:: meanders ::
souvenirs from the space-time continuum

It must have been a dryish summer this year as I was lucky to escape without a single bite. However, this Mosquito has a very narrow bite: teenagers.

Stapleton has taken the lesson...--that children can hear sounds at higher frequencies than adults can--to fashion a novel device that he hopes will provide a solution to the eternal problem of obstreperous teenagers who hang around outside stores and cause trouble.

The device, called the Mosquito ("It's small and annoying," Stapleton said), emits a high-frequency pulsing sound that, he said, can be heard by most people younger than 20 and almost no one older than 30. The sound is designed to so irritate young people that after several minutes, they cannot stand it and go away.

I've been contemplating the ethics of this, and the the analogy comes to mine is of the "anti-sitting" type bumpers on sea walls that discourage both birds and people from remaining too long to enjoy the view. These type of irritants are a sort of line drawn between lingering and loitering. In the grayed out world of relativism, there is no difference, but anyone who has elbowed their way through a cloud of smoking 14 y.o. skateboarders outside a strip mall shop can spot the line.

Then again, I wrote in June 2005 about my own intolerance of noise, and at that time cited a military use of sound to disperse people. With a weapon or a convenience, its use serves a purpose, its abuse serves no one.



image from Boston Museum of Science

The heads-up on Moquito from redwolf, who also has some groovy X-files pages.