Late last year, a fine arts student in Pittsburgh set up a website dedicated to reconciling lost gloves - single ones rather than whole pairs - with their owners and estranged partners. Onecoldhand.com began partly as an art project, partly as an act of philanthropy. But the basic service proved so popular that it has already spread to other US cities. Sites in Canada and Italy are also planned, writes Frank McNally
It wouldn't work with socks, sadly. Maybe individual launderettes could post pictures on their websites. But the sheer extent of sock disappearance worldwide, combined with the notorious fact that most socks are lost in one's own house, means this is a problem not even the internet can solve. It also remains a challenge for science rather than art.
There is a popular myth that you can crack the odd-sock conundrum by buying all your pairs in the same colour, preferably black. This is just not so. For one thing, it assumes you do actually buy all your own socks - highly unlikely given the role played by those twin pillars of the global hosiery market, mothers and aunts.
Perhaps you are the sort of cold-hearted monster who can throw out sincerely-bought Christmas presents in an effort to keep your stocking population pure. Most of us are not so hard, however. And the price of decency is that we never gain full control over our socks drawer.
Assuming we ever could, admittedly, the one-colour idea is a potentially dramatic solution to the problem. Which is why the sock industry, with its vested interest, would never allow it to happen. Sock designers are ingenious at insinuating subtle patterns into their work - often so subtle that you only notice them for the first time when half of a pair has gone missing.
Not that they need patterns. It's amazing what they can do with colour alone. Trawling though my laundry basket for a matching pair, I am regularly amazed at how many different shades of black there are. Observed in sequence, you would swear they were all the same. But placed side by side, there can be an astonishingly rich spectrum.
THERE IS NO shortage of theories about where missing socks go. The extent of the phenomenon has encouraged some fanciful ideas, as have certain behavioural characteristics of the garments themselves. Take the almost sinister way a sock will cling to the roof of a spin-dryer when the cycle ends, for example.
This always evokes one of those film scenes in which a secret agent or a cat-burglar hangs quietly from a ceiling, trying to avoid detection by intruders below. It can be hard to resist the feeling on such occasions that you have caught the sock in the middle of an escape attempt. But of course we must resist anthropomorphism, especially when there are many more rational explanations to choose from.
Most plausible theories centre on the machine-washing process. To many of us, washing machines are very mysterious things, with their multiplicity of settings and flashing lights, like the control panels on a spaceship.
It's true that even the most sophisticated of these machines have broad similarities with the rivers in which our ancestors washed clothes. But rivers offered only one temperature or speed setting per day, usually. And if our ancestors ever lost an item of clothing in them, they could safely presume it had been washed downstream. There is no such comfort with machines.
In his influential Quantum Theory of Laundry, US scientist Dr Brian J. Reardon attempted to answer why, if a washing machine is a closed system, socks sometimes disappear in it; and why, when you use launderettes, other people's socks sometimes turn up in your load, no matter how many times you checked the machine beforehand.
Central to both questions, he believed, were the issues of where exactly lint - what we would call "fluff" - comes from, before it gathers in the filter (or "lint trap"); and the wide variations in the amount of lint found at any given time.
Dr Reardon's maths are too complicated to consider in detail here. But proceeding from the assumption that a sock can be expressed mathematically "as a wave function of position and time (Y(x,t))", he puts it through a programme involving, among other things, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and Schrodinger's Wave Equation.
He concludes, convincingly enough, that socks never actually disappear.
"Quite simply, at the time of disturbance or stopping of the machine, they have a wave function that puts them temporarily in the washing system or completely converts them to lint," he argues. "Furthermore, if a machine is disturbed during a subsequent washing cycle, there is a finite probability that a sock lost in previous cycles may reappear in the main washing compartment." Dr Reardon's theory has yet to gain wide acceptance, no doubt partly because of his startling conclusion that one should never clean out the filter, especially in a launderette machine, because this would be unfair to previous users who have lost a sock.
I used to have my own theory about where socks went, but it depended on the assumption that older pairs were more vulnerable to disappearance. Experience has taught me otherwise. So, attractively simple as it was, I have gradually had to let go of the idea that the missing socks were simply disappearing down - or indeed up - their own holes.