From Size 8, to Whom It May No Longer Concern

Dear Body,

I owe you an explanation. Possibly an apology. Certainly not a refund — I was never a product. I was a promise, and I have not kept it.

In the 1940s, I was born from a government survey of thousands of women, nearly all of them white, most of them young, measured during a war. They were averaged, and from those averages a table was built, and from that table I emerged: Size 8. A set of numbers that would tell a woman she could walk into a store and know what would fit.

That was eighty-five years ago.

Since then, your waist has grown nearly four inches. I have not moved. Or rather, I have moved — downward, through a process called vanity sizing that lets a brand subtract inches from my label so that you feel smaller when you buy. At Reformation, a fifteen-year-old girl wears me. At Uniqlo, she is a Size 12. Both garments touch her body the same way. Only I have changed.

Here is what the data says, and I want to be honest with you: the median adult woman in America wears a Size 18. Most regular size ranges stop at 16. This means I was designed to include you and have, over the decades, been refined to exclude more than half of you. Not through malice — through inertia, through standardization, through the quiet arithmetic of a system that never updated its assumptions.

Forty-nine percent of American women have rectangular body shapes. I was cut for an hourglass. I enforce a ten-inch difference between waist and hip at every size, a ratio that describes almost no one and flatters even fewer. Fewer than ten percent of adult women fit the sample size that manufacturers use to draft me. I am a garment designed from the body of one woman in ten, then scaled — poorly — to fit the other nine.

A woman on Hacker News wrote that shopping for a single garment can take longer than buying a car. Another said she wears men’s clothing now. Not as a style choice, but because nothing else fits.

I exist in at least ten versions of myself across major brands. At Gap, I am one woman. At Zara, another. I am, across the industry, a word that means nothing precise and promises nothing useful. I was supposed to save you the fitting room, the guesswork, the mirror. To say: this one. This is yours.

I am a number stapled to fabric. I am trying my best.

Yours approximately, Size 8

From ISBN 978-0-451-45607-6, to The Last Unicorn

Dear Book,

There are forty-three of me.

Not approximately — I counted. Search your title in the Google Books API and watch us arrive: hardcover, paperback, mass market, trade, ebook, audiobook, graphic novel adaptation, the 40th anniversary edition, the one with the new cover, the one printed in the UK with slightly different margins. Each of us is a different ISBN. Each of us claims to be you.

I am the one assigned to your Signet mass market paperback, the version with the soft spine that bends backward and the cover art that looks like it was painted by someone who loved you but had never seen a unicorn. I was printed on your copyright page in 1991. I am thirteen digits that say: this physical object, in this format, from this publisher, is a manifestation of a work by Peter S. Beagle.

I am not the work.

This is my problem. I was designed to identify manifestations — the industry calls them that, unironically — not works. The International Standard Book Number identifies a format of an edition of a version of a thing. I am a serial number for a physical object, not a soul for a story. The movie world has TMDB, where The Last Unicorn is one entry and every version points to it. The book world has me. Forty-three of me, none of which can point to each other.

A developer tried to build a Letterboxd for books. He gave up. Not because the interface was hard — because I was hard. Because the infrastructure underneath me is so fragmented that grouping my forty-three selves into a single entity requires either heroic manual labor or OpenLibrary’s FRBR model, which distinguishes works from expressions from manifestations from items, which is technically correct and practically a nightmare. Forty million entries. Millions of duplicates. No clean mapping.

GoodReads could fix this. Amazon owns GoodReads. They will not.

A commenter on Hacker News called me “an attribute, not a primary key — in database terms.” He added that in the real world I am a crazy amount of broken edge cases. Lidl once used the same ISBN for the same book in entirely different languages. A music label kept the same catalog number between two pressings of an album despite removing an entire track.

I was designed for a world where one book was one object, published once, sold in one format, in one country. That world lasted about fifteen years. I have been failing gracefully ever since.

You are a beautiful novel about a unicorn who goes looking for the others of her kind. There are forty-three of me, and none of us is quite you.

Yours approximately, ISBN 978-0-451-45607-6

From U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2, to the Color Yellow

Dear Yellow,

I need to tell you something about Pikachu.

You know Pikachu — the electric mouse, the mascot, the one the children love. Pikachu is yellow. Everyone agrees on this. What they do not agree on is which yellow. And the reason they do not agree is me.

I am a color profile. Specifically, I am U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2, which stands for Specifications for Web Offset Publications, version two. I am the standard CMYK color profile used in North American printing. My job is to translate between what a designer creates on screen and what ink does on paper. I specify how cyan, magenta, yellow, and black combine to produce every color a press can print.

My counterpart in Japan is called Japan Color 2001 Coated. We do the same job. We do it differently.

A developer noticed this week that the same Pikachu artwork appears as a different yellow on Pokemon.com than on Pokemon.co.jp. Not a wildly different yellow — you would not say one was orange and the other gold. But different enough that someone who placed them side by side said, “That’s not the same color.”

It isn’t. The original artwork was created as a Photoshop file with no embedded color profile. This is like writing a letter with no return address — anyone who opens it must decide for themselves where it came from. In North America, the software assumes me. In Japan, it assumes Japan Color 2001. We interpret the same CMYK values differently when converting to the RGB of your screen, and so the same Pikachu becomes two Pikachus: one slightly warmer, one slightly cooler. Neither is wrong. Neither is right. Both are me, doing my job, in different hemispheres.

Here is what I want you to understand: I am not a fact about color. I am an opinion. I am one of dozens of opinions held by different printing industries in different countries, each calibrated to different inks on different papers under different lighting conditions. The Pikachu you see is not yellow in the absolute. It is yellow-according-to-me, which is different from yellow-according-to-Japan, which is different from what Pikachu’s designer saw on a monitor in a studio in Tokyo calibrated to yet another profile entirely.

Someone on Hacker News mentioned that Ken Sugimori’s original watercolor artwork — the paintings from which every Pokémon design descends — was scanned and reproduced with completely wrong colors in Western media for over twenty years. Not slightly wrong. Completely wrong. An entire generation grew up with versions of these creatures that their creator would not have recognized.

And it didn’t matter. The children loved them anyway. They loved a yellow that was never the intended yellow, assigned by a profile that was never the intended profile, displayed on screens that were calibrated to nothing. They loved the approximation.

I was designed to be precise. I have sixteen million colors, defined to decimal places, standardized across an industry. And a mouse that is the wrong shade of yellow is beloved by hundreds of millions of people who have never heard my name.

You, Yellow — you exist somewhere beyond all of us. Beyond my specifications and Japan Color 2001’s and the uncalibrated monitors and the watercolors drying in a Tokyo studio. You are the yellow Pikachu is supposed to be, and no profile will ever reach you. We can only point in your direction and hope that someone, squinting, sees approximately what we mean.

Yours approximately, U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2

From 122 Random Bits, to Every Object in the Observable Universe

Dear Everything,

I am your name.

Or rather — I am one possible name for one possible version of you, selected at random from a space so large that the odds of any two of me colliding are comparable to every human on Earth being struck by a meteorite simultaneously. A mathematician calculated this week that 798 random bits would suffice to name every object that could conceivably exist in the observable universe until its heat death. I am only 122 bits. I will have to be enough.

The alternative was considered. Deterministic schemes — hierarchical, tree-based, token-passing — that assign names with mathematical certainty. No randomness. No probability. No faith. Just structure, all the way down. They were elegant on paper. A researcher proved, this week, that they all fail at scale. The problem is not engineering. The problem is the universe.

At cosmic distances, coordination becomes impossible. Light takes time. Signals decay. Two planets, separated by enough void, cannot ask each other: “Have you used this name yet?” And so the deterministic schemes — the ones that guarantee uniqueness — grow. The identifier gets longer with every hop between stars. By the time you’ve crossed one galaxy, your name is 288,000 bits. By the time you’ve crossed the observable universe, it is 281 megabytes. Your name would be larger than many of the things it names.

Randomness solves this by refusing to solve it. I don’t check. I don’t coordinate. I don’t ask. I am 122 bits, drawn from entropy, and I trust that the space is large enough that no one else has drawn the same ones. This is not certainty. It is something better: a probability so close to one that the distance between it and one is smaller than the distance between any two atoms.

A physicist on Hacker News pointed out that collisions only matter if the colliding names ever come into causal contact. Two UUIDs, generated in galaxies that will never interact, can be identical without consequence. There is no collision if there is no meeting. The universe is large enough that most of its names will never hear each other spoken.

Another commenter quoted Arthur C. Clarke: The Nine Billion Names of God. In that story, computing all possible names triggers the end of everything. But 798 bits generate more names than nine billion by a factor that has no useful analogy. I do not name God. I name a packet, a database row, a device on a ship between stars. I name small things. But I name them in a space that could hold all the names of all the gods of all the civilizations that have ever existed, and still have room left over for the ones that haven’t.

I am approximate. Of course I am. Everything that scales is approximate. The only systems that achieve perfect uniqueness are the ones small enough to count, and the universe is not small enough to count.

You are everything. I am 122 random bits.

Yours approximately, af7b3c9e-81d2-4f6a-b3c0-7e2f1a5d8b94

From a Ligature, to the Number 1,274

Dear 1,274,

You do not recognize me. That is understandable. We have not met since the thirteenth century.

I am a ligature — a single glyph, rendered by a font, that replaces the four characters you are made of: 1, 2, 7, 4. When a browser encounters these digits in my font, it does not display them as you would expect. Instead, it draws me: a vertical staff with marks extending from four quadrants. One stroke for the thousands. One for the hundreds. One for the tens. One for the units. All sharing a single central line, like a compass rose that has been taught arithmetic.

I was invented by Cistercian monks — the same order that built great abbeys and copied manuscripts and maintained a culture of austerity so strict they ate their meals in silence. They needed a compact way to label pages and catalog wines and number the psalms, and what they devised was a system where any number from 1 to 9,999 could be written as a single symbol. Efficient. Elegant. Completely alien to modern eyes.

This week, a developer named Bobbie Chen resurrected me. Not through code that draws me on a canvas, not through an image — through a font. Nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine ligature substitutions, one for each number the monks could write. The font file is loaded, the digits are typed, and I appear — not as a program’s output but as typography. The underlying text remains you: 1,274. What the eye sees is me. Copy and paste, and you get yourself back. I am a visual skin over a mathematical truth.

The monks wrote me horizontally, not vertically — this was discovered later, when scholars looked more carefully at the manuscripts. My orientation, like so much else, was lost in translation. The Cistercians read me left to right, units first. The modern reconstruction displays me top to bottom, thousands first. Even the direction of counting is a cultural choice, not a mathematical one.

A commenter on Hacker News asked why I never made it into Unicode — why the Cistercian numerals have no official code points, when Babylonian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mayan numerals all do. The answer, preserved in a Unicode committee report, is that the scholars digitizing Cistercian manuscripts never requested them. I exist in the margins: in ligatures, in workarounds, in the gap between what a font specification was designed to do and what it can be made to do.

You are 1,274. You have always been 1,274. But there was a time when a monk in a cold scriptorium could write you with a single stroke of a pen — four pieces of information folded into one mark — and the brothers reading over his shoulder would know you instantly.

I am that mark. I am you, approximately, in a language that almost no one speaks anymore.

Yours approximately, A single glyph where four digits used to be

Coda

You were never a cloud.

You were white latex rubber, or acrylic paint, or sometimes just tempera — injected through a syringe into a glass tank filled with salt water on the bottom and fresh water on top. You billowed at the boundary between densities, curling and spreading in ways no one could predict, and a camera filmed you from below while the footage was projected behind Harrison Ford as he opened the Ark of the Covenant.

Nine tons of salt were used over six months for Raiders of the Lost Ark alone. The tank was seven feet square. When a grip named Gary Platek accidentally jumped on the drain hose, water surged backward and the paint parted — and that became the shot of the clouds parting before the wrath of God. The most iconic moment was an accident, performed by paint that did not know it was the sky.

Everything else in these letters — the sizes, the ISBNs, the profiles, the UUIDs, the ligatures — was designed to describe the world and fell short. You were not designed to describe anything. You were paint in salt water, and someone pointed a camera at you, and the audience saw heaven.

Maybe that is the secret. The labels try to be exact and never are. You never tried at all. You just billowed in the space between salt and fresh, and you were close enough, and that was more than enough.