Apple makes physical objects with a distinctive look. The product just has to appear for a second. Nobody has to interrupt the flow of dialogue to say anything about it.
What's Microsoft going to do? Ask them to show people booting up their PC so that the Windows logo takes over the screen and that musical sound plays?
Have cool twenty-somethings joke about how to get rid of that obnoxious Clippy?
This is just a dumb upper-management idea. Microsoft doesn't make the kind of products for which product placement works.
Furthermore, Apple's appeal to a certain group is directly connected to their willingness to make strong, emphatic design statements. You may hate the way a Mac looks or you may love it, but you can't be indifferent to it. Other PC makers may take tentative steps in making their boxes charcoal instead of beige, or making the front plastic bulge a bit instead of being perfectly flat, but they're not willing to be emphatic--and neither is Microsoft.
Contrast the Apple "switcher" ads--which I personally hated--with the bland, characterless attempt Microsoft made to do the same thing. You knew the Apple switchers were real people. And it came as no surprise to find that the Microsoft "switchers" were stock photographs.
How lucky we are that technology was invented!
on
The Map of Innovation
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Yes, indeed, everything is different today. Technology is revolutionary stuff! Gee whiz! Just imagine what Watt, Edison, and the Wright Brothers could have done--if only they had known about technology.
It never even occurred to those pioneers that they needed to 1) come up with ideas, 2) develop the best ideas, 3) get funding, and 4) hire great staff.
And the Massachusetts Institute of Technology--don't forget the Massachusetts Institute of Technology! Now, I ask you, what would it be without technology?
Technology suffereth long, and is kind; technology envieth not; technology vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up. Technology never faileth. Now there abideth invention, innovation, and technology, these three; but the greatest of these is technology.
So, I filed online for the CD price-fixing class-action settlement, and everything looked fine, and I've been waiting for what seems like a long time for my check...
I went back to the site and it appears that "Notices of appeal have been filed by persons whose objections to the Settlement were denied by the District Court. Counsel for the State Plaintiffs and Plaintiff Settlement Class are contesting those appeals. Until the appeals are resolved or denied, payments for valid claims and distribution of CDs under the Cy Pres Distribution Plan cannot go forward Please check this web site periodically for updates."
Jarndyce and Jarndyce, anyone?
I don't think it matters whether you file for your share in the Microsoft settlement with Microsoft, with Lindows, by carrier pigeon, or by dropping your claim in the nearest wastebasket--the mean time to payment will be about the same.
...hmmm... if the device runs short of power, it sounds as if it can in effect pull your feet out from under you. (Actually, it's falling to push your feet under you). That sounds like a fairly unpleasant and dangerous kind of fall, similar to being tripped.
On a bicycle, it's easy and natural to take your foot off the pedal and put it on the ground; ditto a scooter. But perhaps it's not so easy when you're standing upright with both feet on the device.
In Dr. Strangelove, a rogue Air Force general launches a nuclear strike against Russia. When the President of the United States objects "but I thought only I was the only person with that authority," and official pauses and says "... well... it appears as if perhaps General Ripper may have exceeded his authority."
How will you know whether they are sharing that information? Are you certain that they are not permitted to share it with, say, law enforcement officials... or other government officials that say they need it for national security, or to fight terror?
...practically the day it was invented. Indeed, it can be argued that he started using one before it had been invented, or at least perfected.
Jack London began using a typewriter the very instant he could afford one. The one he could afford wasn't very good--a balky Blickensderfer that required great effort to operate, was badly aligned, and only typed in uppercase--and he switched to a better one as soon as he could afford that.
Here's a picture of the typewriter he used from 1904 on.
"Creative people" latched onto the Macintosh within months of its introduction.
After all, the IAB says here that "We must emphasize that, technically, this was a legitimate use of wildcard records that did not in any way violate the DNS specifications themselves."
If the decision-makers at Verisign cared about good engineering practice, they wouldn't have done what they did.
They probably regard their own actions as just "sharp business practice" and are probably patting themselves on the back for having found a loophole in the DNS specification that they can use for their own profit.
I don't think jawboning from ICANN, the IAB, or anyone else will have much effect. I don't see how anyone short of the Feds can stop them.
I mean, they have contracts with their SiteFinder advertisers. There's money at stake here.
The solution is obvious. Stop blaming the victim.
on
Where is the Any Key?
·
· Score: 1
As far back as the early nineties, I remember reading a set of guidelines for technical writers.
One guideline specifically said never to use the language "press any key." The recommended substitute was "press the spacebar."
The users aren't stupid. They're being presented with a complicated and badly designed system, with many keys whose functions aren't obvious, and many others ("Print Scrn") which look obvious but almost never do what the legend suggests.
The data was "the proposed government system to prevent terrorism by color-coding airline passengers according to their risk level will be tested using old passenger itineraries from JetBlue..."
How can this possibly be "tested?" Were any people now known to be terrorists flying on JetBlue during that time period? If not, how does anyone know whether the high-risk coding was valid?
The more I think about it, the less I understand why I am expected to use PayPal to buy a BitPass, then use BitPass to buy "The Right Number?"
Why can't I just use PayPal to purchase an individual copy of "The Right Number?"
If the payment involved fractional cents, I could understand it, but as far as I know it is perfectly practical to use PayPal for payments of $0.25.
Indeed, when I originally signed up for PayPal they specifically said this was one of the ways it was intended to be used and explained how it worked. If you had $0.00 in your PayPal account and paid someone $0.25, your credit card would be charged $5.00, the payee would receive $0.25, and $4.75 would remain in your PayPal account. Subsequent small payments would be made out of the account rather than the credit card.
The more I look at it, the more it appears to me that his refusal to accept PayPal except as a way to buy BitPass is just an artificial marketing restriction, intended to promote BitPass, and not a true business requirement for the comic-strip business.
So, I read the Technology Review article which said that "The Right Number" was really good... and I navigated to The Right Number to check it out.
Frankly, $0.25 per comic seems a little high to me. After all, the dead-tree Boston Globe costs $0.50 and contains more than 25 comic strips (only $0.02 each), at least five of which I really like and read every day.
And I found out that I can't just buy $0.25 worth of BitPass, I need to commit to $3.00 worth. And I thought about it a little, and tried to decide what were the chances that I'd really use the full $3.00 worth, or whether it would end up being wasted. It's not that $3.00 isn't such a big deal, but it does exceed my personal threshold for buying without even thinking.
(And this is consistent with my behavior in other real-world activities. It's only when long-distance calls dropped to $0.05 per minute or less that I stopped thinking about whether or not I needed to make the call.)
It's not just the $3.00, it's also the business of yet another account to keep track of... and if it's a real-money-related account I try to keep track of these things fairly closely. I can't possibly use a unique password for everything, so I sort of categorize them.
There's a "practically-no-security" category that I use for things like New York Times article registration: the "I couldn't care less if someone else reads 'my' New York Times article" level. I don't quite want to publish that password on Slashdot, but as far as I know I could with no ill effects (other than helping identity thieves improve their social engineering).
There's another category for information that I don't really want people to know, but for which can't see any obvious possibility of financial damage if they did. I don't want strangers to view my membership in a certain fraternal organization and find out how many years I've been a member, but, hey. Maybe Ashcroft cares, maybe a con artist could use it... sure it's paranoia but I'm a little careful with these accounts.
There's another category for sites where stuff can be ordered but only sent to me, or where money can be transferred, but only between my own accounts.
Then there's the highest level of security, for what I call "real money" accounts. These are sites where an intruder with access could actually take money out of my account and end up with cash in their account. Or get high-value easily-resaleable goods shipped to them. These accounts get their own password, a written entry in a three-ring notebook, I give a copy to my wife, and check the accounts regularly to spot abuse.
Well, there's no getting around it--BitPass goes in that category. Even though it looks as if I could limit my exposure (e.g. to $3), and even though I don't think you can buy any high-value easily-resaleable goods with it yet, I'm still leery. I feel that I have to treat BitPass as a "real money, high risk, be careful" account.
So, before opening a BitPass account I thought I'd better check out "The Right Number" to see whether it's anything I really want to read.
What I saw was a free preview that used the most annoying Flash interface I've ever seen, and didn't show me enough to decide if I want to read even one of them.
The bottom line is that, for me this particular transaction did involve a significant "mental transaction cost," because of my concerns about opening another "it's-money-take-care-of-it" online account, and, even though I was willing to pay that cost, the final analysis was that the "micropayments" for this particular item were nowhere near micro enough to suit me.
Show me in the Constitution where it says that writings and discoveries are property. They are not property. They live in a very complex area which is indeed hard to understand.
But this "intellectual property" phrase is a recent coinage, and a misleading one.
Depriving a record company of revenue by copying a piece of music that would otherwise have been purchased may not be right, but it is not equivalent to stealing.
Consider good old capitalistic competition. If I was about to walk into a Ford dealer, and a Chevy salesman talks me into walking into his dealership instead and I buy the Chevy. Did the Chevy dealer "steal" anything from the Ford dealer? Preventing someone from gaining revenue they might otherwise have gained is not stealing. Sure, Ford dealer might losely say that the Chevy dealer "robbed" him or "stole" his customer, but that's figurative language, and everyone knows it's not literally true.
Everyone agrees that in most cases downloading a copyrighted song is wrong. But it is copyright infringement, not theft.
The whole debate is about HOW wrong it is. The RIAA thinks it's $150,000 per song wrong.
I think it's more like parking in a no parking zone.
...that the commercial products actually meet the government specs?
We are already in a situation where every CD-R vendor claims to meet the industry specs, and every CD-R drive claims to meet the industry specs, yet it is not rare at all to find drives that like some brands of CD-R but not others.
It's not just a question of "using name brands" or "avoiding bargain brands," either.
When people raise this issue in e.g. comp.publish.cdrom.hardware, the answer is always "do your own media tests," and when someone complains that a specific name brand of media doesn't work in a specific drive, the answer is always "well, don't use that brand of media in that drive."
Obviously, vendors are NOT adhering to the specifications.
I don't see how promulgating a new set of specifications will change this.
We'll buy and write on these "archival" media, fifty years later wewon't be able to read them, and what will we do? Other than whine "but they were said they were archival?"
What we really need is for CDR drives to have a nice, continuous, real-time indicator that measures signal strength, or quality, or something like that... something that would give us an early warning that a disk, while still readable, was starting to fade.
If you have a problem with cars that run out of gas unexpectedly before reaching their destination, the solution is not cars with bigger gas tanks or cars that get better mileage. The solution is to equip them with gas gauges.
I have always wondered whether the name "Opus" could have been have been derived from the strange and wonderful enormous outdoor sculpture called Opus 40. It was sculpted/built by one Harvey Fite, and captured my imagination when I visited it some years ago on a trip to Woodstock, NY.
You see, I've always thought the "Opus" character bore a certain family resemblance to Charles M. Schulz's (please mod me up for spelling his name correctly) "Woodstock."
I can't help thinking that Breathed said to himself, "I guess this character is a little close to Woodstock..."
...www.toynbee.net seems to have been slashdotted... but... have any new tiles appeared in the USA since Sept. 11th, 2001? Seems like a reasonable test of our homeland security measures, since installing the tiles would seem to be both a conspicuous and suspicious act.
Let's hope that terrorists don't find out about this and start embedding WMD's in our pavements.
It's ultrasonics, not infrasonics, so I'm drifting offtopic here, but I really do want to mention "The Whispering Box Mystery" in the Rick Brant Electronic Adventures series.
This was a sort of Tom-Swift-like juvenile series popular in the fifties.
This adventure revolves around a wonderful contraption that generates high-intensity ultrasonics which, it is said, can be aimed at humans and produce instant, harmless paralysis. The book describes the device in some detail--it feeds high-pressure air from a cylinder through a block of metal with a tiny nozzle, IIRC.
Surely the use of "subsonics" to induce feelings of dread and awe was standard sixties SF fare, and was actually applied to good use in the movie "Earthquake," for which movie theatres installed special bass-enhanced sound-reproduction gear called "Sensurround." By all accounts "Sensurround" was very effective in its original form in that particular movie.
I don't have it at hand, but IIRC in Heinlein's 1966 novel, "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress," the central computer, "Adam Selene," uses his control over HVAC systems to generate fear-incuding subsonics at a critical point in the story?
"When you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of the meager and unsatisfactory kind."--Lord Kelvin
The article doesn't give one single blessed number that would enable anyone to judge how effective the experiment was.
I'm not sure what the right measurement would be... decibels? sones? psi? pascal-seconds? Or average blood pressure increase in human subjects in Hgmm? But the article doesn't say.
Not even the usual marketing claim, like "42% less boom than traditional aircraft, yet still has that same great NASA 'look'"
Something about "We were all blown away by the clarity of what we measured" just doesn't do it for me.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple makes physical objects with a distinctive look. The product just has to appear for a second. Nobody has to interrupt the flow of dialogue to say anything about it.
What's Microsoft going to do? Ask them to show people booting up their PC so that the Windows logo takes over the screen and that musical sound plays?
Have cool twenty-somethings joke about how to get rid of that obnoxious Clippy?
This is just a dumb upper-management idea. Microsoft doesn't make the kind of products for which product placement works.
Furthermore, Apple's appeal to a certain group is directly connected to their willingness to make strong, emphatic design statements. You may hate the way a Mac looks or you may love it, but you can't be indifferent to it. Other PC makers may take tentative steps in making their boxes charcoal instead of beige, or making the front plastic bulge a bit instead of being perfectly flat, but they're not willing to be emphatic--and neither is Microsoft.
Contrast the Apple "switcher" ads--which I personally hated--with the bland, characterless attempt Microsoft made to do the same thing. You knew the Apple switchers were real people. And it came as no surprise to find that the Microsoft "switchers" were stock photographs.
Yes, indeed, everything is different today. Technology is revolutionary stuff! Gee whiz! Just imagine what Watt, Edison, and the Wright Brothers could have done--if only they had known about technology.
It never even occurred to those pioneers that they needed to 1) come up with ideas, 2) develop the best ideas, 3) get funding, and 4) hire great staff.
And the Massachusetts Institute of Technology--don't forget the Massachusetts Institute of Technology! Now, I ask you, what would it be without technology?
Technology suffereth long, and is kind; technology envieth not; technology vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up. Technology never faileth. Now there abideth invention, innovation, and technology, these three; but the greatest of these is technology.
So, I filed online for the CD price-fixing class-action settlement, and everything looked fine, and I've been waiting for what seems like a long time for my check...
I went back to the site and it appears that "Notices of appeal have been filed by persons whose objections to the Settlement were denied by the District Court. Counsel for the State Plaintiffs and Plaintiff Settlement Class are contesting those appeals. Until the appeals are resolved or denied, payments for valid claims and distribution of CDs under the Cy Pres Distribution Plan cannot go forward Please check this web site periodically for updates."
Jarndyce and Jarndyce, anyone?
I don't think it matters whether you file for your share in the Microsoft settlement with Microsoft, with Lindows, by carrier pigeon, or by dropping your claim in the nearest wastebasket--the mean time to payment will be about the same.
Subject line says all...
...hmmm... if the device runs short of power, it sounds as if it can in effect pull your feet out from under you. (Actually, it's falling to push your feet under you). That sounds like a fairly unpleasant and dangerous kind of fall, similar to being tripped.
On a bicycle, it's easy and natural to take your foot off the pedal and put it on the ground; ditto a scooter. But perhaps it's not so easy when you're standing upright with both feet on the device.
"...with anyone else without my permission."
In Dr. Strangelove, a rogue Air Force general launches a nuclear strike against Russia. When the President of the United States objects "but I thought only I was the only person with that authority," and official pauses and says "... well... it appears as if perhaps General Ripper may have exceeded his authority."
How will you know whether they are sharing that information? Are you certain that they are not permitted to share it with, say, law enforcement officials... or other government officials that say they need it for national security, or to fight terror?
...practically the day it was invented. Indeed, it can be argued that he started using one before it had been invented, or at least perfected.
Jack London began using a typewriter the very instant he could afford one. The one he could afford wasn't very good--a balky Blickensderfer that required great effort to operate, was badly aligned, and only typed in uppercase--and he switched to a better one as soon as he could afford that.
Here's a picture of the typewriter he used from 1904 on.
"Creative people" latched onto the Macintosh within months of its introduction.
...RCA Orthophonic records were judged superior to Edison Blue Amberols--even at 160 RPM.
...and hang tough.
After all, the IAB says here that "We must emphasize that, technically, this was a legitimate use of wildcard records that did not in any way violate the DNS specifications themselves."
If the decision-makers at Verisign cared about good engineering practice, they wouldn't have done what they did.
They probably regard their own actions as just "sharp business practice" and are probably patting themselves on the back for having found a loophole in the DNS specification that they can use for their own profit.
I don't think jawboning from ICANN, the IAB, or anyone else will have much effect. I don't see how anyone short of the Feds can stop them.
I mean, they have contracts with their SiteFinder advertisers. There's money at stake here.
As far back as the early nineties, I remember reading a set of guidelines for technical writers.
One guideline specifically said never to use the language "press any key." The recommended substitute was "press the spacebar."
The users aren't stupid. They're being presented with a complicated and badly designed system, with many keys whose functions aren't obvious, and many others ("Print Scrn") which look obvious but almost never do what the legend suggests.
I had the same reaction.
If the Dewey Decimal system is copyrighted, the copyright should have expired.
If it's patented, it should have expired.
And if it's trademarked, there shouldn't be any problem, since they don't call themselves the "Dewey Decimal Hotel."
Please name one vendor other than Microsoft that has announced that their product will be able to read and write Microsoft Word 11 documents.
The data was "the proposed government system to prevent terrorism by color-coding airline passengers according to their risk level will be tested using old passenger itineraries from JetBlue..."
How can this possibly be "tested?" Were any people now known to be terrorists flying on JetBlue during that time period? If not, how does anyone know whether the high-risk coding was valid?
Bravo to them! A refreshing change from all the stories of corporations responding to security issues by shooting the messenger.
The more I think about it, the less I understand why I am expected to use PayPal to buy a BitPass, then use BitPass to buy "The Right Number?"
Why can't I just use PayPal to purchase an individual copy of "The Right Number?"
If the payment involved fractional cents, I could understand it, but as far as I know it is perfectly practical to use PayPal for payments of $0.25.
Indeed, when I originally signed up for PayPal they specifically said this was one of the ways it was intended to be used and explained how it worked. If you had $0.00 in your PayPal account and paid someone $0.25, your credit card would be charged $5.00, the payee would receive $0.25, and $4.75 would remain in your PayPal account. Subsequent small payments would be made out of the account rather than the credit card.
The more I look at it, the more it appears to me that his refusal to accept PayPal except as a way to buy BitPass is just an artificial marketing restriction, intended to promote BitPass, and not a true business requirement for the comic-strip business.
So, I read the Technology Review article which said that "The Right Number" was really good... and I navigated to The Right Number to check it out.
Frankly, $0.25 per comic seems a little high to me. After all, the dead-tree Boston Globe costs $0.50 and contains more than 25 comic strips (only $0.02 each), at least five of which I really like and read every day.
And I found out that I can't just buy $0.25 worth of BitPass, I need to commit to $3.00 worth. And I thought about it a little, and tried to decide what were the chances that I'd really use the full $3.00 worth, or whether it would end up being wasted. It's not that $3.00 isn't such a big deal, but it does exceed my personal threshold for buying without even thinking.
(And this is consistent with my behavior in other real-world activities. It's only when long-distance calls dropped to $0.05 per minute or less that I stopped thinking about whether or not I needed to make the call.)
It's not just the $3.00, it's also the business of yet another account to keep track of... and if it's a real-money-related account I try to keep track of these things fairly closely. I can't possibly use a unique password for everything, so I sort of categorize them.
There's a "practically-no-security" category that I use for things like New York Times article registration: the "I couldn't care less if someone else reads 'my' New York Times article" level. I don't quite want to publish that password on Slashdot, but as far as I know I could with no ill effects (other than helping identity thieves improve their social engineering).
There's another category for information that I don't really want people to know, but for which can't see any obvious possibility of financial damage if they did. I don't want strangers to view my membership in a certain fraternal organization and find out how many years I've been a member, but, hey. Maybe Ashcroft cares, maybe a con artist could use it... sure it's paranoia but I'm a little careful with these accounts.
There's another category for sites where stuff can be ordered but only sent to me, or where money can be transferred, but only between my own accounts.
Then there's the highest level of security, for what I call "real money" accounts. These are sites where an intruder with access could actually take money out of my account and end up with cash in their account. Or get high-value easily-resaleable goods shipped to them. These accounts get their own password, a written entry in a three-ring notebook, I give a copy to my wife, and check the accounts regularly to spot abuse.
Well, there's no getting around it--BitPass goes in that category. Even though it looks as if I could limit my exposure (e.g. to $3), and even though I don't think you can buy any high-value easily-resaleable goods with it yet, I'm still leery. I feel that I have to treat BitPass as a "real money, high risk, be careful" account.
So, before opening a BitPass account I thought I'd better check out "The Right Number" to see whether it's anything I really want to read.
What I saw was a free preview that used the most annoying Flash interface I've ever seen, and didn't show me enough to decide if I want to read even one of them.
The bottom line is that, for me this particular transaction did involve a significant "mental transaction cost," because of my concerns about opening another "it's-money-take-care-of-it" online account, and, even though I was willing to pay that cost, the final analysis was that the "micropayments" for this particular item were nowhere near micro enough to suit me.
Show me in the Constitution where it says that writings and discoveries are property. They are not property. They live in a very complex area which is indeed hard to understand.
But this "intellectual property" phrase is a recent coinage, and a misleading one.
Depriving a record company of revenue by copying a piece of music that would otherwise have been purchased may not be right, but it is not equivalent to stealing.
Consider good old capitalistic competition. If I was about to walk into a Ford dealer, and a Chevy salesman talks me into walking into his dealership instead and I buy the Chevy. Did the Chevy dealer "steal" anything from the Ford dealer? Preventing someone from gaining revenue they might otherwise have gained is not stealing. Sure, Ford dealer might losely say that the Chevy dealer "robbed" him or "stole" his customer, but that's figurative language, and everyone knows it's not literally true.
Everyone agrees that in most cases downloading a copyrighted song is wrong. But it is copyright infringement, not theft.
The whole debate is about HOW wrong it is. The RIAA thinks it's $150,000 per song wrong.
I think it's more like parking in a no parking zone.
The distinction is very important.
...that the commercial products actually meet the government specs?
We are already in a situation where every CD-R vendor claims to meet the industry specs, and every CD-R drive claims to meet the industry specs, yet it is not rare at all to find drives that like some brands of CD-R but not others.
It's not just a question of "using name brands" or "avoiding bargain brands," either.
When people raise this issue in e.g. comp.publish.cdrom.hardware, the answer is always "do your own media tests," and when someone complains that a specific name brand of media doesn't work in a specific drive, the answer is always "well, don't use that brand of media in that drive."
Obviously, vendors are NOT adhering to the specifications.
I don't see how promulgating a new set of specifications will change this.
We'll buy and write on these "archival" media, fifty years later wewon't be able to read them, and what will we do? Other than whine "but they were said they were archival?"
What we really need is for CDR drives to have a nice, continuous, real-time indicator that measures signal strength, or quality, or something like that... something that would give us an early warning that a disk, while still readable, was starting to fade.
If you have a problem with cars that run out of gas unexpectedly before reaching their destination, the solution is not cars with bigger gas tanks or cars that get better mileage. The solution is to equip them with gas gauges.
I have always wondered whether the name "Opus" could have been have been derived from the strange and wonderful enormous outdoor sculpture called Opus 40. It was sculpted/built by one Harvey Fite, and captured my imagination when I visited it some years ago on a trip to Woodstock, NY.
You see, I've always thought the "Opus" character bore a certain family resemblance to Charles M. Schulz's (please mod me up for spelling his name correctly) "Woodstock."
I can't help thinking that Breathed said to himself, "I guess this character is a little close to Woodstock..."
I believe you can get a VT for well under $1000, and I've even heard that some of them now support advanced "sixel" graphics.
And they scroll MUCH more smoothly than OS X.
...www.toynbee.net seems to have been slashdotted... but... have any new tiles appeared in the USA since Sept. 11th, 2001? Seems like a reasonable test of our homeland security measures, since installing the tiles would seem to be both a conspicuous and suspicious act.
Let's hope that terrorists don't find out about this and start embedding WMD's in our pavements.
It's ultrasonics, not infrasonics, so I'm drifting offtopic here, but I really do want to mention "The Whispering Box Mystery" in the Rick Brant Electronic Adventures series.
This was a sort of Tom-Swift-like juvenile series popular in the fifties.
This adventure revolves around a wonderful contraption that generates high-intensity ultrasonics which, it is said, can be aimed at humans and produce instant, harmless paralysis. The book describes the device in some detail--it feeds high-pressure air from a cylinder through a block of metal with a tiny nozzle, IIRC.
I think that would be "Sixth Column," but who's counting?
Surely the use of "subsonics" to induce feelings of dread and awe was standard sixties SF fare, and was actually applied to good use in the movie "Earthquake," for which movie theatres installed special bass-enhanced sound-reproduction gear called "Sensurround." By all accounts "Sensurround" was very effective in its original form in that particular movie.
I don't have it at hand, but IIRC in Heinlein's 1966 novel, "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress," the central computer, "Adam Selene," uses his control over HVAC systems to generate fear-incuding subsonics at a critical point in the story?
"When you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of the meager and unsatisfactory kind."--Lord Kelvin
The article doesn't give one single blessed number that would enable anyone to judge how effective the experiment was.
I'm not sure what the right measurement would be... decibels? sones? psi? pascal-seconds? Or average blood pressure increase in human subjects in Hgmm? But the article doesn't say.
Not even the usual marketing claim, like "42% less boom than traditional aircraft, yet still has that same great NASA 'look'"
Something about "We were all blown away by the clarity of what we measured" just doesn't do it for me.