Saturday, October 12, 2002

Are telemarketers bothering you? Many people use answering machines and caller id to screen calls, but there are more sophisticated tricks. It turns out that many telemarketers dial all of the numbers in an exchange until they get lucky. When you answer their computer listens for an answer. Your phoneline is logged as valid and the call is transferred to an available telemarketer. If their machine gets a long burst of audio (your answering message) it may often instruct the system to call back later. If it gets the signal for a non-valid phone number, it generally hangs up and removes your number from its database. The tones for a non valid number are 985.2Hz, 1370.6Hz and 1776.7Hz. I have them in .wav, .aiff, and .mp4 (aac) formats. http://homepage.mac.com/esc/phone Download an appropriate file and play it at the beginning of your answering machine message (followed by a note for your confused human caller).. I believe this is how many of the $50 anti-telemarketing boxes work. 4:44:22 PM     This may have been a feature since day one, but it finally struck me that the NY Times archives its travel reviews. Great stuff if you can't afford the time or cost of traveling. http://www.nytimes.com/travel/ Perhaps it will receive more attention as people read their 401k statements. 6:38:43 AM     Sometimes the logo is more inspiring than the product. Case in point... http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/28/27526.html 6:38:24 AM     This morning I came across a note that P.A.M Dirac was born in 1902 - somehow the world just missed his 100th birthday (or at least I have). Dirac is not well enough known outside of physics and math, but his contributions to physics are among the most profound made by a single person. After a bit of searching we find a nice mini-biography http://physicsweb.org/article/world/11/2/9/1 Everyone is entitled their own taste, but to my mind the two most astonishing and beautiful equations in physics are Maxwell's Equations (actually a set of equations) and the Dirac Equation - the leap it makes is staggering and its simplicity is equally astounding. It is undoubtedly among the most beautiful things crafted by a human. 6:38:07 AM

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