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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.
Oh great. Gimme 40 of those in an office & see how long before someone snaps...
the voices! the voices!..!
In Kissinger's memoirs, White House Years, he describes how he and others, probably Nixon included, while in Moscow for a summit meeting, brought along a device I believe he called "the babbler", which was a tape player that played the sounds of many people speaking or maybe splices of babble. Then they could converse in their presumably bugged living quarters while playing the babbler. Kissinger wrote that it became intolerable after a while, it was so distracting.
Here's a nice project for someone: Play the POTUS's speeches into this thing and record what comes out.
No - increase headaches.
I thought it was going to be a cone of silence like device, where it could cut down on outside distractions - maybe some white noise generation. A cone of silence type device.
Nope, it's a damned chatterbox. I can't imagine anyone who would want to hear random snippets of themselves while talking on the phone, talk about totally breaking your train of thought.
If you need privacy while speaking in your cubicle, you can just as easily leave your cubicle and use either a cellphone or another phone to have that privacy. If you're really talking about company secrets at work and your coworkers *shouldn't* be overhearing, go petition to your boss to get a real office, because you shouldn't have to be the one to find some crazy solution to what should be a nonissue. If it's personal, then pop out to break and actually deal with it, instead of muffled tones that waste more time than you need to spend, and distract everyone else around you whether they want to listen in or not.
cyn, free software and *nix operating systems enthusiast.
The article says:
"As promised, when the speakers play a scrambled version of your voice, your real conversation can't be understood by someone standing even four feet away. (In tests by NEWSWEEK, no one wanted to stand four feet away, because the chatter from those boxes was anything but soothing.)"
What the article doesn't say is how the chatter from those boxes affects the person talking on the phone. I'm prepared to believe that it doesn't irritate the user him-or-herself, but I'm from Missouri, you've got to show me.
Or at least show me some convincing testimony from Newsweek reporters!
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
:shrugs:
:grins: One of the few advantages of being deaf, that and not hearing some of what you don't want to.
Useless to me since I'm deaf and use a TTY anyway. A TTY is a text based telecommunications device that works over a phone line. You can buy software TTY's though they aren't as good as the hardware.
Kind of hard to overhear a TTY since it isn't verbal.