The Mind of an Inventor

kipb writes to tell us that Newsweek has an interesting article about Danny Hillis and the company he co-founded called Applied Minds. One of the featured devices that Hillis talks about is a device designed to increase the amount of privacy one has working in the average corporate cubicle. "Babble" is about the size of a paperback book and plugs into the phone with two external speakers that you place on the top of your cube. While holding a normal conversation on the phone Babble plays back random meaningless snipits of your own voice which makes your conversation practically unintelligible to people as close as 4 feet away.

Comments

Re:Meaningless Snipits

[meringuoid]

What if the "meaningless snipits" just happen to have the words "fire", "bankruptcy", "layoffs", "harassment", "pregnant" or "terror" in them?

Ooh. Now I want one of these. Never mind the rest of it, just that last word and perhaps others like it. Hook it up to your VOIP system and call a likeminded prankster, and leave it running. It'd gum up Echelon something awful :-)

... and we're hiring

[yppiz]

If you are in the SF area and very well versed in Java, C, or AJAX-like techniques, and looking to work on really interesting problems, let me know. Bonus points if you're a hacker (in the traditional sense).

--Pat

Re:... and we're hiring

[yppiz]

I should have mentioned that the we in the parent post is Applied Minds, the company that Danny Hillis co-founded.

--Pat

Re:... and we're hiring

[carndearg]

Those of you who modded the parent offtopic should check out the guy's www site:

http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~zippy

"I work at Applied Minds with Danny Hillis, Kurt Bollacker, and a bunch of other cool people."

How about...

[Spencer Mabrito]

...reading the linked article? It is full of descriptions of amazing things, and indeed does say that Hillis is quite childlike - his inventions are almost toys, very expensive and shiny toys. It's not just Babble.

Re:Mind of Mentifex

[Flamefly]

Ignore the links to "True Artificial Intelligence" and "Stumbling upon" which link to Mentifex's web site.
He is a troll of the AI community. Before you assign him informative mod points for links to his own useless work, please read the following page http://www.nothingisreal.com/mentifex_faq.html

Re:Brilliant

[Pyrowolf]

Go here to see babble... go here to hear babble.

Re:Active noise cancellation anyone??

[Znork]

Actually, there are _very_ effective noise cancellation solutions.

They're called 'walls', and come in a variety of efficiency levels.

However, they're probably not 'hip' enough for todays corporate interior designers, and they may not be patentable, which makes this solution a more desireable one for the interested parties.

Re:What good is this?

[parkrrrr]

I think I heard this guy interviewed on NPR's Day to Day a month or two ago. He contends that it works better than noise cancellation because the nonsense doesn't activate the speech-recognition parts of the brain in the same way that even a quiet conversation down the hall might. In some sense, your brain gives up on trying to interpret the babble and starts ignoring it, whereas a barely-audible conversation will just make some part of your brain work harder to attempt to pick out the signal from the noise.

So, in your case, you would actually be less distracted by the stupid people in the next cube, even though they might objectively be a bit louder.