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How you sleep reveals your personality
Okay, maybe that headline is a wee bit hyperbolic. But dig the results of a recent study Harris Interactive. They asked people about their cell-phone etiquette, and got the following results:
… 86 percent of wireless phone subscribers believe they rarely or never engage in discourteous cell-phone use. However, 50 percent believe Americans are generally discourteous when using cell phones.
Nice. So, Houston, we have a problem: At least 36 per cent of the population are too self-absorbed — or too stupid — to notice that they’re pissing everyone else off.
Actually, to be fair to these legions of morons, I think some of the problems are latent in mobile-phone design. Mobile phones have become so tiny and small that they no longer resemble, well, phones. Pick up the average mobile phone today, and it doesn’t look much different from holding a stapler to your head. And therein lies the ergonomic problem. Old-fashioned phones, which I collect, are an example of good ergonomic design: They cradle your head and wrap around directly in front of your mouth, so the machine feels like it’s listening to you. You feel like you can whisper into it. But because today’s tiny mobile phones have no sense of phone-ness, we have no sense that the phone is listening to us. The tiny speaker-hole is floating off somewhere near our earlobe. On some level, we can’t help but feel that there is no way in hell this is picking up our voices. So we bellow. We yell. No matter how much experience we’ve had using mobile phones, we bawl into them at full volume.
(Thanks to Techdirt Wireless News for this one!)
I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.
Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!
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» visit the Collision Detection archives
September 26, 2008 » 01:57 PM
From an interview with ethnobotanist and anthropologist Wade Davis:
One of the cultures you celebrate in Light at the Edge of the World is the Inuit. What do you most admire about them?
Davis: The Inuit didn’t fear the cold; they took advantage of it. During the 1950s the Canadian government forced the Inuit into settlements. A family from Arctic Bay told me this fantastic story of their grandfather who refused to go. The family, fearful for his life, took away all of his tools and all of his implements, thinking that would force him into the settlement. But instead, he just slipped out of an igloo on a cold Arctic night, pulled down his caribou and sealskin trousers, and defecated into his hand. As the feces began to freeze, he shaped it into the form of an implement. And when the blade started to take shape, he put a spray of saliva along the leading edge to sharpen it. That’s when what they call the “shit knife” took form. He used it to butcher a dog. Skinned the dog with it. Improvised a sled with the dog’s rib cage, and then, using the skin, he harnessed up an adjacent living dog. He put the shit knife in his belt and disappeared into the night.
September 25, 2008 » 11:21 AM
“Video from a camp north of Toronto in December 2005 shows a car spinning around in a nearby, snow-covered parking lot. Prosecutors characterized that as special driver training but the defense, and many outsiders, said it was nothing more than “cutting doughnuts,” a favorite winter pastime of young Canadian motorists.” - A key piece of evidence submitted in the trial of a gang of alleged young Canadian terrorists.
September 24, 2008 » 11:21 PM
“Life imitates art imitating life: just thought a gnat crawling across my monitor was part of a Flash-based ad. I clicked it.” - A Tweet from Bill Braine.
September 24, 2008 » 02:37 PM
“Funniest FB friend request ever: “Twitter friend hoping to get to second base (Facebook!) ;-).”” - A recent Tweet by Pistachio
September 24, 2008 » 12:28 PM
Chinese powdered-milk crisis creates a new market: The return of the wet nurse
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