Ellen Wallace
Today’s news carries the story about the indignation the city of Geneva tried to foist on its young people – putting ultrasound noisemakers in a park where they like to congregate at night. The piercing and irritating "mosquitos," which can be heard only by people under 25, were whipped down by one of the city leaders when he learned about it, but the insult had been made. A Green party member said the city was treating its teenagers like dogs.
Who would do that to a dog? Who would invent such a piece of nastiness? Turns out it is the same man who has invented the telephone ring that can be heard only by teenagers, not by their teachers. "Oh, that is so cool!" was the reaction of the first 19-year-old I tripped over.
Howard Stapleton of Wales is the man behind the noise, which Britain’s Guardian refers to as an "electronic teenager repellant." The same technology is used for both devises, proving the point of the Ig Nobel prizes, one of which Stapleton won in 2006. They are offered for "research that makes people laugh and then think." Every invention has its flip side. Stapleton won the Ig Nobel peace prize. Now that takes some thinking about.
In other noise news, from Sound Bites, which is published by the Acoustic Ecology Institute in New Mexico, USA, it turns out that cows have regional accents and an elephant in Seoul, South Korea, has mimicked human speech by putting it trunk in its mouth and "blowing against its molars, inner tusks and gums. The acoustic properties of the sounds are very similar to those of sounds made by his trainer, Jong Gap Kim; elephants often copy the actions of those closest to them. Last year, another captive elephant was observed mimicking the rumble of passing trucks."
The closest thing to the poor elephant is a truck? Time to love our elephants a little more, not to mention people under 25.
GenevaLunch, 10 May 2007.
Filed under: Society
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