Hooray for Zoozve
Alphanumeric adventures and misadventures
Five years or so ago, I developed a fear of flying (actually, it turned out to be claustrophobia: of not having the option to get off the plane whenever I wanted to ... hello also escalators, trains, and motorways). On a journey back from Norway in autumn 2018, on what I remember as a particularly bumpy flight on a rainy and windy night, my younger sister, Beth, who was in the next seat, helped quell my fears in two simple yet transformative ways. Firstly, seeing my worry about the plane's every movement, angle, and adjustment, Beth, who is an engineer, said, 'That's what it's supposed to be doing'. Secondly, she handed me one bud of her (wired) earphones and put on some podcasts as a distraction technique.
Her podcasts of choice were supremely comforting, but they weren't light entertainment (although, as I wrote about last week, I'm a big fan of that too); they were reassuring to me because they were focused on the big things in life, including deep-dive science, social commentary, and unusual stories from all corners of the globe, stretching out into the universe, taking me away from the immediate plane-related panic, settling my body, and quietening my mind.
One of these podcasts I found particularly cheering and life-affirming: Radiolab, a US-based show best described by its own 'About us' blurb:
'Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser'.
It's a show I still listen to today, and it was the first one that sprang to mind when a friend asked for podcast recommendations last week. A recent episode, from the end of January this year, holds one of the best Radiolab stories yet.
Co-host Latif Nasser describes how he was putting his young son to bed one night when he noticed a surprising detail included in the solar system poster on the bedroom wall. Next to the illustration of the planet Venus, was a moon. And the moon had a name label: ZOOZVE (Nasser guessed that it would be pronounced Zoos-vey). He googled it to sense-check what seemed to be brand-new information. But the only results that came up were in Czech and were about, unsurprisingly, zoos.
Nasser also called NASA, who confirmed that Venus didn't have a moon called Zoozve and that, in fact, Venus didn't have a moon at all.
He tracked down the poster's creator, Alex Foster, an artist based in the UK, to ask him about this unusual inclusion ('who would be twisted enough to put a fake moon on a poster for kids'?). Alex was confident he had found the reference to Zoozve on the internet, in a list of moons, but couldn't re-find it now that he was searching again.
It was a mystery. Then, a breakthrough in the search (spoilers ahead).
A message from Latif Nasser's friend Liz Landau, a senior comms specialist (and proud space nerd) at NASA HQ. Having drawn a blank initially, she had a sudden moment of clarity – reseeing the word ZOOZVE for its true identity: 2002 VE68, an asteroid quasi-moon orbiting Venus.
So this moon-like object or, to use Nasser's words, this 'potato-shaped space rock the size of the Eiffel Tower' did exist; Alex Foster, the poster's illustrator, realised he had simply misread his own handwriting: twos for zeds, the letter O instead of zeros. You can see (and buy) the poster on Alex’s website.
Chatting to an astronomer, Paul Wiegert, Nasser learnt that all asteroids get auto-assigned provisional names after being discovered. They only get named properly once they have been sufficiently well studied and understood to warrant an official title (imagine if the same went for humans!). This sparked an idea, Nasser thought: wouldn't it be cool if 2002 VE68 was renamed Zoozve?
He set about proposing the name Zoozve to the (also-not-so-well-named) International Astronomical Union's Working Group Small Bodies Nomenclature.
And, guess what? The name Zoozve was formally adopted this week! Wow! That amazing hunk of space rock is now known by its true and proper name: Zoozve. A truly awesome typo-type tale. I really recommend you hear it unfold in Radiolab-style: the excitement in the co-hosts' voices and of the clever space people they chat to is what really makes the story come alive, even now you know the outcome (plus, there is another fun reveal in the second of the follow-up episodes).
Inspired by the Zoozve story, I set out to write today's Substack about other fantastic twists and turns arising from alphanumeric misreadings. Perhaps mail delivered to the wrong address sparking a lifelong love affair?
But when I did a google dig (with a relatively sharp search-spade), almost all the results I found were from the medical field and were accompanied by heavy words of warning. An article published by the Institute for Safe Medication Practices listed several alarming incidents of incorrect treatment due to misreadings of drug names and dosing (size/number of doses), leading to unfortunate and, in some cases, life-changing consequences for patients.
So, it didn't feel appropriate to write a piece called 'Embrace your mistakes!' – even though I'm on board with that as generally good advice in life, I couldn't find an angle here that didn't somehow sound like I was making light of serious, albeit inadvertent, medical errors. So, instead, in the vein of 'write what you know', I thought I'd share:
Here are my three tips to prevent misreadings (at least in the Latin alphabet of twenty-six letters and numeric system of ten numerals).
Because apart from this one-off quasi-moon-naming adventure, they're usually best avoided, right?
Help yourself to read your own handwriting (if you still pick up a pen/pencil now and again)
When I was in school, I saw a friend write their 7s and Zs with a bar across the downward stroke, and I thought it looked different and mysterious, so I practised writing them that way too.
And now it seems, if I were a doctor or nurse or pharmacist, I could save someone's life this way ... or at least prevent a death.
Of course, plenty (most) stuff isn't handwritten these days, not even shopping lists, but if you ever do put pen to paper, you may as well add those bars (plus those extra strokes on the letter I and the number 1), just to be on the safe side.
Make friends with uncool tools
As a copywriter and creative, there is an expectation, an assumption, that I'll be typing into one of those beautiful designery full-screen documents. I'm thinking of Scrivener, OmWriter, and someone mentioned Notion has this feature too. Plus, Substack right here has a lovely interface for creating posts.
And I get it. That's my aesthetic preference too: milk-pond calm. But in fact, I'm almost always typing in what I think of as my swimming pools: TextEdit in plain-text mode:
And Word in reveal-formatting mode (and zoomed to 200%).
Nothing can hide from these two, not least any extra or missing spaces of the ZOOZVE / 2002 VE kind). They are my trusty tools of the trade, even if they are a little uncool. These days they are joined, whether they like it or not, by my frenemy AI.
Use an accessible, easily legible font
Named after J. Rober Atkinson, the founder of the Braille Institute, Atkinson hyperlegible is my recommended font for clarity of communication.
It is, as the name suggests, great for legibility and readability, thanks to its clever design, which is focused on letterforms to help everyone, especially people with low vision, to easily distinguish between the different letter and number characters.
You can download it free from the Braille Institute website.
February is low-vision awareness month, so even more reason to give this font a whirl.
Okay, now time to go and immerse yourself in the world of Zoozve, on the Radiolab podcast.