Science

Five Seconds Grace

65 Comments

Students at Aston University in Birmingham, England have conducted an experiment and claim to posess data that lends credence to the famous 5-Second Rule for dropped food.

They fumbled toast, pasta, biscuits and sticky sweets, and then left the morsels on different types of flooring for up to 30 seconds.

These calculating slobs of science found that time is a significant factor in the transfer of bacteria from a floor surface to a munchie. Remarkably, the experiment found that food dropped on carpet picked up fewer contaminants than food dropped on flooring that is less plush.

Additional findings: that wet food drew more invisible unsavories than dry food, and women were more likely to pick up and eat dropped food than were men. That last one runs against the stereotype that women are less disgusting in every respect. I can only reconcile it by assuming that, rather than pick up dropped food, men are more likely to grind tidbits into the carpet with their feet before plunging their hands deeper into the chip bowl.

Although its findings are contradicted by study after study after study, this unpublished and non-peer reviewed research is good enough for me, because now I can begin to imagine living in a more forgiving world where mistakes can be undone with no penalty as long as you realize it right away.

I’m not saying I do a lot of dumb things, but most of the time while committing my major screw-up-of-the-day I pretty much know it immediately – often while in the act.

Although putting it that way might have been an error.

Never mind. Undo!

What if there was a Universal Five Second Rule (UFSR) that allowed you to instantly take back anything at all if it seemed wrong within five seconds of commission – a contract signature, an unkind word, an errant throw, a dropped match, a Facebook post or an e-mail?

The irreversibility of ill-considered choices is what makes it worthwhile to think before acting. In a world governed by the UFSR, some people would abandon discipline and take back virtually everything. And then there would be an expansionist lobby – if five seconds works, why can’t we make it fifty seconds? Or five minutes?

“A slippery slope,” as they say. Which, if you stepped onto one, is exactly the sort of thing you would want to revoke before the consequences hit.

What is the proper length for a grace period?

65 thoughts on “Five Seconds Grace”

  1. I have always wanted a keyboard for my life with undo, delete, cut and paste, and spell check, the last to see if some evil person had hexed me. Since I am a slow typist I need along grace period.

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  2. Good morning. Can there be a grace period that lasts forever? The world would, I hope, be a much better place if we could undo all of our mistakes. Without any time limit on changing mistakes we could undo all of the terrible things done in the past such as wars, racism, imperialism, damage to the environment, etc, etc.

    The problem would be recognizing our past problems and deciding to undo them. This would be a science fiction world where time can be completely altered. By changing all of those terrible mistakes from the past we would completely change history and the present as well.

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    1. but then what happens to all the things that happened because of the mistake you just edited. jackie robinson and martin luther king would be moot because we didn’t bring slaves over and abuse an entire race out of the unbelievable lack of conscience and looking the other way in allowing it to happen.
      maybe we can get steves photo edit to work with jasper fford and have multiple parallel worlds running with an erase button when the scenario has gone too far(should we push it now)

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      1. In the talk I’ve heard about “multiverses” (multiple universes), the assumption seems to be that they are somehow bound to be better than the universe we’re in. But what if they’re even more messed up?

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    2. The mental housekeeping gets complicated pretty fast, Jim. Not only would we have historians writing our history, we’d have historians following the history of history – cataloging the collection of revoked acts that made up our history before we re-did it.

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      1. Perhaps the best grace period length is none. Even a second or two of grace time might change history is some undesirable way.

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  3. About a day and half would be good for me….

    New lightboards come with an ‘Oops’ button allowing you to undo what you just did. The print is always worn off that button.

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    1. if i had a 1/2 day deadline for going back on mistakes i would be screwed
      i make so many I would have timers going off all day to remind me that the bonehead move I made 11 1/2 hours ago had 30 minutes to go then the world would be stuck with the ramifications of my poor judgement and my failure to edit.life is hard enough without having to be tethered to undo on all decisions but dang it sure would present some unbelievable options that you would never consider otherwise wouldn’t it?

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  4. It isn’t really a matter of time, is it? The fool who said something stupid is the same fool who does the editing. So if you tell a woman she looks far better than she used to, you might edit that to ask her if she has had a baby because she doesn’t appear nearly as fat as she was. And then you see that both versions are pretty damn insulting.

    I edit my photographic images with a sophisticated program that has one huge virtue: it is “non-destructive.” So if I change an image, the edits apply to a later version of the image but the original is never altered. That way I can revise over and over without losing the original image.

    But it is a scary notion that we cannot really edit our lives. My favorite singer has a line in which she croons, “We are in ‘Record’.” And, dammit, we are.

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      1. I doubt you know her: the singer is Laurie Anderson, the avant garde performer from New York. The line appears on her “Big Science” album, I think. I’m surprised I can listen to her, but she is my favorite singer.

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        1. Here, PJ, from her song “Same Time Tomorrow”

          You know the little clock, the one on your VCR
          the one that`s always blinking twelve noon
          because you never figured out
          how to get in there and change it?
          So it`s always the same time
          just the way it came from the factory.
          Good morning. Good night.
          Same time tomorrow. We`re in record.

          So here are the questions: Is time long or is it wide?
          And the answers? Sometimes the answers
          just come in the mail. And one day you get the letter
          you`ve been waiting for forever. And everything it says
          is true. And then the last line says:
          Burn this. We`re in record.

          And what I really want to know is: Are things getting better
          or are they getting worse? Can we start all over again?
          Stop. Pause. We`re in record. Good morning. Good night.
          Now I in you without a body move.
          And in our hearts we fly. Standby.
          Good morning. Good night.

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        2. Thanks, Steve. I am familiar with her work, although I admit she’s not someone I listen to very much. I think of her more of a visual performance artist and would love to se her perform live. If I remember correctly, she was married to Lou Reed who passed away last fall. I didn’t realize they were a couple until I read his obit.

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  6. I have empirical data to prove my Esc button does not work. Ctrl works only intermittently, Alt is kind of scary to try. End is very frightening. Once in desperation I hit F12 and I ended up in Couer d’Alene.

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      2. i was crushed when i discovered couer d alene which i fell in love with driving through in the old hippy vw bus days. i knew nothing about it and upon researching it in pre google technology era i found it to be the main area for all white supremacist groups. i cant get past that in days since on drive throughs. pretty but…

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    1. This is a good habit to cultivate. Never hit “send” on a hot email you just wrote. If it is worth saying, you can send it tomorrow when you are cooler. Abraham Lincoln used to write angry letters that he didn’t mail right away. He often decided they were a mistake before he sent them.

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      1. (Hopefully, this post will go through – earlier, each effort resulted in a “Sorry, your comment cannot be posted”) Steve, you stole my thunder on this one! Too often, when I type an email while emotionally charged and sent it, I’m flooded with regret. How I’ve wished there was a “Retrieve” button. In efforts to censor myself, I’ve taken to “Saving to File), waiting one day, then reviewing it. Embarrassingly, I never end up sending any email that I’ve save for a day. I teach my clients that when unpleasant things happen, there’s difference between reacting and responding. I’ve simply needed to drink my own medicine! I’ve also learned not to be the first responder on the Trail because too often I’m way off target, taking things too literally as usual.

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    2. but if in the 5 seconds you begin something else and then wait for that 5 seconds and forget about the stuff you set up …. you end the day going , oh yeah I was almost doing that…

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  9. In my early days of emailing, AOL would allow you to retract a message sent for a certain time (hour or two?) if it was to another AOL subscriber, which at the time seemed to be almost everyone. That was handy, but short lived, as we switched servers…

    Now? Depends on whether you’re computing or in the real world. It would be nice to have one hour on the computer to realize, say, you’ve just sent that email to the wrong sister-in-law. I’d need longer in the real world, but as tim pointed out, then you have to keep track of how much time you have for revision… Maybe it’s just not worth it.

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  10. I am most careful about the things I say when I am testifying in court as an expert witness. I wonder what would happen if we filtered everything we said as if we were on the stand under oath?

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      1. It might make us all very creative. It takes some thought to communicate to a judge in even, measured, and non-inflammatory terms that the parents in front of him should be locked away on a diet of uncooked oatmeal for the rest of their lives rather than gain back the custody of their children.

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        1. thy uncookthed oatmeal is more than thou deserveth thy scurvy knaves. a pox on thy house and be it without thine poor unfortunate youth you bourn into thy house they have been forced to suffer at thy hands enough. out damn family.

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    2. Nobody is reading this, I think, but I testified in court once. It was frickin’ weird. I was a passenger in a boat that was struck at high speed in the dark by another boat.

      SG: “Then I saw this boat light coming toward us across the water.”
      Attorney: “You can’t say that. When it was in the distance it was just a light, not a boat light.”
      SG: “But it was a boat light.”
      Attorney::”You couldn’t have known that.”
      SG: “Well, I saw this light coming at us over the water. It got bigger and bigger. And then it had a boat under it, and that boat hit us.”

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  11. Lots of folks here want a redo. A Vietnamese family came here, I guess 30 years ago, and achieved the American dream. They have/had several businesses. Nails salons. Vietnamese restaurant. Bubble tea place. The matriarch of the family has been held up as a shining example of free enterprise. Nominated a few times for Mankato woman of the year by a friend of my wife’s. Often extolled in public. Pillar of the Catholic church. She recently got a large bank loan to buy prime land and build two strip malls and a new place for the restaurant.
    Tuesday she plead guilty to human trafficing. Turns out some of the large “family” she secreted across the Mexican border with some Mexicans. At least one of her Vietnamese imports was held as a virtual slave to work in the restaurant to pay off the import fees.

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    1. every relationship you enter into is like marrying into a new dysfunctional family. now mankato gets to deal with their latest realized offender. its hard to understand why people make the decisions they do. ill bet the virtual slave agreed wholeheartedly to work hard to pay back the opportunity to live the dream only to discover others here at the minimum wage workforce arent all that thankful for their lot in life. did they send back the virtual slave or are they living the dream form the free ticket provided by the dragon lady who hires illeagals?
      my childhood on the highways of northdakota remembers lots of mexicans with a suitcase heading for work in the fields. today the factories look the other way and when the immagration officials show up they act surprised. i think if the employers all got ticketed with human trafficking the application process may change a bit. i am not condoning her actions it just sounds like an enemy nailed her. did noone really notice all the illeagals until now? my son talks about how chipotle near our house requires a manager who speaks spanish as no one ever speaks english. every time the immigration officials show up . the back door opens for extended periods and the hiring ads go back out to the illeagal community to start the application process again.

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      1. How would anyone know the woman’s status? There are a couple other similar nail businesses and another restaurant here who employees I wonder about. Many of the employees in these businesses do not speak English. I do not know how she got caught. Her sentencing is next week. Up to 20 years and $250,000.
        Both Chipotles here are almost entirely Caucasian and mostly college kids.

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        1. the illeagal market is ugly. i would support the change to nail unscrupulous emplotyers. mexicn roofers are big here. my son in law works with mexican window installers almost exclusively . the window guy hires through another company so he is not the employer. they are.

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    2. Those are very tough waters to navigate. There was an Indian restaurant in MInneapolis that was closed down for their hiring practices. Many of the workers were brought over from India and lived in a house owned by the owner of the restaurant where they worked. It was a sort of indentured servitude – they were paid low wages and a portion of the wages went back to the person who paid them – and yet they likely considered themselves better off than if they had stayed in their own country, where they didn’t have much opportunity. Their living conditions here were considered substandard – eight or nine people living together in a small house – but what was their alternative?

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  12. we have discussed the 5 second rule here on the trail before and how i am raising bulletproof bacteria ladedn children. the stuff that doesn’t kill you makes you stronger is the real perception at my house. i have one daughter who may not be mine really. i have suspicions. she has odd eating preferences and will not eat food if it touches other food and is doomed to be a non experimental person. i noticed the other day she has stopped eating her bread crusts. she stopped eating school lunch because a peanut butter sandwich cant be beat. i may need to focus on getting her back on track . she is interested in cooking and help figure out orange chicken the other day. she wanted potato onion pepper baked ditty so maybe she will be ok but i have concerns, if the food hits the floor in our house it is landing on one of the cleaner surfaces in the old abode. my wife has the cleaning phobia for floors and countertops.(but dont look for spider webs, they are lucky right)
    if you can still remember when it hit the floor thats close enough at my house. if you cant remember you may have to check for fur and make your own decision.

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  14. Just got home from Michigan visiting Mom. She’s doing well. I ate lunch at Blue Gilly’s restaurant on I 90 kinda near Madison. It was great. I can’t think of a song for the 5 second rule at the moment because I am fried. However, that could be a good thing if I turn out like that bluegill lunch I had….

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      1. I think things have changed since the format for Trail Baboon changed. You have to fill in your info again.

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    1. Ha! That’s my hamburger, and no, not yet. The bun was old and dry (though not moldy) and ready to be tossed. The patty is a frozen black bean burger that’s now back in the freezer, still waiting. Was doing that a mistake? I don’t know if bacteria can jump.

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        1. Clean? I suppose they look that way, but as you well know, so much depends on the lighting.

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  17. I can’t say as I have much more original to add. If I had a grace period longer than 30 seconds I can see where I would start second guessing myself far too much and might get stymied and then wouldn’t say anything. I, too, have written emails I did not send (or re-wrote them 5 or 6 times before I did have something I could send). I do eat things that fall on the floor (like tim, I feel that if it doesn’t kill you it makes you stronger – and with a basset hound under foot, it also keeps you speedy). If I didn’t occasionally do things that I later regretted, I couldn’t have learned from those mistakes – and life would be less rich without a few juicy mistakes to look back on in my dotage (whenever that arrives).

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    1. Keep it at bay as long as you can, Anna. I can feel mine breathing down my neck, but I refuse to succumb just yet. Juicy mistakes don’t necessarily fall in the category of regrets, and regrets are often things you didn’t say or didn’t do.

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  18. I wonder about the stereotype that women are “less disgusting’ – perhaps women just don’t have the resources to be so choosy. I, personally, don’t find it easy to throw away something edible…if it’s not too contaminated.

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    1. You really question that “stereotype”? I’m sure it is true. There are some people who save time in the morning by peeing as they stand under the shower. And when I say “some people,” do you think I refer to women? Noooooooo!

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