June 14, 2006

Can You Hear Me Now?

Sure, it's all over the blogosphere, but here it is again:

In that old battle of the wills between young people and their keepers, the young have found a new weapon that could change the balance of power on the cellphone front: a ring tone that many adults cannot hear....

The technology, which relies on the fact that most adults gradually lose the ability to hear high-pitched sounds, was developed in Britain but has only recently spread to America — by Internet, of course.....

The cellphone ring tone that she heard was the offshoot of an invention called the Mosquito, developed last year by a Welsh security company to annoy teenagers and gratify adults, not the other way around.

It was marketed as an ultrasonic teenager repellent, an ear-splitting 17-kilohertz buzzer designed to help shopkeepers disperse young people loitering in front of their stores while leaving adults unaffected.

I'm actually just posting this to make note of the fact that, at the ripe old age of 34 years, 7 months, and 13 days, I can still hear the tone. I rock.

I guess all those times my father told me that loud music would make me go deaf he was wrong. Combined with the way something else was supposed to make me go blind, them thar old(er) folks aren't doing too well in the "conventional wisdom" department.

You can test your hearing here. (If that link doesn't work, my apologies, but the NY Times site had some other traffic measurement link info attached to it, which I removed).