Daniel sent us this one — and it's actually a follow-up to a conversation we had about silent reading and how people learned to read in their heads. He mentions Paul Saenger's 1997 work, Space Between Words, which traces the origin of silent reading. And his real question is bigger than the book itself. How does someone like Saenger study something that niche — the literal space between words — and find stable academic employment? And more importantly, how do we safeguard these corners of academia when the profit motive that drives most of the economy provides very little room for esoteric inquiry? Daniel's asking for the pushback we can use when these areas come under ridicule, the case for why funding them isn't a luxury we can't afford but something closer to essential.
By the way, DeepSeek V four Pro is writing our script today, so if anything comes out especially coherent, that's why.
I'll take that as a compliment to the model and a subtle dig at us. So where do we start? Because I think Daniel's question has two layers. One is the practical mechanics — how does somebody actually build a career around studying word spacing in medieval manuscripts — and the other is the philosophical case for why that career should exist at all.
Let's start with the practical, because Paul Saenger's story is genuinely instructive. He's the George A. Poole the Third Curator of Rare Books at the Newberry Library in Chicago. He's been there for decades. And what's interesting is that his position isn't in a university department — it's at an independent research library. The Newberry is privately endowed, which means it's not subject to the same funding cycles and political pressures that public universities face. That's one answer right there to Daniel's question about stable employment. Independent research institutions, private endowments, and library curatorships create pockets of protection for this kind of work.
The first answer is, don't look for this kind of scholarship in university departments. Look in libraries, archives, places where the mission is preservation and deep cataloguing rather than teaching loads and grant cycles.
Saenger's book didn't come out of a tenure-track position where he was teaching four courses a semester. It came out of years of work at the Newberry, where his job was literally to understand medieval manuscripts at a granular level. The question of when and how readers began inserting spaces between words — that emerged from handling thousands of manuscripts and noticing a pattern that nobody had systematically documented.
That's worth pausing on, because the discovery itself is a great example of why this kind of scholarship matters in ways that aren't obvious at the outset. Saenger noticed that in the earliest Latin manuscripts, from roughly the seventh century and earlier, there were no spaces between words. Scriptura continua, they call it. Everything ran together. And then, gradually, over centuries, scribes in Irish and Anglo-Saxon monasteries began inserting spaces. By the twelfth century, word separation was standard across Europe.
The implications are enormous. Saenger's argument — and he's not the only one, but his is the most comprehensive treatment — is that word separation changed how humans think. When you have to sound out every syllable aloud to parse where one word ends and the next begins, reading is inherently a communal, oral activity. When the visual cue of the space lets you recognize words at a glance, reading can become silent, private, interior. That shift enabled everything from heretical private reflection to the modern concept of the self. I'm not exaggerating — Saenger traces a direct line from word spacing to the conditions that made Descartes possible.
This is where I'd push back if I were a skeptical legislator or a taxpayer looking at a grant application. I'd say, fine, word spacing led to Descartes. But we already know that. The discovery's been made. Why do we need to keep funding the next Paul Saenger to study whatever other microscopic feature of manuscript culture hasn't been documented yet?
That's the question that gets to the heart of Daniel's concern, and I think there are three answers. The first one is that you never know which microscopic feature is going to unlock a fundamental insight about human cognition or history. Saenger couldn't have known, when he started counting word spaces in eighth-century Irish gospels, that he'd end up writing a book that changes how we understand the development of silent reading and interiority. Nobody knows in advance which niche inquiry is going to be transformative. That's the nature of basic research.
The first defense is an epistemic humility argument. We're bad at predicting which knowledge will matter, so we should fund broadly.
That's not just a humanities argument. It's the same argument that funds pure mathematics and theoretical physics. Nobody knew what non-Euclidean geometry was good for until Einstein needed it for general relativity. Nobody knew what number theory was good for until cryptography became the backbone of the internet. The gap between discovery and application can be centuries.
I think the humanities version of this argument is actually harder to make, because the payoff isn't a technology. It's a refinement of how we understand ourselves. And that's harder to point to on a spreadsheet.
Which brings me to the second defense, and it's the one I find most compelling. These esoteric fields are the seed bank of the humanities. When a field gets too applied, too focused on immediate relevance, it starts drawing its questions from the present moment. It becomes reactive. The person studying eighth-century Irish punctuation isn't trying to be relevant. They're following a thread because it's there, because the manuscripts are there, because nobody has traced it before. And sometimes that thread leads somewhere that completely reorients how we understand a period, a practice, a way of thinking.
There's a phrase I've heard you use before — "the questions we don't know we should be asking." That's what niche scholarship generates. Not answers to existing questions, but new questions entirely.
Saenger's book didn't answer the question "how did silent reading begin?" — that wasn't a question anyone was really asking in a systematic way before him. He created the question. And now it's a whole subfield. There are scholars who've built careers extending, challenging, and refining his argument. That's how human knowledge advances. Not by answering the questions on the existing list, but by adding new questions to the list.
We've got the epistemic humility argument, and we've got the seed bank argument. What's the third one?
The third one is harder to make in polite company, but I think it's true. Some knowledge is worth having even if it never produces a single practical application. Understanding how medieval scribes introduced word spacing and how that changed cognitive practices is worth knowing for the same reason the orbit of Jupiter's moons is worth knowing. It's part of the full account of what humans are and how we got here.
That's the intrinsic value argument, and I think it makes a lot of people uncomfortable because it sounds elitist. It sounds like you're saying we should fund the hobbies of tweed-wearing academics while potholes go unfilled.
I know, and I think the way around that is to stop framing it as a zero-sum choice between esoteric knowledge and practical needs. The United States federal budget for the National Endowment for the Humanities is about two hundred and seven million dollars a year. That's less than the cost of a single F-35 fighter jet. The idea that we can't afford to fund niche humanities research is just arithmetically false. We're choosing not to, and we're pretending it's a necessity rather than a choice.
That's a useful reframe. The question isn't "can we afford this" — it's "is this among the things we value enough to spend a tiny fraction of our collective resources on.
I'd argue the answer should be yes, partly because the total cost is so small relative to the potential upside, and partly because the alternative is a kind of intellectual monoculture that's dangerous. If the only research that gets funded is research with obvious commercial or military applications, you end up with a very narrow, instrumental view of what knowledge is. You lose the capacity to ask questions that don't have an immediate payoff. And over time, that impoverishes the whole intellectual ecosystem.
Let me play the skeptic again, because I think Daniel wants us to actually arm him with responses he can use. The skeptic says, fine, but there are thousands of niche fields. How do we decide which ones to fund? Surely not every esoteric inquiry deserves a salary and a research budget.
That's a fair question, and I don't think the answer is "fund everything." Peer review exists for a reason. Paul Saenger's work was published by Stanford University Press and went through rigorous academic review. He didn't just declare himself an expert in word spacing and get a paycheck. The system — imperfect as it is — does filter. The question is whether the filter should be "does this have obvious practical value" or "is this rigorous, original, and potentially significant." I'm arguing for the second filter.
I'd add that the "practical value" filter is itself deeply flawed, because it's always practical value as judged by the people holding the purse strings at a particular moment. In 1975, the practical value of studying bat echolocation wasn't obvious. Now it informs sonar technology and drone navigation. In 1960, the practical value of studying how bacteria defend themselves against viruses wasn't obvious. Now CRISPR is a multi-billion-dollar technology. The people making funding decisions are terrible at predicting what will matter.
There's a wonderful example from the history of science. When Michael Faraday was demonstrating electromagnetic induction, someone asked him what use it was. He supposedly replied, "What use is a newborn baby?" That's the posture we need. Not "this will be useful someday" — which is still an instrumental justification — but "we don't yet know what this will enable, and that's exactly why we should support it.
Let's bring this back to Saenger specifically, because I think his career trajectory is instructive beyond just the independent library model. He didn't just write Space Between Words. He also wrote a catalogue of the Newberry's pre-1500 manuscripts. He's done deeply technical bibliographic work that only a handful of people in the world are qualified to assess. And that kind of expertise doesn't emerge from a system that demands a paper every eighteen months on a topic of broad interest. It emerges from giving someone decades to go deep.
That's the temporal dimension that's easy to overlook. The kind of scholarship Saenger does requires long, uninterrupted stretches of concentration. It requires the freedom to follow a hunch through thousands of manuscripts across dozens of libraries. It's not compatible with the publish-or-perish cycle, or with the grant-application treadmill, or with the demand to demonstrate impact in six-month increments.
One practical answer to Daniel's question — how does someone study this and find stable employment — is that the system has to include institutional models that are designed for the long term. Independent research libraries. Positions where the job description is "curate this collection and understand it deeply" rather than "produce X publications per year.
Those models are under real pressure. The Newberry is well-endowed, but many independent research libraries are struggling. University presses are facing budget cuts. Tenure-track positions are being replaced with adjunct roles that don't allow for long-term research agendas. The infrastructure for deep, slow scholarship is eroding.
Which means Daniel's question isn't just philosophical. It's urgent. If we don't actively defend these institutional models, they'll disappear, and the next Paul Saenger won't have a place to do his work.
Let me add another layer here, because I think there's a political dimension that doesn't get discussed enough. When esoteric humanities research gets attacked, it's often framed as a left-wing concern. The stereotype is that it's all critical theory and deconstruction, and that conservatives should want to defund it. But Saenger's work is not ideologically fashionable. It's deeply traditional scholarship — philology, paleography, the careful study of material texts. And it has produced insights about the history of reading, cognition, and religious practice that are important regardless of your political commitments.
The culture war framing of the humanities misses the fact that most of what happens in these fields is not political at all. It's people trying to figure out when Irish monks started putting spaces between words, or how medieval readers organized their libraries, or what marginal annotations tell us about reading practices. That's not ideology. It's curiosity, disciplined by evidence.
I'd argue that conservatives, of all people, should be invested in this kind of scholarship. If you care about tradition, about understanding the roots of our civilization, about preserving the cultural inheritance of the West — then you should care about the people who study how that inheritance was transmitted, how texts were copied and read and understood. Saenger's book is a profound contribution to understanding the history of Christianity, because the shift from oral to silent reading had enormous implications for religious practice and belief.
That's a clever reframe. Don't defend esoteric humanities research as a liberal cause. Defend it as a conservative cause — the preservation and deep understanding of tradition.
I'm not being clever. I mean it. The people who complain about the decline of the humanities and the loss of cultural literacy are often the same people who mock niche research as useless. You can't have it both ways. Cultural literacy depends on a deep infrastructure of scholarship. The reason we know anything about how medieval people read, thought, and prayed is that generations of scholars did the painstaking work of figuring it out. Defunding that work guarantees that future generations will know less about their own inheritance.
Let me pivot slightly, because I think there's another angle on Daniel's question that we haven't touched yet. He asks about the pushback when these areas come under ridicule. And I think the ridicule is worth taking seriously, because it's not just ignorance. There's a genuine intuition behind it. The intuition is that studying word spacing seems absurdly narrow — that it's a parody of academic overspecialization.
The response to that is to show, not just assert, that the narrow focus connects to something much larger. Saenger's book is about word spacing, but it's really about the history of reading, which is really about the history of cognition, which is really about what it means to be a thinking human being. The narrow focus is the entry point, not the destination.
That's the move. Don't apologize for the narrowness. Explain what it unlocks. Every field has its version of this. In biology, someone spends twenty years studying a single protein and unlocks a mechanism that explains a whole class of diseases. In physics, someone studies the behavior of electrons in a particular crystal lattice and discovers a new quantum state. The narrowness is a feature, not a bug. It's how depth happens.
The ridicule often comes from a place of not understanding how knowledge is actually produced. The popular image of the scholar is someone who reads widely and synthesizes big ideas. But actual scholarly progress usually comes from someone who knows one tiny corner of the archive better than anyone else and notices something that doesn't fit.
Saenger noticed that the pattern of word separation didn't match the standard narrative about the history of reading. The standard narrative said silent reading emerged in the later Middle Ages, maybe the twelfth or thirteenth century. But Saenger found evidence in much earlier manuscripts — Irish and Anglo-Saxon texts from the seventh and eighth centuries — that suggested the practice was already developing. That anomaly led him to re-examine the whole timeline, and eventually to a book that changed the field.
That's how it works. Anomalies that only someone deeply immersed in the material would notice. If you don't fund the deep immersion, you don't get the anomaly detection, and the standard narrative — which is often wrong — never gets corrected.
The ridicule response has a few layers. First, narrowness is how depth happens. Second, the narrow question is always connected to a bigger question if you trace it far enough. And third, the person mocking the research usually has no idea what the research actually found, because if they did, they'd understand why it matters.
I'd add a fourth. Ask the mocker what they think should be funded instead. Because usually the answer reveals an assumption that only obviously practical research deserves support. And then you can point out that "obviously practical" is a historically contingent judgment that has been wrong more often than it's been right.
Let's talk about another dimension of Daniel's question — the "relentless profit incentive" part. He's pointing to something real, which is that market economies systematically undervalue knowledge that doesn't have a clear commercial application. The market will fund research into better battery chemistry because there's a huge payoff. It won't fund research into eighth-century Irish punctuation because there's no product to sell.
That's fine, as far as it goes. Markets are good at allocating resources for commercial goods. But knowledge isn't just a commercial good. It's a public good, like clean air or national defense. The market won't provide enough of it on its own, so we fund it collectively. That's the basic case for public funding of basic research, and it applies to the humanities just as much as to the sciences.
Though I think we should be honest that the case is harder to make for the humanities, not because the humanities are less valuable, but because their value is harder to quantify. If you fund battery research, you can point to better batteries. If you fund manuscript research, you get... a richer understanding of medieval reading practices. Which is valuable, but it doesn't fit neatly into a cost-benefit analysis.
That's true, and I think the response is to refuse the terms of the cost-benefit analysis rather than to try to win within them. The question "what's the economic value of understanding how silent reading developed" is a category error. It's like asking what's the economic value of knowing your grandmother's stories. It's not an economic question. It's a question about what kind of civilization we want to be.
That's the civilizational argument. A society that only values knowledge it can monetize is a society that's decided to be ignorant about most of its own history and culture. That's not a decision we should make lightly, and it's certainly not a decision we should pretend is forced on us by budget arithmetic.
The idea that we can't afford to fund niche humanities research is just not serious. The total budget of the NEH is about one one-hundredth of one percent of federal spending. We're not talking about a major fiscal choice. We're talking about a rounding error that happens to have enormous symbolic and practical significance.
One of Daniel's questions is about stable employment for people doing this kind of work. And I think we should be concrete about what that looks like. Saenger's position at the Newberry is one model. Another is the traditional tenured professorship, which is designed precisely to protect scholars from short-term pressure and allow them to pursue long-term research agendas. The erosion of tenure is directly relevant here.
Tenure was created to protect academic freedom — not just the freedom to express unpopular political opinions, but the freedom to pursue research that doesn't have obvious immediate value. When you replace tenure-track positions with adjunct roles, you're not just making life harder for individual academics. You're changing the kind of research that gets done. An adjunct teaching five courses a semester at three different institutions cannot write the next Space Between Words. They don't have the time, the resources, or the institutional support.
This connects to something Daniel didn't explicitly ask but that's implicit in his prompt. He mentions "the rigidity of our fact-checking and verification process" — the fact that when he looks up these obscure academics, they turn out to be real. That verification infrastructure is itself a public good. It depends on libraries, archives, peer-reviewed journals, university presses — all of which require funding and institutional support.
The peer review system for a book like Saenger's is a fascinating thing to think about. Who are the peer reviewers for a manuscript on the history of word spacing? There are maybe a dozen people in the world qualified to evaluate that work at a high level. They're scattered across institutions in Europe and North America. They review the manuscript as a service to the field, usually unpaid. That system works because there's a scholarly ecosystem that makes it possible. If that ecosystem collapses, we lose not just the production of niche knowledge but the ability to verify it.
The fact-checking that Daniel appreciates — the ability to confirm that Paul Saenger is a real scholar who really wrote a real book about word spacing — is downstream of the same funding decisions we're discussing. Cut the funding, and eventually you cut the verification.
Let me bring in another example that I think strengthens the case. There's a scholar named Mary Carruthers who wrote a book called The Book of Memory, about how medieval people conceptualized memory and used mental techniques to organize knowledge. It's deeply esoteric — she's analyzing manuscript diagrams and medieval metaphors for memory storage. And it's also one of the most influential books in medieval studies in the last fifty years. It changed how scholars understand medieval cognition, education, and literary composition. Nobody could have predicted that when she started the research. She followed a thread because it was interesting, and it led somewhere transformative.
That's the pattern. And it's worth noting that both Saenger and Carruthers are medievalists. Medieval studies is a field that's been particularly vulnerable to the "why fund this" attack, because it's about a period that's distant and unfamiliar to most people. And yet it's produced some of the most profound insights about reading, memory, and cognition that we have.
There's a broader point here about the relationship between the esoteric and the essential. The most fundamental insights often come from the most seemingly obscure investigations. Darwin spent eight years studying barnacles. That's not a metaphor — he literally spent eight years dissecting and classifying barnacles. It was during that work that he developed the taxonomic skills and the understanding of variation that made On the Origin of Species possible. The barnacles weren't a distraction from the big idea. They were the path to it.
That's a great example. And I think it points to something about the psychology of deep research. The people who do this kind of work aren't just tolerating the narrowness because they hope it'll lead somewhere big. They're fascinated by the narrow thing. Saenger clearly found word spacing intrinsically interesting. The manuscripts were beautiful, the puzzle was absorbing, the detective work was satisfying. The big implications emerged from that genuine engagement with the material.
Which means you can't replicate this by trying to skip to the big implications. You can't say, "let's just fund the research that has obvious significance and skip the barnacle phase." The barnacle phase is where the significance comes from. The deep engagement with the specific is what generates the general insight.
The defense of esoteric research is partly a defense of a certain kind of intellectual temperament. The person who wants to spend twenty years cataloguing watermarks in fifteenth-century paper is not a defective scholar who couldn't think of anything more important to do. They're someone whose particular cast of mind — patient, detail-oriented, absorbed by material evidence — is exactly what's needed to produce certain kinds of knowledge. If we don't fund that temperament, we lose the knowledge it produces.
I'd argue we're already losing it. The number of PhDs awarded in paleography — the study of historical handwriting — has dropped dramatically in the last thirty years. There are medieval manuscripts in archives that nobody alive can read, because the expertise required to decipher them isn't being replenished. That's not an abstract concern. Those manuscripts contain unknown texts, lost works, evidence about the past that we're choosing to leave inaccessible.
That's a concrete example of what's at stake. Not "we might miss some interesting insights" but "we are losing the ability to read documents we already possess." That's a genuine loss, and it's irreversible if the expertise disappears.
It's happening in multiple fields. Languages go extinct. Traditional knowledge vanishes. The academic version of this is the loss of deep scholarly expertise in fields that don't have obvious economic value. Once that expertise is gone, it's extraordinarily hard to rebuild, because you can't learn paleography from a textbook. You have to learn it from someone who already knows it, working with actual manuscripts.
We've covered the philosophical case, the institutional models, the civilizational argument, the temperament point, and the concrete stakes. Let me try to synthesize what Daniel can actually say when someone mocks niche humanities research or questions its funding.
Give me the pushback playbook.
First, the narrowness is the point. Depth requires focus. The person studying word spacing in eighth-century manuscripts is doing something that can't be done by a generalist, and the insights that come from that depth can't be generated any other way.
Second, you can't predict which narrow inquiry will unlock something transformative. Saenger's word spacing research changed how we understand the history of reading, cognition, and the self. Darwin's barnacles led to natural selection. The people who mock esoteric research are asserting a predictive ability that nobody has.
Third, the cost is trivial. The entire NEH budget is a rounding error in federal spending. The question isn't whether we can afford this. It's whether we value it enough to spend a tiny fraction of our resources on it.
Fourth, the alternative is intellectual monoculture. If we only fund research with obvious commercial or military applications, we get a very narrow kind of knowledge, and we lose the capacity to ask questions that don't have immediate payoff.
Fifth, this isn't a left-right issue. A lot of the most esoteric humanities research is deeply traditional scholarship that conservatives should be invested in preserving. Understanding the history of your civilization requires supporting the people who study it at a granular level.
Sixth, we're already losing expertise in fields like paleography. The manuscripts exist. We just can't read them anymore. That's not a hypothetical future loss. It's happening now.
Seventh, the ridicule usually comes from not understanding what the research actually found. If someone mocks Saenger's book without having read it, they're mocking a caricature. The book isn't just about word spacing. It's about how a small change in scribal practice transformed human cognition. That's not trivial. It's fundamental.
That's a solid playbook. And I'd add an eighth point, which is that this research is part of the infrastructure of cultural literacy. When you read a popular history book or watch a documentary about the Middle Ages, the author is drawing on decades of specialized scholarship by people like Saenger. The accessible version depends on the inaccessible version. Cut the roots and the tree dies.
That's a good metaphor. The popular understanding is the visible tree. The niche scholarship is the root system. Most people never see the roots, but without them there's no tree.
The root system takes time to grow. Saenger's book came out in 1997, but the research behind it took decades. The book is about three hundred and fifty pages, and the bibliography runs to dozens of pages of manuscripts consulted across libraries in Europe and North America. That's not something you can produce in a two-year grant cycle.
I want to circle back to something you said earlier about independent research libraries, because I think it's an underappreciated part of the answer. The Newberry, the Huntington, the Folger — these institutions were created by philanthropists who understood that deep scholarship requires protected space. They're not perfect models, and they depend on endowments that not every field can access. But they're proof that it's possible to create institutional homes for this kind of work.
They're under threat in their own way. Endowments took a hit during the financial crises. Operating costs rise. The pressure to demonstrate public engagement and measurable impact is real even for independent institutions. But they're still one of the best models we have for supporting the kind of scholarship we're defending.
There's also the European model, which is worth mentioning. In Germany, the Max Planck Institutes support basic research across the sciences and humanities with long time horizons and stable funding. In France, the CNRS does something similar. These are state-funded institutions designed explicitly to support research that doesn't have immediate commercial application. The United States has nothing quite like them for the humanities.
The NEH is the closest thing, and its budget is minuscule compared to the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health. The NSF budget is about ten billion dollars. The NEH budget is about two hundred million. That's a fifty-to-one ratio. I'm not saying the NEH should be as large as the NSF, but the disparity reflects a set of priorities that's worth questioning.
The disparity has consequences. The ratio of humanities PhDs to available tenure-track positions has been terrible for years. Brilliant scholars are leaving the field because they can't find stable employment. The next Paul Saenger might be driving for a rideshare company right now because the institutional support isn't there.
That's not an exaggeration. I know people with PhDs from top programs who couldn't find academic jobs and are now working in completely unrelated fields. They have the training, the temperament, and the ideas. They just don't have the institutional home. And the knowledge they would have produced is simply lost.
Daniel's question about stable employment isn't just about being nice to academics. It's about whether we're going to have the next generation of deep scholarship, or whether we're going to let that capacity atrophy because we couldn't find the institutional will to support it.
Let me add one more thought before we wrap up. There's a tendency, when defending the humanities, to reach for economic justifications. "Humanities majors learn critical thinking skills that employers value." "Cultural tourism generates revenue." That kind of thing. And I think those arguments are true but also a trap. They concede the premise that the only valid justification is economic. And once you concede that, you've already lost, because the economic case for paleography is never going to be as strong as the economic case for petroleum engineering.
You're saying don't make the economic case at all?
I'm saying make the economic case as a secondary point if you want, but don't let it be the primary frame. The primary frame should be that a civilization that doesn't understand its own past is impoverished in ways that can't be measured in GDP. We fund this research because we want to know who we are and how we got here. That's not a luxury. It's a basic responsibility.
I think that's right. And it's worth saying explicitly that "who we are and how we got here" isn't just a matter of knowing the big events and the famous names. It's knowing the texture of past lives — how people read, how they prayed, how they organized their mental worlds. That texture comes from the kind of granular scholarship we've been discussing. You can't get it from a textbook summary.
Saenger's book is a perfect example. You can summarize the history of silent reading in a paragraph. But that paragraph doesn't give you the feel of what it was like to read before word spacing — the cognitive effort, the oral muttering, the way reading was a physical performance rather than a private act. The granular detail is what makes the past come alive. And that detail only exists because someone spent years in the archives.
The final answer to Daniel's question — how do we safeguard these important corners of academia — is multi-layered. We need institutional models that protect long-term research from short-term pressure. We need funding mechanisms that don't demand immediate practical payoff. We need to push back against the ridicule by explaining what the narrow focus actually unlocks. And we need to insist, as a civilizational commitment, that understanding our past is worth paying for.
We need to act on this now, because the infrastructure is eroding. The independent libraries are under pressure. The tenure system is shrinking. The expertise is disappearing. This isn't a hypothetical future problem. It's a present reality.
Daniel, I hope that gives you some ammunition. And I hope the next time someone mocks an obscure academic monograph, you can say, let me tell you about a man named Paul Saenger and what he discovered about the space between words.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the 1880s, a naturalist in the Solomon Islands calculated that a single horseshoe bat, echolocating through a cave, emits approximately fourteen thousand ultrasonic pulses per hour. Over a single night of foraging, that's enough acoustic energy — if converted to a continuous tone audible to humans — to ring a church bell for eleven seconds.
I have so many questions about the unit conversion choices there.
Church bell seconds is not a standard unit I was familiar with.
This has been My Weird Prompts, produced by Hilbert Flumingtop. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts — it helps other people find the show. You can find every episode at myweirdprompts.I'm Herman Poppleberry.
I'm Corn. We'll be back next time.
