Observations and inanities by a second-shift assistant supervisor in the Puppy-Grinding division of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy® (our motto: "Sure it's cruel, but think of the jobs!"), your host, Brent Rasmussen.
Survival of the Fittest (idea).
Anyone who reads my stuff for a while comes to the realization that I come up with a lot of oddball ideas. I'll be making coffee, or washing the dishes, and some thought will cross my mind, and I'll go "huh, that's kind of interesting." My good lady wife has learned to duck whenever I say that kind of thing out loud.
But I almost never write the idea down, or try and otherwise save it. I take a strict, simple, Darwinian approach to these things: if the idea has any merit, it'll stick around.
Just one example of the things I come up with, which has been bugging me for the last couple of days:
OK, you know the noise-cancelling headphone/earbud tech that's out there (Bose's "Quiet Comfort" series, among others - I have a pair of QCII headphones which are great for cutting wood or mowing the lawn), wherein the headphones have a sensor on the outside which samples incoming sound waves, and then creates an inverse waveform to 'cancel' the sound?
It'd be pretty simple to embed a program into those headphones which would also create an inverse wave form for a range of predictable medical symptoms - specifically, tinnitus. Yeah, put on your headphones, or your earbuds, tweak the adjustment to 'tune' it to your particular tinnitus condition, and poof - silence is once again golden.
Anyone wants to use this idea to get filthy rich is welcome to do so - so long as you cut me in for say, 7% of the profit, and I get a pair of the headphones to cope with my own howling tinnitus. And I have plenty of other ideas for product which can be created using off-the-shelf tech which are available for similar sorts of financial arrangments...just contact me. ;)
Jim Downey
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tinnitus/binoculars
I have accidently found that 25mg of zoloft daily eliminates my tinnitus. there are image stabilized binoculars that work just fine, cost around $800.
Love it!
I love this idea! I forwarded it to my musician/computer tech son, Randy (www.randyhaylor.com), maybe he can find a little time to look into it...
I read somewhere online that there is an excellent tinnitus clinic in Israel - for $6k (plus travel and living expenses?). They cater to your individual case using modern medicine and herbs and such, instead of the one-size-fits-most medicine we have here.
Have you tried kelp, sublingual B-12 or homeopathics?
What works to keep my tinnitus at bay is no dairy, no caffeine (coffee, teas, chocolate, and other sources), no sweets (I use stevia), no starchy carbs (bread, potatoes, pasta, cereal, flour, etc.), no booze, no vinegar. I am not saying I absolutely follow this, lol, but it helps...
Foods can be the cause of, or at least aggravate, many problems like autoimmune diseases, deafness, diabetes, arthritis, asthma, chronic ear and sinus infections, mood swings, depression, mania, schizophrenia, celiac, etc. There is lots of helpful info online.
Ideas
Jim, I get ideas popping into my head like that too. The difference is, I save mine on a microcassette recorder I carry with me constantly. Bright ideas, reminders, memories, mullings, all sorts of stuff that comes to mind and seems to carry significance beyond the normal mental background noise.
Some of those ideas that might otherwise be non-survivors can spark major ideas later, if you save them and consider them in a different frame of mind. You get the seed of an idea, you build on it over time, and sometimes it turns into something big -- maybe an understanding beyond the ordinary. (Transcription of the tapes is a chore, but I consider it worth the time. I'm hoping I can figure out some kind of voice transcription system in the near future.)
Related to gadgets like the one you mention here, two that I'd like to see are:
1) Head-mounted binoculars -- a helmet-like thingie that cancels out the problem of shaky hands or wind by putting the binos directly on your head. Your field of vision would be mostly unimpeded, but when you glanced UP into the eyepieces, you'd get a 10X view of your objective. It would also make FINDING the bird or whatever easier, because after sighting the bird you could switch from normal vision to binos without moving your angle of view.
2) Binaurals -- an array of forward-pointing wave guides on each side of your head would feed into microphones and a sophisticated processing computer that would allow you to amplify, tune and noise-suppress anything you heard while on a hike. You could focus in on a single bird's song, or pinpoint the source of that mysterious rustling noise you heard. (Maybe it could also record that bird song for your birding blog.) OR you could overhear the conversation of thugs waiting in the alley just ahead. For people with hearing problems, this would be a large, clunky substitute for a hearing aid, but ... given the extra features, there are times I'd wear one, and be completely unselfconscious about it. If mass-produced, it would probably even cost less than a hearing aid.
Cool idea
Sort of like Go Go Gadget Binoculars. There would have to be a version for glasses wearers, since one problem I have with normal binoculars/cameras is that you've got this tiny picture unless you remove your glasses in which case you not only loose sight of the bird but may not be able to distinguish the tree from the forest.
I don't carry a tape recorder around with me, but I do get bright ideas.
A case for rechargable AA batteries: They've sense released it, but at the time I was making do with an empty extra-large tic-tak case for the spare rechargable batteries for my camera.
An ocular camera that basically monitors the way your eyes are focused so that it automatically focuses on whatever you're looking at (instead of whatever it is the camera thinks it sees, like the wall behind the ladybug I'm trying to photograph). Also this would monitor how your eyes were dialated so it would record the light in the picture in a way that's at least similar to how you see it.
That *is* a cool idea.
But they'd have to be adjustable for my nearsightedness, since my progressive lenses work that way looking down.
Jim Downey
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Like Science Fiction? Read my novel, Communion of Dreams, for free.
First wife
made me keep a notebook and a pencil wherever I went to write down such flashes of brilliance. They ended up on scraps of paper stuffed into pockets that went through the wash, covered up with numbers as I did some financial stuff, being completely illegible because they had been written in situations where I should not have been paying attention to writing, or thrown out as I came across them later and thought, "What the hell were you thinking?" I still carry the pencil with me everywhere but the ideas are fewer and farther between than they used to be. Start my fifth decade in July and am at that cusp. No real physical problems but I imagine the multiple surgeries, breaks, sprains, etc. (c. 2.5 years of my life total on crutches) will come back to haunt me if I stop moving for too long (what I call the Tin-Man Syndrome).
"You better start giving me some inner peace before I mop the floor with you." - Homer S.
or
"Pinky, you excel at random." - the Brain
won't work
As the wiki article states tinnitus is a sound originating from the inner ear. As such something like an ear plug or head phones wouldn't work. Although if you could do something like in the form of a hearing aid, or one of those tiny bug microphones, that then surgically implant it into the offending ear... but I would worry about it blocking out sounds you want to hear. Like the wikipedia article said it originates from some sort of abnormality in the area of your ear. I'd try to have it checked out by a doctor, just in case its something serious.
Tinnitus...
...is common for those of us who have, ahem, reached our middle years and were not careful with our hearing when young. (In my case, too many loud concerts, too much shooting guns without hearing protection.)
Jim Downey
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Like Science Fiction? Read my novel, Communion of Dreams, for free.
well then, you reap what you sow
That's why people are trying to tell kids today not to do stuff that damages their hearing.
If that's the case I know that hearing damage is caused by the flattening of the hairs inside your ear that pick up the sound and translate it into nerve impulses that then go to your brain. With these hairs rendered immobile hearing is lost, and it can't be repaired.
So sorry, Jim, as far as I know what you've got can't be cured, it's basically all in your head, it's possible the sound you hear doesn't even technically exist (as a sound wave). But, I really don't know much about this stuff.
Tinnitus is a 'false sound'
Um, yeah, Cat, I knew that it wasn't something that medical science can cure at this point. And you're right that it isn't even a 'sound' as such - rather it is the stimulation of the nerve endings, creating a 'false sound'. The chances are that my idea in the original post wouldn't help matters, but simply be an additional sound, since the generation of the wave-form wouldn't have anything coming in to cancel out.
But it was fun to speculate about.
Jim Downey
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Like Science Fiction? Read my novel, Communion of Dreams, for free.
Airplanes & Tinnitus
In my case it was 15 years of jet airplanes screaming in my ears. First, on Navy Carriers and Naval air bases, then on commercial airports.
Usually my mind edits it out. Thanks for making me aware of it today Jim. Heh.
(An aside - I actually work for a university that has a wonderful Doctor of Audiology program, and three or four of the courses involve tinnitus. Diagnoses, treatment, the physiology of it, etc. It makes for some interesting reading.)
The noise cancelling
The noise cancelling headphones work because they take the incoming noise, fliip the polarity of the signal, and produce the cancelling audio at the proper moment. The incoming sound and inverted audio cancel to reduce the apparent noise.
With Tinnitus the objectionable audio is generated within the ear so there's no way to sample it (ASFAIK) and create a cancelling wave.