10th anniversary thoughts

Seeing Patterns That Aren't There: A Lesson from 9/11

The hours just after the attacks on New York and Washington saw an impressive gearing-up of the machinery of collective delusion. I don’t mean to discuss the “Truthers,” – they came later — though I frankly hope to do them some harm by indirection in what follows. The delusions that sprouted first, though, were those of people who simply sought some meaning in the rubble, and who found it in the (imaginary) quatrains of Nostradamus, or for that matter in the wingdings font.

 

Indeed, one of my own memories from that awful day was that soon after hearing the news I received an email telling me that the call letters of one of the hijacked planes was Q33 NY. My correspondent attached great significance to this, saying that I should type Q33 NY in the “wingdings” font and see what resulted. He didn’t want to leave it up to me, though. He told me what I’d see: a picture of an airplane, two scissors, a death’s head, and finally the Star of David.

Q## NY

 Whoa (or, in Wingdings, Whoa).

I was far from the only recipient. Almost immediately the wingdings code “went viral” (did we have that expression yet in September 2001?).

That must have seemed to many recipients like a bizarre summary of what had happened, anti-Zionists dealing death by using scissors — presumably itself a wingding substitute for box cutters — to take over airplanes. Or maybe the cosmos was trying to tell us through the presence of the six-pointed star in the form of the letter “Y” that the whole thing was a Zionist plot.

Ah, the mind staggers.

But after it staggers it has a duty to recover equilibrium. To think, as William James wrote, “is the only moral act.” First, wingding doesn’t use scissors for the number “3”. That scary pictograph only comes about if you hold down the “shift” button while typing the “33”. And you’d only do that if you thought the airplane was a Q## NY! If you use wingding for “Q33 NY” you get two rectangles where the scissors had been. They aren’t as scary as scissors. “Oooo, but they could stand for skyscrapers!”

 

 

you say. Yes, I suppose, though they look more like filing cabinets, or pieces of lined notepaper, or rectangular plots of farmland. And if you type in “Q33 NY” using Webding font, you’ll get a tree, two arrowheads, an eye and a heart. Riddle me the significance of that!

The only reasonable supposition here is that somebody surveyed the wackier fonts to see what combination of letters and numbers would create the scariest and most 9/11 specific ‘code,’ then wrote an email asserting that particular combination to have been the number of one of the airplanes. It wasn’t. Q33 NY is and was without aeronautical significance.

So … why do I bring it up? Because the people who circulated this meme wern’t themselves weirdos or professional conspiracy theorists. They were normal people, sometimes quite intelligent, who along with the rest of us had been smacked on the side of the head in a way defying settled categories and expectations. The mind can do funny things at such a moment, as it is stretching to include the new horrific datumn as part of its view of the world. The mind can even swallow, if only briefly, the notion that wingnuts (sorry, wingdings) are trying to tell it something.

This is one of the lessons we might take from 9/11, now that we have the perspective of a decade. The mind is a pattern-making machine. Yet sometimes it makes patterns that are arbitrary and dysfunctional. We make our own traps, and sometimes the results are a good deal more serious than a little time wasted playing with fonts and sending or deleting a lot of silly emails.

Math notation

I'm not accustomed to thinking of mathematical notation as having a history. After all, the equals sign, "=," just is what it is. When did I first encounter that sign? First grade? I can't remember, and this "time out of mind" quality is what protects it from historical inquiry.

But of course such notation does have a history. The number zero has a history that supports a legion of scholars, as does the history of pi. How we write a number is connected with the way we think about numbers, so that writing "0" is something very different from writing "zero."

Still, let's not drift away into number theory. Let's stick with a sample of what one might call "pure notation," the equal sign. This = was invented in 1557 by Robert Recorde, of Wales, in what was actually the first book on algebra printed in the British isles.

Here's the URL for an image of the page in which the equal sign first appears.

http://members.aol.com/jeff94100/witte.jpg

You'll notice if you go to that page that Mr. Recorde used two rather longish parallel lines.

The old-fashioned fonts can make comprehension difficult. So I'll reproduce the final paragraph for you, just before his list of seven equations.

"Howbeit, for each alteration of equations, I will propound a few examples, because the extraction of their roots, may the more aptly be wrought. And to avoid the tedious repetition of these words, 'is equal to,' I will set as I do often in working, a pair of parallels, or remote lines of one length, thus: ===========, because no two things can be more equal. And now mark these numbers."

We should all have as solid a claim to immortality as Mr. Recorde and his scheme for the avoidance of tedious repetition.