The Coconut Effect: Difference between revisions
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** In the earliest remotes (like the one linked), the clicking sound wasn't just a resultant of a mechanical button being moved, it's how they sent the signal to the T.V. Each button flicked a different tine, setting it resonating (like a tuning fork), and the T.V. was able to detect this sound; different tones would trigger different functions. Naturally, there isn't a lot of bandwith there, so these early remote controls did little more than adjust the volume, power, and sometimes change the channels. It was only later that televisions began to be signalled electrically, first by wired remote and later wireless (via infrared or radio-frequency).
* Oddly, for years after the introduction of early B&W televisions, it was assumed by a significant number of people that dreaming in monochrome was the norm and dreaming in color was a rarity. If you could have asked someone from a time before the age of TV if they dreamed in black and white, they'd look at you funny like you just said the sky is green with pink polka dots.
** [https://web.archive.org/web/20091012010849/http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3353504/Black-and-white-TV-generation-have-monochrome-dreams.html This study] notes that before the advent of B&W TV, most people dreamt in color, but people who were exposed to only B&W TV during childhood are more likely to dream in B&W than people raised on color TV.
* Digital telephones have a clause in their governing standards that mandates the use of "[[wikipedia:Comfort noise|comfort noise]]", a soft hissing generated in the receiving end, in order to fake the atmospheric noise from normal land lines. The most often cited reason: in a normal analog telephone, a soft hissing means the line is working fine, whereas complete silence means the line is dead, and the audio data sent by digital phones is pretty much impervious to atmospheric noise and thus it must be added. Another reason is that while the silence is encoded as true silence, transmitted speech always contains some noise from the speaker's environment and speech encoding. If comfort noise was not added during silence, the end result would be a chopping background noise whenever the speaker says something.
** Similarly, Bell System engineers discovered long ago that feeding the speaker's voice back into the earpiece prevented users from shouting into their phones. This feature, called sidetone, actually had to be carefully calibrated; too much and users will speak too softly. Most cell phones are on the soft end of the extreme, which is why people on cell phones in public are often so obnoxious.
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