Links & Blinks

A few years ago, a security firm in Britain was trying to figure how to discourage teens from loitering around convenience stores. Eventually, they discovered a very high-pitched sound that ably drove the kids away, similar to nails on a chalk board but with a higher tone. Granted, such a noise is not useful if it also bothers the employees in the store as well but that was the major advantage - the old employees could not hear the tone.

Apparently, the average adult over the age of thirty has had minor hearing loss and can no longer discriminate extremely high pitched tones. Ah, but youth these days are more clever, eh? While these kinds of sounds were originally intended to drive teens away from places, teens have turned it to their advantage. (Or marketers to teens, whatever...) Now you can download these sounds as ring tones for your cell phone. Teens can leave their cell phones on during class at high school and when it rings, the teacher doesn't hear it but the rest of the class does.

Curious to see if you can hear it?

Test Tone #1

If you only hear background noise with people chatting and laughing, then you're old. :)

Test Tone #2

This one is much more obvious and much louder then the first version.

In other news, did you hear that the world's oldest living creature died recently? (Link) It was a 176 year old turtle owned by the Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin. It was supposedly one of the three tortoises that Charles Darwin brought back from the Galapagos Islands in 1835 while he was developing his theory of evolution. For the record, the oldest known creature ever was another turtle that died at the age of 188 that Captain James Cook gave as a gift to the royal family of Tonga.

Since I'm in the aviation industry, at least in terms of related software, I loved reading about this new invention. In the case of a crash landing for a plane, a patent was submitted in the USA to trigger explosives along one the edge of one wing. That would blow one wing off of the plane and the force would send the plane into a spin just before it hits the ground. The one remaining wing would act like a helicopter blade and slow the aircraft's descent. Sure, there are potential problems of having a line of explosives sitting there and the centrifugal force might kill the people on board, but those are just details.

I found this article about the advantages that homeless people have in using e-mail as their primary means of contact. The article also mentions a few homeless people that have made names for themselves with their own blogs. I was aware of the necessity of e-mail as the main form of communication for many people, homeless or otherwise, but it's an interesting article.

Finally, I have an interesting coincidence to share. I was chatting with retired neighbours by Andrea's house last month and the wife mentioned in passing that her husband was a veteran. I asked her a few more questions about it since I assumed that he had been stationed here in London at our army base. He was indeed based here in London, had fought in the Korean war, had gone with the army to Germany in the fifties and had been part of the official procession for the Queen's Coronation. What do you know, my grandfather was stationed here at the same time and did those very same things! In fact, I was looking at my grandfather's old medals and memorabilia when I was helping them move to B.C. a few months ago. He received one medal for being at the Coronation celebration. What a small world...