Why a Portable Cone of Silence Would be an Awesome Travel Gadget

Noise & Your Health

Our world is noisier than it once was. Oh yes, my friend, the loud side effects of the world can have health effects. Low levels of background noise (like from traffic) appear to be able to gently freak one out. In studies of children, moderate ambient noise was found to be related to increased blood pressure, heart rate, and levels of stress hormones.

It is also quite well known that high levels of noise can outright damage your hearing. Which, I guess, would actually weakens noise’s ability to slowly increase one’s stress level. Because of that, I’m going to count this as a “backhanded win.”

Sleep is Nice

It is well documented that a lack of sleep makes you hilarious for a few hours and makes “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” one of the funniest movies ever made. However, after that it can cause some clearly-un-funny side effects. In the extreme lack of sleep can even result in death.

Since it can be hard to sleep when things are all abuzz, a cone of silence could really help out. It might even force your hostel mates to resort to continually poking you until you enter the funny stages of sleep deprivation.

The Conduction Powers of The Skull

Ear plugs are readily available, cheep, and pretty effective. They can be used to help you get to sleep and can also be good at lessening the background noise that is slowly wearing you down. However, like super man, it has a weakness: your skull.

Ear plugs are pretty good at hindering the noise in your ear canal. I like to think of them as a skilled sumo wrestler in a small room. However, ear plugs are helpless against the tricky noise that figures out how to go around the ear canal. This is where the cone of silence could really excel. It could shield your whole skull from pesky noise.

Creative Commons picture by psd.

We Need More Spy Spin Offs Anyway

The space program gave us microwave ovens. The army developed quality canned food. However, I have yet to see a similar payoff from spy agencies. There is no swiss SPY knife.

Asides from all that “stuff they the agency was created to do,” what have spy agencies really brought to the table? They have some catching up to do.

Catching up that can only be done with silent focus.