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Sorry, I Didn’t Catch Your Name

It’s surprisingly enthralling watching Amy Walker introduce herself twenty-one times.

The trick is she does it each time with a different accent – London, Dublin, Belfast, Scotland, Italy, Germany, Prague, Moscow, Paris, Sydney, Wellington, Australia, Texas, California, Seattle, Toronto, Brooklyn, Charleston…

I like Dublin and Charleston best.

This reminds me of the Speech Accent Archive from George Mason University, which currently has 866 samples of people from around the world reading the same sample of text.  (They even have a category for American Sign Language, though it’s empty.  I’m not sure how they think that’s gonna work.)

Minor Sadness

In Episode 110: Mapping of This American Life there’s an act that leads with a discussion of the background noise we hear all the time from appliances at home and in the office – noise that, like all sound, has a particular pitch.

“For some reason I had been thinking about why it is that we seem, almost universally, to assume that a minor chord is sad and a major chord is happy. If a minor third is just somehow inherently sad, then if I were sitting in an office having a minor third played at me all day long, then it’s indeed possible that I could be made sad by just sitting in my office.”

Try not to Crash Into the Tunnel

For unimportant reasons, I opened up Google Maps to a satellite image of O’Hare International Airport, and I couldn’t help but notice a mysterious tunnel in the middle of the tarmac.

At first glance this looks easily big enough to admit a large commercial airliner. What the heck is it, though? The Google doesn’t seem to have an easy answer for me.