Morning Snip:
And, on the other hand…
In an Op-Ed piece in the Times, about the costs of our unthinking everyday numerologies, Daniel Gilbert plays a quiet little joke on the unsuspecting reader.
In 1962, a physicist named M. F. M. Osborne noticed that stock prices tended to cluster around numbers ending in zero and five. Why? Well, on the one hand, most people have five fingers, and on the other hand, most people have five more.
As with the well-known vase-profile illusion, we’re surprised when a very common figure of speech is put to literal use.