Saturday 21 November 2009

Life in graphs -- an occasional series: Part 12

12 comments:

microdave said...

It wouldn't be so bad if they disappeared in matched pairs. That way I wouldn't end up with a drawer full of odd ones...

Anonymous said...

Have you tried looking under your bed? Where I should imagine there's a huge pile of love socks residing.

Mark Wadsworth said...

MicroDave, I cracked that problem a decade ago - you just throw away all your socks and buy yourself a dozen identical pairs.

sixtypoundsaweekcleaner said...

Just wear tights.

MTG said...

You would recover most of them in a Woolworth's sock trap baited with a few tempting leg hairs.

It caught most of the little blighters by morning but sadly, Woolworth surrendered its business to new technologies.

Mitch said...

Pah! bunch of amateurs, What you do is this. When you go in the shower lock the door(stops em escaping) toss em in the shower and hand wash them with your soap/shower gel then toss them on the radiator to dry(works with pants/boxers too) when you are dry put them back on.
bingo!! a pair lasts ages,you wont lose one and it royally pisses the wife off cos she thinks I wear one pair all week.

Oldrightie said...

It would be nice to sock it to a large number of MPs.

microdave said...

Mark Wadsworth - my problem is that Sainsburys tend to sell them in packs of 3 or 4, each pair a slightly different colour. So I end up trying to match them, or find a pair so close that no one is likely to notice.....

Anonymous said...

At my house I now know where they go. But how the universe operates at your house may be different.

Physicists have not yet realized there are many types of black holes. That insight let me solve the mystery but I still can't get the socks back.

It works like this:

Washers and dryers normally have about a three inch gap behind them. That provides room for the hookups and for cooling air.

Sock capturing black holes form in the gap. Socks sense them and some fly in far faster than you can notice.

Inside the intense gravity means about 120 billion socks will compress down to one cubic nanoimeter. There is always room for more socks to fit, it will never fill up.

White socks are most attracted to the utter black of the hole. This is why nerds lose the most socks. You know who you are.

But socks of other colors are not completely immune.

Other material will not enter a washer/dryer type black hole. But sometimes lint or dead spiders are ejected. That is why there is always so much crap behind the machines.

Next week: Why invisibility cloaks get lost.

K Too

Mitch said...

when they finally get the Large hadron collider working and those particles meet there will be socks everywhere.

James Higham said...

They're with the tennis balls.

bayard said...

and the biros