My wife and I like our new home a lot, but after 25 years of living together in a condo, a ranch house takes some getting used to. It’s big. Not that anyone would mistake it for a mansion, but compared to how we’ve been living, it’s really big.

The cats are loving all the space. When we first brought them home, they were nervous but curious. They’d go exploring all these places they had never seen before, but every few minutes they’d come back to visit us to make sure we were still there, and then they’d go exploring again. Now they’ve settled into routines. Ivy the Norwegian Forest Cat likes to spend the day in my wife’s craft room, sitting on the chair by the window, soaking up the morning sun and watching the neighborhood. At night, she settles onto a cat condo in the middle of the living room. Beezle the Ragdoll is a little less predictable, although if he’s not sleeping on the bed it’s usually because he’s following us around to see what we’re up to.

The WiFi isn’t working well in the new space. It’s great here in my office, right next to the router, but it gets a little spotty in the living room, and is very difficult to get in the family room or the garage. It’s also surprisingly weak when I’m sitting in my car in the driveway, which is weird considering that’s in direct line of sight of my office window. I’m going to try mounting the Wi-Fi router high up on the wall to get better coverage, but I don’t expect much of an improvement. I think I’ll either have to move it to a more central location or find the old router from the condo and install it as a second access point on the other side of the house.

Our old kitchen had a lot of space, but it was mostly dining room. The working kitchen area was small and efficient. This one has about twice the cabinet room and three times the counter space. I’m still not sure how to organize it. It’s also a lot farther to carry stuff between the refrigerator, stove, and sink.

Because the floors are mostly hardwood or laminate, we decided to get a Roomba vacuum robot to clean the place. I was skeptical, because I’d always heard that Roombas weren’t very smart and didn’t work well cleaning more than a few hundred square feet, but my wife had done her research: This is one of the new ones that does mapping, so it can find its way around, and when its battery gets low it can return to its base to recharge and then pick up where it left off, because it can remember which parts of the house it’s already cleaned.

That’s not to say it’s problem-free: With two big fluffy cats, its bin is filled with cat hair every day. It also has a few problems getting around. Sometimes it flips up a throw rug and then gets stuck on top, and three times now it’s managed to bump one of the doors closed and get itself trapped in a room. One time it somehow found a gap between a piece of furniture and a wall that was just large enough for it to get into, but it couldn’t figure out how to get back out.

And then there was the time the charging cable to my phone disappeared. It had been pulled out of the charger, and we eventually found it under the bed. We think probably the Roomba snagged it during a cleaning pass, but we can’t rule out the possibility that one of the cats got tangled in it. It wasn’t us, so it has to be either the cats or the robot.

I think it probably says something about our lifestyle that “Cats or robot?” is a thing that comes up.

It happened again a couple of nights ago. I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. As I took care of business, something was nagging at me, but I was groggy enough that it didn’t quite rise to the level of a conscious concern. As I lay back down in bed, however, it finally pushed through the fog: I was hearing a quiet beeping sound. Some electronic device somewhere in the apartment wanted my attention.

Thus began the Beep Hunt.

It’s one of the more annoying tasks of the wired life. I have a lot of electronic gadgets, and many of them are smart enough to let me know when they need attention. But few of them do it well.

The first time it happened was 20 years ago, when a pager battery got critically low in the middle of the night. It freaked me out. I started awake with an adrenaline rush and ran out into the living room to track down the strange noise. I guess that’s an old animal reflex — a strange and unexpected noise in the night could be a threat, so I responded in full fight-or-flight mode, ready to defend my family against the mysterious intrusion.

(Some of you kids may not know this, so I should explain that a pager at that time was a special-purpose one-way communication receiver. It works kind of like those things some restaurants use to tell you when a table is ready, except over much longer ranges. Someone who wanted to talk to you would call a special number you had given them. A computer would answer, and they could punch in a phone number where they could be reached. The computer would then send out a radio message to your pager, telling you the number. This was before widespread inexpensive cellular service, so you’d have to find a land-line to call them back. These were one-way devices because without a cellular antenna network, the signals had to go out over a small number of dedicated commercial antennas which used 1000-Watt bursts to broadcast the page over hundreds of square miles. Nothing you’d want to keep in your pocket could generate enough power for a return signal.)

This beep wasn’t a bad one. It was a long oscillating beep that happened every few seconds. They aren’t always that easy.

As far as I know, your brain uses three basic factors to figure out where sounds are coming from. First, there’s the relative volume difference between the ears, which works best when the sound is coming from one side and the other ear is hidden from the source by your head.

Second, there’s the different arrival time of the sound at your ears. As with the volume difference, it doesn’t work so well with sounds that aren’t far to one side because the sounds arrive closer together.

Third, there’s the way the sound waves interact with the structure of your ears. Your ear will attenuate different frequencies of sound in different ways depending on the direction from which the sound strikes your ear. This works best when the sound is complex, consisting of many frequencies, each attenuated a little differently, such as the rustling noise of an animal creeping through bushes — which would often have been a life-or-death concern for our ancient ancestors.

(Modern video games use a mathematical model of the human ear to simulate this attenuation in order to give you better directional cues for sounds. Warning systems for fighter pilots use a similar mechanism to make the sound easier to distinguish.)

Your brain has to pick the beeping sound out of a cacophony of other noises — everything from outside traffic and air conditioning to the sound of blood flowing through your head — so it helps if the sound is loud. It also helps if there’s a lot of information for your brain to analyze, which means that longer or more repetitious sounds are easier to localize. It’s especially helpful if you can turn your head and change the way the sound strikes your ears.

Thus, the easiest sounds for your brain to localize are long, loud, complicated, and repeated frequently. Of course, the easiest sound for a cheap low-power electronic device to generate is a quiet beep at a single pure frequency, and it helps power consumption to keep the duty cycle low by using a short duration sound delivered at a long interval. In addition, I think many devices are designed to emit a discrete and unobtrusive sound, in order to be less annoying. Of course, that only makes it more annoying when you don’t know what’s beeping, and you have to hunt for it.

My procedure for finding a beep is tiresome but fairly straightforward. First I stand sideways in the hallway of our condo, very still, with my back to the bathroom, waiting for the beep. This maximizes the sound difference from either end of the hall. If it comes from my left, it’s either the kitchen or the living room. If it comes from my right, it’s either the bedroom or my office. If neither, it’s probably something in the bathroom behind me.

This last time, it came from the office/bedroom direction, so I move to stand still at that end of the hall, with my office to the left and my bedroom to the right. It was coming from the office. I walked in and stood between the two desks, and quickly figured out it was coming from the VPN phone I use for work. Now I was close enough that it actually sounded like it was coming from the phone, and the display said something about incoming voicemail. I hit a couple of buttons and the sound stopped. Despite the message, I had no voicemail.

(When I first walked in, I noticed two of our cats sitting by the phone. It could be that they were curious about the noise, but I suspect that one of them may have stepped on a button. It wouldn’t be the first time one of our cats was responsible for a disturbing noise in the night.)

This wasn’t a bad one. It probably took me less than a minute. The worst beep hunt I ever had was caused by a failing battery in a UPS that emitted a pure beeping tone for one second every hour. The tone was so pure and high-pitched (which also makes it hard to locate) that even standing a few feet away, I couldn’t be sure where it was coming from. I had to find it by relative volume in different locations, which is kind of hard to compare when the beeps are that far apart. It took days to figure it out.

Hey girls — and I’m talking to you teenagers here — you want to know how to dress so that cute boys will notice you? Just check out this survey by the The Rebelution (“a teenage rebellion against low expectations”) and find out what clothing boys think is a stumbling block for a girl who seeks a modest appearance. Then dress like that.

Some sample results:

• 70% of guys think that showing any cleavage is immodest.
• 71% of guys think seeing even an inch of skin between the bottom of a girl’s shirt and her pants is a stumbling block.
• 48% of guys think a purse with the strap diagonally across the chest draws too much attention to the bust.
• 40% of guys think that shirts or dresses (long or short-sleeved) with slits in the sleeves are a stumbling block.

On the other hand, sweatshirts with messages across the front do not draw too much attention to the bust. So there.

Remember: Use this knowledge only for good.

(Hat tip: Lindsay Beyerstein)

Got an email from Bob (not his real name.  His real name is Karl Keller*) earlier today, and it’s worth sharing:

I went on a date with Kristy last night and we ended up in the emergency room. Well, that’s the short version.

It’s not as bad as I make it sound. A close friend of Kristy’s (on blood thinners, I believe, for other conditions) called her while we were making supper. He’d been bleeding from a cut on his shin for a couple hours without clotting and needed to get to the emergency room.

We picked him up, got him there, and stood by while he told us jokes and funny stories for an hour or so as the doctor and nurses patched him, cleaned him up, and started in on some tests. All in all, this was a very successful trip to the emergency room. I made some mistakes, but no one died. For your benefit, here are a few mistakes not to make.

1. When removing items from the back seat to make room for the patient, don’t remove the bag containing your major first-aid kit.

2. Find out how badly the patient is bleeding and how much blood he’s lost before putting him in the car.

3. Even though you left the major first-aid kit behind, don’t forget about the QuickClot bandage in your carry-bag. Sure, you might carry it to deal with knife, bullet, shrapnel, or other accident related trauma type injuries, but it’ll probably help the patient with a popped vericose vein structure and thin blood just as well–but only if you remember you have it. Remember, review your kits often or they will be of little use when you are under pressure.

The idea is not to be looking out for opportunities to play doctor, but that, if you have only a little bit of knowledge, a clear understanding of where that knowledge begins and ends, and a fair amount of humility, you might end up being able to make a bad situation less bad.  Then again, maybe not; you pays your money, and you takes your chances.  But there are a fair number of times in life where doing something constructive right now is a lot better than doing the perfect thing days later. 
   
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* Yes, I have permission to post this, and name him, silly.