood where the downhill side of the road began to slump a year ago. The town set up three Jersey barriers to keep cars away from the edge, then seemed to forget about the problem. Of course the barriers are ugly: blotchy gray concrete, crumbled here and there at the edges, a nub of rusted rebar showing. Some of his neighbors complained. About a month ago, someone used pink spray paint to write in cursive along the three scorned objects: “Tell me/I’m/Pretty.” Yes, he’s a ridiculous person; he finds this touching.
It also fascinates him that most people have no idea how many beeps their own cars make. (He was curious, so he started asking.) It’s not an utterly trivial question, because it is, after all, an engineering decision stemming from a social-science judgment. Manufacturers want to annoy people enough to get them to attach their seat belts, but can’t annoy them so much that they’ll buy a different car. Toyota is willing to harass him more than Ford. Could that be because Japanese are more comfortable than Americans in using social pressure to enforce norms?
He once asked all his acquaintances to sing for him, on the spot, the chimes produced by the university clock tower. The full sequence, on the hour, is sol-mi-sol-do-sol-mi-do-mi. They had heard parts or all of this melody four times every hour, every day, for years. Of the ones who didn’t merely shrug and admit they hadn’t the foggiest, about two-thirds responded by singing the chimes of Big Ben. A fine example of pattern dependence. One study has shown that if you display to people on a screen, even for several seconds, an ace of hearts falsely colored black, they will perceive it as an ace of spades. Much of what we “see” is not actually data acquired through our retinas. Our brains economize processing power by looking for patterns, then relying on them as shortcuts. If you project on a screen a regular grid with dots placed randomly near the edges, then stare at the center of the grid, the dots will disappear from your peripheral vision.
He parks near his building, checks to confirm the doors are locked, makes a circuit of the car to ensure the headlights and taillights are off. Takes the stairs two at a time up three flights.
Departmental hallway (right there is where beautiful Beth stood, endearingly sipping her coffee), office, desk. He likes to start each morning by seeing what the Astrophysics Science Division at NASA has chosen to post as their Astronomy Picture of the Day. Today’s is a photo of yesterday’s launch of the Hitomi satellite by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency. A beautiful image—the H-IIA rocket is riding a dazzling fan of fire up out of a cloud of water vapor, about 15 degrees off vertical. It’s interesting how the tilt makes the flight seem more “dynamic” than a purely vertical rise, and he wonders if the photographer manipulated the frame. But the orientation of the cloud argues against it.
He loves the look of rockets. In his early boyhood, that’s what all the “spaceships” on the covers of sci-fi paperbacks actually were—sleek convex cylinders with fins, a wonderfully alluring design that he had no idea at the time was a copy of Hitler’s V-2. So those vehicles “reaching for the stars,” paeans to human idealism, were actually Nazi terror weapons. Which is kind of a fun fact. The enormous
