A Needle in a Haystack

Walking back to my hotel in Amsterdam at 2am, I come across a large number of people searching the ground with their phones. I couldn’t help but notice that they were also underneath one of the not-very-frequent lampposts on the street and wondered if it was because of that old joke about better light.

They were asking any passers-by to help search for a diamond heart that had accidentally been ripped from a necklace. I joined the search, but after thirty minutes it was not looking hopeful so I ran to my hotel to grab a bright flashlight. Coming back, I was puzzled to find them a bit down the street from where I had left them. “What happened? Why are you looking over here,” I asked. Strangely, they didn’t quite realize that they had moved, so I asked them to replay the start of the evening for me so that we could look in the right spot. The group had been walking home from a bar, when the brother playfully attacked his sister and accidentally yanked the necklace, breaking it. No one was sure if the jewel had flown far away or just dropped into clothing or on the street; they also weren’t sure any longer what part of the street they were on when things went down. Most confusing of all, the sister kept describing the jewel as a “diamond heart… a red, diamond heart.” Diamonds are not red. ¹

Being all suspicious of a scam, I quizzed them a bit more but they seemed to just be drunk people who ran into some bad luck. We reenacted the scene a little bit and tried to imagine where the heart could have flown to. And then using the brighter light, did some scans around the area where they were searching, sifting through glass and leaves. Still nothing.

My new friends were all concentrated “down the street” from where I first met them. I felt like we had searched the area pretty well, and then I had a hunch: what if they had gotten confused over time, and where I first saw them was closer to where the heart had been lost? I moved back up the street, but was using my phone light again and could not see much of anything.

A technique I have previously used was to lay on the ground to get a worm’s eye view of vertical displacement. That is, I put my eye to the ground and look for any bumps in the road. I guess seems pretty strange if you haven’t done it; in fact, a new passerby sat on me and played with my hair while her boyfriend took a picture us² … and then they walked away without talking to us! I was trying to decide how I felt about that when a glint of red in the street caught my eye and turned into the fabled diamond heart we had been looking for!

Everyone jumped on me to hug me. I was still laying on the ground, so I imagine that it looked like one of those piles of people in a football game. It felt like when I was a kid and we would play the dogpile game.

And we all lived happily ever after.

Footnotes