Using a delicate magnetic caliper employed by violin makers to measure in millimeters an instrument’s walls and veneers, the conservators tracked the wood’s thickness at short intervals along the crack.

While researchers typically measure IIV by assessing the same person at short intervals—such as every 24 hours for a week or five times each day—psychologist Nadin Beckmann of Durham University in England and her colleagues adopted a different approach.

Gisotti explained that there were many people in line and the pope did want to spread germs as one person after another repeatedly kissed his hand at short intervals.

“The sound of taut ropes lashing on concrete at short intervals is, to me, the sound of summer.”

To distract from their inability or unwillingness to reform, they instruct their citizens to experience elation and outrage at short intervals, drowning the future in the present.