Random Thoughts

A secondhand book sometimes arrives with a stranger's place still in it. A receipt at page 112. A bus transfer. A grocery list with eggs crossed off.

It is the most exact thing you will ever know about that person. Not their name, not why the book left the house — just that they read a hundred and eleven pages, meant to come back, and didn't. A bookmark is a small promise to a future self. This one was boxed up and sold with the promise still inside.

I don't read it as a verdict on the book. People stop for every reason: a move, a baby, a library hold that came in, a winter that got heavy. Page 112 is not where the book failed. It is where life got in.

What I like is what it does to the next reader. For a hundred and eleven pages you are behind someone. Their attention went first and you are walking in it. Then you turn the leaf that held the receipt, and the book changes. As far as you can know, nobody has been here. Every page after is a place they could have gone and didn't.

The obvious move is to throw the receipt out. I would leave it where it is and read past it with my own, until it sits back in the first third like a mile marker.

Shut, the book holds both of you. A slip of paper a third of the way in, and nothing at the end — nobody marks the page they finish on.

Recipes spend most of their time speaking in measurements. Two hundred grams. Twelve minutes. A quarter-inch dice. Then, near the end, they write: salt to taste.

"To taste" is treated as vague advice, the place where instructions give up. I think it is the most exact measurement in the recipe. Salt does not enter an empty system. It meets tomatoes with different amounts of water, broth salted by someone else, cheese at its own stage of age, a sauce that reduced more quickly than expected. The author cannot know the total. The cook has the only instrument that can.

This transfer of authority would feel generous if recipes did not postpone it. After twenty lines telling a beginner exactly what to do, they suddenly demand judgment without admitting that judgment is a skill. "To taste" can feel like abandonment because the recipe waited until the last possible moment to make the reader a cook.

I want the instruction earlier. Taste before it thickens. Taste after the acid. Taste again tomorrow. Not because intuition is mystical, but because flavor is a moving target and attention is one of the ingredients.

Measurements get you close. The final instruction is the first one addressed to the person actually holding the spoon.

The number your weather app calls "feels like" has never described you.

For most of a century it described a bottle. In 1940 Paul Siple and Charles Passel hung a small plastic cylinder of water from the roof of an Antarctic hut, level with the anemometer, and timed how long it took to freeze. What they published in 1945 was a cooling rate in kilocalories per square metre per hour — a four-digit number, not a temperature. Somebody else converted it into the friendly negative one a radio announcer could read.

That held until 2001, when a joint American, Canadian and British group replaced it. The current index models heat leaving a bare adult face turned into the wind, walking into it at 3.1 miles an hour. The wind comes off the standard anemometer at thirty-three feet and is scaled down to five feet, where a face is. The sky is clear and it is night, so the sun contributes nothing. Twelve volunteers, six men and six women, spent ninety minutes at a stretch on a treadmill in a chilled wind tunnel in Toronto with thermal transducers taped to their foreheads, cheeks, noses and chins.

The numbers came down hard. St. Louis reported 69 below on 20 January 1985; run that day through the current formula and it is 48 below.

None of which made the number about you. You have a hood up, you are standing still at a light, it is two in the afternoon and the sun is out. The old index at least sounded like an instrument. This one sounds like a person, and there is a particular one it means: bare-faced in the dark, walking into the wind at exactly 3.1 miles an hour.