Some Extremely Inconspicuous Details About Tape Measures
Some people say you should start your measurement from the 1″ mark, not from the metal clip at the end. But is that really true?
The latest episode of the podcast HyperFixed addresses an interesting question: When measuring something with a tape measure, like the one shown above, should you start your measurement at the “zero inches” mark (i.e., the metal clip at the end of the tape), or at the one inch mark?
The answer turns out to be complicated and involves lots of inconspicuous details, including how the metal clips are attached to the tape, how thick the clips are, how thick the lines on the tape measure are, how measurements can be affected by temperature, and more. It ends up being a master class in the minutiae of measurements (with lots of expert commentary from popular all-around expert Adam Savage, so fans of his work will definitely want to give this a listen).
The episode is 37 minutes long and is absolutely an inconspicuist’s delight! Check it out here:
Handwritten Names in Books, Continued
Last week’s post about how I spotted an old friend’s name on a vintage “due date” card that was salvaged from a discarded library book prompted the following note from IC reader Eve Harris Celsi:
My childhood friend Janice grew up right across the street from my old elementary school in Queens. One day in the early 1990s, she was walking by the school after visiting her mother and noticed a huge pile of books out for trash collection. When she got closer, she realized the pile contained over 100 copies of our old third and fourth grade reader, Days and Deeds, which we used back in the 1970s.
For nostalgia’s sake, she randomly grabbed a book out of the pile to flip through briefly [shown above]. Upon opening it, she found this:
Of course, she kept it and later gave it to me.
Great story! It’s interesting to see that Eve was apparently the last student to use this book, which means these books sat in a closet (or wherever) for 20-ish years before the school finally tossed them.
Paul Lukas has been obsessing over the inconspicuous for most of his life, and has been writing about those obsessions for more than 30 years. You can contact him here.
A somewhat peripheral story about textbooks. I was in seventh grade at JHS 202 in Queens in 1969. My first French textbook was a large format book, reddish-purple, and contained a practice dialogue at the end of each chapter. I took French through JHS, HS, and for one year in college.
Fast forward to 1997. Our daughter comes home from her first day at middle school in Merrick, Long Island. I see a very familiar looking reddish-purple textbook, and ask if that's her French text. She says yes, I ask her to open it to the dialogue at the back of chapter 1, and I begin to recite the dialogue. I can remember it today - "Bonjour, Jean, comment vas-tu?" Tres bien, et toi?" "Pas mal, merci." She and my wife were both pretty amazed. And, as the old gag goes, I can remember that, but I can't remember why I walked into the kitchen.