speed dial

[cris]

I was hanging out with mishak on Saturday afternoon, finishing up lunch and a conversation about torture1. It was on the way out that I asked him if he had sarcasmchasm's number, because I needed to call her to discuss possible evening plans. I've been asking for numbers with some frequency, now that I'm on my fourth cell phone in as many months, and need to

Comments

phone numbers!

[julishka]

it's an awful state. i love your idea of a solution. perhaps when that legislation is enabled where one can keep their cell phone number when switching provider, your idea may flurish.

as for the inconvenience of not knowing anyone's number, this old entry of mine shows how stranded i was w/out being able to access my phonebook. i seriously felt like a little kid who hadn't memorized anyone's number yet.

Re: phone numbers!

[cris]

one of my more vivid challenges of moving to the States was trying to adapt to the new phone numbering system. I remember being at school and needing to call up my mom to tell her that I had a half day and would have to be picked up early, but couldn't remember what our home number was, and was too embarassed to go to the school office to ask. So, I basically sat around after school for three hours, hanging out on my own in the playground and reading my history textbooks until my mom showed up and wondered why nobody else was around.

[spriggan]

on GSM phones, your contacts are saved on the little flash memory card that you can transfer between any GSM phone. i can plug my card into jen's phone and it will use my phone number and have my contacts. but that still doesn't address all the issues you're talking about.

what we basically need is DNS for phone numbers. i imagine this: a computer or little black box that sits on your home number. assuming you can remember your home number, you just dial it, punch in an access code, and it gives you menu prompts or uses voice recognition to give you access to your phone book, and then automatically connects you.

[cris]

I suspect that there's already some kind of unified messaging software that will do just that. When I worked at Canbox, I vaguely recalled seeing prototype applications that used text-to-voice to read off entries in a centrally stored phone list. So, that technology is already there -- the things I'd want to add, though, would be transparent access to that centralized directory via speed dial GUIs and DNS-like propagation of a changed phone number, so in the future, you'd never have to worry about the actual "number", someone's provider can change six times over and you'd never notice because there's no need for you to notice.

[spriggan]

yeah, i was thinking that your idea sounds pretty far off because it requires cooperation of different service providers, cell phone manufacturers and a central server, while the home-DNS server could be done today.

but something could be done via SMS. whenever you change your number, SMS the central server, and the server SMS's all the people who are 'subscribed' to your name. then of course you have to read the SMS and make the change in your address book. but that could be done today.

[cris]

yeah, the SMS idea is something along the lines of what I was thinking of by a 'DNS-like protocol for cell phones' ... some sort of common message format that mobiles can receive and immediately incorporate into their built-in contact list. The more I think of this, though, the more it seems necessary to have some sort of personal ID, similar to the idea of being able to retain a cell number through different providers, but also something that would follow you if you moved to another state (or ideally another country)

[couplingchaos]

I had that conversation about remembering numbers a couple of times last weekend as well. I used to be good at holding several numbers in my head, but I think I'm out of practice now, and I have to make a special effort to commit a number to memory. I've also had to have a keypad in front of me to tell someone what a number was because my fingers were just used to moving where they needed to go.

[cris]

this sort of dovetails with that Word Scrambler site that was making the memetic rounds last week. I wonder if anyone has ever done any research in how we memorize number strings. More than just phone numbers, but also things like mathematical constants or even ATM PINs. I remember being all kinds of screwed up when I had to take money out of an ATM in Iceland and was confronted with an icelandic keypad where all of the digits were laid top-down instead of bottom-up.

[heresiarch]

I actually made myself sit down and memorize latemodel's number when he first got a cellphone, so I'd be able to reach him even when I don't have mine on me. I knew otherwise I'd never learn it. Similarly, when I was in college, I knew all of my parents' numbers by heart -- home, office, cells, cape house, etc. Then they moved to Providence, got all new numbers, and now I'm screwed without my cellphone. Totally embarrassing.

On the truth serum note -- meth, or mdma? I know that's what it was originally developed for, at the least. Hm, maybe I should pretend to hold terrorist secrets.... And hey, figure afterwards, the detainees would have warm fuzzy feelings towards their captors, instead of PTSD! Bonus!

[cris]

This is the best interrogation ever!

Bowden mentioned methamphetamines, whether it was a refined form like MDMA or crystal is unclear. He also had an interesting breakdown of how meth compared to other drugs when it came to interrogation (LSD - generally useless, barbituates - only for specific cases, etc.) While I was reading it, my reaction tend to vacillate between "my god, that's horrible" and "wow, that's genius." It's frightening to see how much refinement went into CIA torture techniques during the early Cold War era.

It's also worth noting that thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, most of this knowledge is now openly available.

btw

[sarcasmchasm]

i did miss hanging out with you Saturday night.