The Tongue Twisting Tooth Microphone

dylanduck writes "New Scientist has found a patent for a microphone that clips on your tooth, meaning you can stay in radio contact even the noisiest situations - like warzones. You use your tongue to flip it on and off. Here is the patent itself. The same article mentions a blimp that launches like a rocket."

Comments

Hedwig and the Angry Inch

[vena]

interesting. in outtakes for the movie, the band's publicist had this for her cell phone. she would push the tooth with her tongue to answer the call.

War zone?

[heavy snowfall]

I'll keep that in mind the next time I enter a war-zone. Like Henrico County, VA.

On a more serious note, this looks really interesting for diving. But it's just a patent, so I don't have too much faith in a product being released.

--
Use your bluetooth phone as a modem for Linux

A new combat injury

[Stephen Samuel]

I can see a lot of special forces soldiers suddenly biting their tongue in battle. Preventing that injury is probably going to be the subject of yet another patent.

Patents patents ...

[karvind]

Two other websites about stupid patents:

Patently Silly

Totally Absurd Inventions America's Goofiest Patents!

Design flaws?

[Cave_Monster]

I really wonder how effective this mic would be. How is it affected by food, saliva, smoke, water etc? If it's highly susceptible to damage from these substances then that would require you to continually be taking it in and out of your mouth. What a hassle and highly prone to getting lost. What about if you accidentally swallowed it? Is that dangerous? And can it damage your teeth if, for example, you bit down really hard?

None of these issues really get addressed in the article, not to mention the ease at switching it on and off. Those listening to the transmission could be deeply traumatised by what they hear :)

Sound quality inside your mouth?

[aywwts4]

Seriously though, only a portion of our voices comes from our throat, the articulation is produced at the tounge and the lips, how is this going to sound when it picks up whats inside the mouth as well as what we actualy project And on headsets we sometimes have to worry about the terribly annoying com problem of listening to someone pant at lenght during shows. now do we get to hear him lick the inside of his mouth with sloppy gurgling noises just because he forgot to flip a switch with his tounge? Ick. Maybe for air traffic controllers, but its hard to imagine any use of this microphone outside of the most extreme conditions.

Re:Good point

[The Evil Couch]

True enough. The ASIPS kicks the crap out of the old SINGCARS radio, being roughly half the size and weight and improved features, and even the ASIPS is getting up in age. I think it's been out for something like 7 years. While miniaturizing radios is always a step in the right direction, something I've always seen Platoon Leaders doing (except the one previous to my current one, worthless cherry) is having two hand-mikes up at a time. While sometimes confusing, having a pair of radio handsets clipped to the helmet is pretty easy and makes communicating on seperate radio nets relatively simple.

Sticking multiple switches in someone's mouth would probably suck.

Getting access to the PL's radios in case he gets hit or completely spazes out under fire and starts giving retarded orders would be a problem if they were connected to his mouth, though.

I mean, I could *say* I was punching the PL in the mouth so I could get access to his radios, but I don't think they'd let me keep my squad afterwards. :p

Pot, meet kettle

[Atario]

(usually stupid Americans) bitch about the Indian people's names being hard to pronounce. So, to you Mr. or Mrs. or Ms. backslashdot, here's a little clue: every language but English is phonetic. No other language has stupid rules where Y is 'sometimes' a vowel - where C is sometimes K - where "tongue" is pronounced "tung"

English is just as phonetic as all those others -- mainly because its spellings and pronunciations are derived from all those others. Your confusion arises because you don't know how (that?) different words in English come from different languages, and you need to treat each word with the rules of the language it came from for it to make sense.

Furthermore, your "{Americans|The English Language} sucks" argument is pretty much based on the very stupidity you claim to decry -- ignorance of pronunciation rules in different languages.

In short, educate yourself before you tell people you're smarter than them.