With a growing baby in the house I’ve
become especially sensitive to the smell of soured milk and so the number of
loads of laundry has significantly increased.
Between the clothes changes because of slimy sour smelling baby barf (both
mine and Chicken Little’s) and cloth
diapers (which I LOVE and could quite easily expound on my love affair with
cloth and share in the process an unsolicited advertisement for the Fuzzi Bunz brand– but I
that is not the point of this blog entry... )
It is about Laundry... and the Mystery
of the Disappearance of Socks! Especially small infant sized ones – but applies
to all socks. In the early days,
the disappearance of articles of clothing could simply be accounted for by
saying that the sock was lost in the river. Unfortunately, such excuses can no longer be
used today.
It's a well known fact that socks
disappear in dryers. Until now there has
been no suitable theory to explain the mechanism by which they disappear. Since
the mass of the stuff left on the lint screen is not enough to account for the
missing sock, one can only conclude that this disappearance is not a simple
physical phenomenon. It was once proposed that a sock would be completely
annihilated on collision with an antisock, i.e. a corresponding sock composed
of antimatter. However, how the antisock actually got there could not be
explained, and furthermore the energy released, according to Einstein's
mass-energy equivalence relation, would destroy not only the dryer, but also
everything else within a 10 Km radius.
So I have now concluded that it has something to do with the speed at which
the socks move and centripetal motion created within the washing process
wherein the socks are directed orthogonal to the velocity of the spin cycle,
toward the instantaneous center of curvature of the dryer drum... resulting in
the abrupt disappearance of socks into another dimension.
There remains one last question of why
other things such as pants and shirts don't also disappear. In fact, they do,
but less often because their greater size and mass make them less likely to do
so. Also, it is much easier to notice
that a sock has disappeared, since socks come in pairs.
And that my friends is my latest theorem
on the disappearance of socks. As well
as representing the types of things I think about at four in the morning while
changing diapers.
You sometimes see a woman who would have made a
Joan of Arc in another century and climate, threshing herself to pieces over
all the mean worry of housekeeping. ~Rudyard Kipling
