Talk to your plants? Come on over and listen to my underpants
After doubting IEEE 802.11bb, I finally see the light
Your dirty laundry might be minging but mine is singing.
At least it would be if I could get the electric cables properly connected. For some reason, I have an aversion to bringing the wires into the vicinity of my unwashed shreds. It feels wrong: underpants are simply not a place where electrodes should go. I’d never get a job in the French military.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: recently worn clothing destined for a Saturday-morning 15-minute wash cycle does not sing as such, even if it does hum a bit. That’s only because you have a closed mind. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, according to Arthur Clarke. (I mean Arthur ‘C’ Clarke, of course. Let’s not get him mixed up with all the other Arthur Clarkes.) I can’t help it if the contents of my underpants look like magic. Rest assured they are simply advanced.
My musical experiments with the laundry basket were triggered by the late-silly-season story that has been doing the rounds this week concerning the discovery that it is possible see through solid walls using Wi-Fi. That is, a sufficiently powerful Wi-Fi signal ought to be able to penetrate walls and ceilings to reach compatible wireless devices around the office or home; but using the technology to read something written down on paper in another room is the stuff of bad sci-fi novels, corny stage mentalists or a Pierce Brosnan Bond movie.
Researchers at University of California Santa Barbara, however, found that they could use Wi-Fi to detect the basic edges of shapes and then apply enhancement techniques to continue draw the missing bits it can’t see. The successful experiment involved bathing a room with waves from Wi-Fi transmitters and then moving a bank of Wi-Fi receivers along the other side of the wall to see how the received signal changes across the grid.
Initial results look basic but unmistakably correct, the setup successfully reading upper-case letters from the English alphabet printed on pieces of card, from another room. I saw Uri Geller do this a couple of times in the 70s but frankly his Sharpie scribbles were no comparison. Combine it with an AI chatbot and UCSB’s RF imaging tech could be the ultimate typography bore.
“The word you were thinking of was ‘filibuster’ but you forgot the ligature and your kerning stinks.”
This barely seems possible but, then again, Wi-Fi itself seemed too good to be true when it first made its way into small local networks. The nice thing was that nobody tried to burn Wi-Fi at the stake for witchcraft. In fact, if I remember correctly, so keen were manufacturers on getting wireless tech into consumer-level devices after the turn of the century that they didn’t bother waiting for IEEE’s 802.11 group to ratify each proposed update to the standard before rolling them out in cheap, plasticky and shamelessly unsupported wireless routers.
My own broadband supplier’s Wi-Fi router is something to behold, at least when you scan the airwaves. Not only can I pick up the signal all over the house despite the concrete walls and floors, I can pick it up halfway down the street from inside a neighbour’s house. If I was nosey, my Wi-Fi router wouldn’t need to read what’s written on a piece of paper on the other side of the wall: it could probably burn a physical hole through the wall so I could reach across to pick up the piece of paper and read it myself.
This is all par for the course in a country that got spooked by Apple’s iPhone 12 three years after the product’s launch. A tiny peak in electromagnetic emissions from a handset that Apple isn’t interested in any more is enough to send the relevant government agencies into over-compensation mode to make up for lost time, and now other EU member states are ploughing in too. In the meantime, I fear that if I prod the back of my Wi-Fi router with so much as a torque screwdriver, it may bleed radioactive green emissions that sizzle down through three decks like the blood of John Hurt’s chest-burster in Alien.
Besides, Wi-Fi’s old hat now. I’m more interested in LiFi, which uses variations in the intensity of LED lights to support 100Gbps networks.
Ratified back in June by my IEEE colleagues as Draft Standard 802.11bb, LiFi can multiplex the RGB channels in white LEDs to achieve its throughput. Although it cannot transmit through walls, let alone read through them, it does not usually require a clear line of sight between transmitter and receiver. Light bounces easily off walls and ceilings, you see – unlike the pencil-thin infrared beam between my DVD player and its remote control, which is so narrow that it really ought to have been supplied with a sniper’s gun-sight to aim it. I was thinking of connecting them with a taut length of string and use a spirit level and protractor to set the angle.
Talking of old duffers like me insisting on keeping ancient kit such as DVD players, the following publicity billboard was erected in front of some villas near my home, promoting their redevelopment (i.e. “smashed to rubble and rebuilt from scratch”) into modern cuboid flats.
I have put a red ring in the photo to highlight a feature that caught my attention when I first walked past it. Did you notice the detail? The items casually placed on the stylish round coffee table? No? OK here it is again, blown up a bit.
That’s unmistakably a circa-2004 Apple iPod complete with clickwheel. Oh so modern! Er, I mean retro! I wonder what its emissions are like. The French authorities might want to fly into action and ban it from sale.
Blimey, that clickwheel felt like magic when I bought that model. Annoying, mind, as it always scrolled one line too far down or up when trying to pick a song, but hey, it did wonders for my thumb rotation – and I eventually learnt to appreciate lesser-known album-filler songs whose titles were alphabetically adjacent to frankly much better ones.
So who’s to say what’s magic or technology advancement? It’s easy to scoff.
For example, weekly satirical news magazine Charlie Hebdo ran a report a couple of issues ago from a journalist who attended a hippy-shit festival of ‘Plant Music’. At this event, a Getafix/Panoramix lookalike demonstrated an electronic gadget that allowed a pot of ferns to express itself with a sequence of musical tones via a loudspeaker.
The fellow explained that “rhododendrons often play in D” and that some musicians, when shown notation transcribed from sounds “composed” by a geranium, had hailed it as similar to phrases written by Bach or Mozart.
See? You’re scoffing.
Of course, this is hardly news. I remember hearing musical tones produced by plants via electronics when I was a kid; probably shown on BBC TV science programme Tomorrow’s World between items on how we will all be driving flying cars by 1976 and wearing neckties woven from the nasal hair of plankton. The fact that people are still out there today plugging electrodes into plants to make them impersonate a theremin virtuoso after 15 pints fills me with glee.
Better still, a Charlie Hebdo reader wrote in to the magazine last week to say that he’d been given one of these singing-plant gadgets as a present. It was so effective, he wrote, that when he attached the electrodes to the heap of clothes in his laundry basket, his dirty underwear produced similar tunes.
Oh you may scoff but I am determined to be ahead of the pack when it comes to rolling out stinky kek tech, and this is why you find me knee-deep in off-colour undies. It might sound ghastly to you now but it’s (heh) music to my ears…
… at least once I work out how to stop farting noises coming out the back.
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. In another dimension, he hopes to be reborn as a gurning Joe Walsh guitar solo.
I was reading the articles published on the iPhone12 and wondering why they chose to release this news on the day Apple stopped supplying it and released the iPhone15 as the latest model. Seems rather coincidental….
I do have to take issue with the description of a theremin virtuoso - as I wasn’t aware they existed in the first place, no I am not a theremin fan myself, I think my cat makes a better noise and 95% of the time she is silent.
I can see how plants make the noise as you are picking up on biological processes , but am not sure how a static pile of clothing will unless you start rummaging in them to induce a current…. Are you going to publish the results?
"Les Ondes!!!!"
The French love a good techphobe rant. Plenty of "Non a 5G !!!!" (badly) hand-painted roadside placards (signs, not cupboards) around near where I am. These are people who literally leather their skin from decades of bronzage on the beaches and up in the mountains.