I am a bit slow to the whole escape room phenomenon, but it seems like a great idea to me. While I am not a computer gamer, I have run sites with that editorial content and know many professional gamers as a result. I am also a big Sudoku and crossword fan, having done those puzzles for more than a decade.

The idea, if you are still not tuned in, is to bring a few friends to a facility and try to escape from a locked room within an hour. You have to solve various puzzles. Actually, you have to find the clues and then figure out the puzzle, without a lot of guidance. If you haven’t ever done a room, you first have to be very observant, looking at what objects have been placed in the room, what information is written on the walls or displayed on various monitor screens, and what objects might lead you to other things. For those of you that don’t like solving puzzles, this is probably not something you are going to like. If you do like puzzles, or if you go to haunted houses every fall (or even build your own), this is probably something you have already checked out.

While I am not a computer gamer, I recognize that many years ago I spent weeks of my life trying to solve the puzzles of Myst. Back then, I said that “Myst starts out a total puzzle, and as you gain skills and understand the sequence of play involved, you get drawn into the universe of the game and lose track of real life and elapsed time.” You can say that about many modern computer games too. The problem with this is that you only have an hour to escape your particular room, and you don’t know how many puzzles you will have along your journey.

Given that there are thousands of rooms in cities all over the world, if you want to try one out the next hurdle is going to be to find one that suits your particular skills, experience, and group. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone reviewed rooms with some sort of consistency? Fortunately, there is a site that does called EscRoomAddict. I spoke to one of their editors, named Jeremie Wood. (You can see a sample of one review here.)

The site has teams of reviewers in LA, Chicago, New York, Kansas City, Denver and Toronto, which is where they began four years ago. They have reviewed more than 400 rooms in North America. There are other sites that have reviews, but not as well organized or as consistent in their evaluations as ERA, as they call themselves. The site doesn’t pay their reviewers, but usually the room operator comps the reviewers to do the room. Many of his reviewers have played 50 or more rooms during their tenure, and Wood himself has lost count but thinks he has been party to at least 180 room reviews.

He told me based on his experience that he doesn’t think the escape room craze has peaked yet, and there are still new rooms being built. One opportunity is to try to attract more corporate customers, who use the room as a team-building exercise. And part of that effort is what motivated the founders to start ERA, so that corporate customers could find the best rooms in a particular location.

The escape room landscape is also changing. “Many of the early operators have closed, mainly because the standards for the best experience keep going up.” You might think that the best rooms are the ones that take the most money to build, but that hasn’t been his observation. “I have seen great rooms that didn’t cost much, and lousy rooms that were very expensive,” he said. ”You don’t have to spend huge amounts of cash, but you do have to know what you are doing and design something that has really great puzzles and a great story.”

One of the reasons I like the ERA site is that it attempts to have consistent review metrics for all of its room reviews. The teams from the various cities met earlier this year here in St. Louis to try to iron out consistent style and to set up minimum requirements for their reviews. The reviewers also try to take into account a wide range of puzzle solving ability in their write-ups. Each room is done by at least three different people, who then collaborate on the review, and they usually agree on their evaluation.

Having been to so many rooms, Wood told me that the average Canadian rooms are smaller and more suitable for 4 to 6 people, whereas in the States, they can hold more participants. Also, in Canada, you usually book a room exclusively for your own group, even if it is smaller than the room capacity. In the US, your team is sharing the room with others if the demand is there.

If you have particular room experiences and want to share them with my readers, please post a comment here.

The story sounds almost like a Hollywood plot, except it is true: A young starlet doing nude scenes as a teenager, goes on to invent a critical wartime technology that is ignored by the US Navy but ultimately forms the basis of WiFi and cell phones that we use today. Of course, I am talking about the life and times of Hedy Lamarr, the subject of a 2017 documentary film called Bombshell that is available from the streaming services.

She was also the subject of a 2011 biography from Richard Rhodes. I heard Rhodes back when he was promoting his book. Rhodes is the author of many intriguing history of science works, including the story of the Manhattan Project, and his book is worth reading. So is the film, which is also based on a 1990 taped interview that was recently found.

She is a fascinating study in how someone with both beauty and brains can not necessarily make the best of both thee worlds, but was constantly reinventing herself.

The movie traces her acting career and has various clips, including scenes from the provocative film Ecstasy, the one cited earlier that began her career and was banned by Hitler eventually. Lamarr was even the basis of one character in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles.

Both the film and the book show how one of Lamarr’s many inventions, which she developed with her music composer neighbor George Antheil, came about through an odd inquiry. Lamarr was interested in a boob job and Antheil had written about early efforts in that area, again presaging another important intersection of Hollywood and technology. The duo went on to get a patent for a new technique for frequency-hopping radio communications. While not taken seriously at the time, it ultimately was deployed by the military in the 1960s during the cold war. While the technique involved piano rolls, the basis of frequency hopping continues to be used as part of spread-spectrum radio communications that are in common use today. Along the way, Lamarr made many movies and married and divorced six husbands, the first of whom was a Nazi arms merchant that got her interested in developing new technology for the war effort once she fled to America. She lived to be honored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation a few years before she died in 2000.

It is hard for many of us to grok a movie star with her trips to the patent office and test tube rack in her trailer on the movie set, but she was the real deal.

Lamarr once said that “Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.” She was anything but.

I have been living with Tinnitus for 20 years, but until recently, I didn’t own it. Before I tell you how this came to be, a little background.

In 1998, I was diagnosed with Meniere’s Disease. I was experiencing intense dizzy spells, and many of you who are readers of this journal have heard or lived through what follows: dietary changes, a series of unsatisfying visits to various MDs, and a great deal of frustration. Back then, it wasn’t easy to do Internet research, but eventually my attacks stopped. What I got out of that experience was a case of Tinnitus.

My situation is a bit unique: I have been deaf in my left ear since birth. My right ear hears just fine – except for this continuous tone that sometimes is louder, sometimes is softer, but is always there. Over the years, I have learned to deal with it, but owning it? Nope. Sometimes I would hold a pity party for myself, sometimes it was more than annoying, especially when I was in crowded noisy rooms or restaurants. I remember one time I was at a professional conference of about 300 people. For dinner, we were seated at a very long tables and the noise was literally deafening. I quickly ate my meal and literally ran back to my room, in pain from the noise. I know it looked odd to my dinner companions.

I have been a member of ATA for most of those decades, and appreciate the amount of knowledge that the association provides its members in trying to understand and cope with this disease. But I didn’t own my Tinnitus. That is, until I went to the Iowa conference this past summer.

The conference is small – less than 100 attendees and that includes many of the speakers over two very full days. The audience is 90% professionals, including nurses, MDs and audiologists, with a few of us patients scattered in and allowed to participate. It was very worthwhile, and I want to describe some of the things that I learned during the event. I was surprised at how much I didn’t know, and it wasn’t just learning medical jargon, but actual, actionable, useful stuff that helped me begin to own my disease.

What does owning mean? It means that you control it, rather than it controlling you. You aren’t defined by your Tinnitus, you aren’t at its mercy, and you manage your own treatment and your own response to the disease. The noise you and I hear may be all in our heads, but we have to use our brains to figure out a way to cope and live our lives. Many of the stories here in this journal have carried this theme, but for some reason I didn’t really understand what they were getting at until I was sitting in the conference, listening to the various presentations. Then it all clicked, so to speak. (Sorry for that pun.)

Here are a few other things that I heard and took away from the event.

While I knew that Tinnitus is different for everyone, I didn’t realize how different it was. Meeting others who have it and hearing their stories was good to understand its individuality and the different paths that patients have taken to understand and cope with Tinnitus. When you see the breadth and depth of variations of research that is going on around the world, you begin to understand this is a huge problem – or many problems – to solve. You can get some of this by attending one of the local ATA support groups, too.

Another thing that I liked about the Iowa conference is that you get to put yourself in your doctor’s shoes and see Tinnitus from his or her perspective. This is helpful in understanding how they will treat you and respond to your needs and concerns. There were several presentations from audiologists, therapists, and other professionals so again you could appreciate their different points of view.

Meeting the ATA staff and board members attending the conference (ATA is one of the sponsors) was also a treat. It helps to put a face with the organization, and also gave me an opportunity to thank them personally for all their hard work in helping us.

The conference is also a good place to get first-hand knowledge about cutting-edge research, particularly by the University of Iowa team that has been involved in Tinnitus work for decades. By the end of the two days, you feel like you know these folks quite well.

At the conference, vendors present their devices and explain how they are used and whom they are intended. During one of these sessions, I learned that hearing aids are ways to manage Tinnitus, even if you don’t have much in the way of hearing loss. This is because they ca be programmed to block out the frequencies that you think you are hearing with your Tinnitus noise(s). Now I know I am a bit of an unusual situation – no hearing in one ear, and the opposite in the other. Not to worry – there are specific kinds of aids for this problem. Years ago I investigated in using a BAHA hearing aid, which involves implanting a microphone in the side of your skull (in my case, the left side) and transmitting the sound through your bones to your hearing ear. When I tried on the sample aid back then, I could actually hear stereo and locate the source of the sound coming from behind me – both of these for the first time. I opted not to use the aid then. But the advances of technology with regards to digital signal processing are significant, and now there are wireless CROS aids that can work with your cellphone via Bluetooth connections. At the conference, I could talk to audiologists who have installed both BAHA and CROS aids and get their first-hand experience. That kind of insight would be nearly impossible as an ordinary patient.

As patients, we tend to interact with the medical/industrial complex at the moment when we have a problem: we break a bone, we want it fixed. We have an infection, we want to get rid of it. But the single point of contact with our doctors method doesn’t work with a chronic condition such as Tinnitus (or Meniere’s or whatever). That is because research is ongoing: new drugs, new procedures, new devices, and so forth. We aren’t watching the medical literature like our doctors are doing, because we are busy living our lives. And even if we are willing to put the time into doing Internet research, we aren’t going to medical conferences and learning about many of the latest technologies and techniques. Until I attended the Iowa conference, my knowledge of Tinnitus was limited to what I read in this journal. While that is great it can’t provide me with everything that is going on in the world. The Iowa conference can quickly bring you up to speed in a way that doing your own net-based research or reading a medical journal article, even one intended for patients, can’t easily do.

Now, most medical conferences are way beyond my skills and knowledge (or so I imagine), and probably yours as well. The jargon of just understanding the different parts of the human body alone is daunting enough. The Iowa conference certainly had its moments when I was totally lost. But it had plenty of other moments when I got useful information that was clearly explained and in terms that any layperson could understand.

Next summer, put Iowa City on your calendar and plan on coming to the conference. You will be welcomed, and you might get to understand more about our common affliction. The cost is minimal for the benefits I received.

I just returned from a trip to Israel, and as the old joke goes, my arms are so tired. Actually, my fingers, because I have been spending the better part of two days on the phone with support techs from both AT&T and Apple to try to get my phone back to the state where it works on the AT&T network.

My SOP for travel is to use a foreign SIM card in my phone. This has several benefits. First, you don’t pay roaming charges for local in-country calls, although if you are calling back to the States, you might have to pay international long distance charges, depending on your plan. Second, if people in-country are trying to reach you, they don’t pay for any international calls either, since they are calling a local number. (Some of the networks overseas have the more enlightened method of calling party pays, but we won’t go there for now.) You also don’t use any minutes or data GB on your American cell account, which is nice if those are limited.

For the past several years, I had been using two different travel SIMs. First is one from FreedomPop, which was a very inexpensive card with monthly fees around $15 for a decent plan. I had some billing issues initially but these were resolved. It doesn’t work in Israel, so I ended up buying another SIM at the airport kiosk in Tel Aviv. My last trip in October had some major hiccups with that card, and so I decided to try a new supplier, Call Israel. They offered a plan for $50 that seemed reasonable. AT&T charges $60 a month with lower data usage for Israel. If you go elsewhere the fees could be less.

Call Israel mailed me a SIM a week before my trip, and right away I saw an issue: I was just renting my SIM card. At the end of my trip, I had to mail it back. Strike 1.

But strike 2 was a big one. I made the mistake of taking my Israel SIM out of my phone when I changed planes in Europe on the return trip, and put in my AT&T SIM card. That confused my phone and got me in trouble. When I landed in the States I spent an hour on the phone with a very nice AT&T person who verified that my phone was working properly on their network. Except it wasn’t: I could get voice service, but not broadband data service. Some parameter that the Call Israel SIM had needed was still set and messing up my phone, and there was no way that I could access that information to remove it.

I ended up speaking to Apple next, because I figured out that they could get rid of whatever it was that was blocking my data service. I had to find an older iTunes backup that I had made before I went abroad (lucky I had done so with Time Machine), and then wipe my phone clean and bring that backup to the phone. All told, several hours were wasted. I found out that there is a subtle but important difference in how iTunes and iCloud handle backups. I was fortunate to find a very nice woman from Apple who called me back as we tried various strategies, and eventually we figured out what to do. This took place over the course of a couple of days. Here is the bottom line: your phone has hundreds of parameters that determine whether it will communicate properly. Some of them aren’t accessible to you via the various on-screen controls and are hidden from your use. The only way to change them is to restore from a known working backup.

So if you are planning on being out of the country, think carefully about your options. Consider if you need a foreign SIM for a brief trip. If you can afford service from your American provider, do so. Or if you can find Wifi hotspots, you probably can do 90% of the work on your phone by setting it to airplane mode when you leave town and not turning it on until you return. Under this scenario, you would use Facetime, What’sApp and Skype for voice and texting. Does that additional 10% make the difference? If you have a terrible sense of direction and need Google Maps, for example, you will need that broadband data. Or if you are traveling with other Americans and need to meet up, you might need the cellular voice flexibility.

SIMs come in at least three different sizes, and most suppliers ship them with cardboard adapters so you can fit them in your phone’s compartment. It doesn’t hurt to check this though.

Next, don’t swap SIMs until you reach your destination. If you need to look at buying a local SIM, make sure you understand how you have to bring your phone back to its original state when you come home. Make backups of your phone to your computer, to the cloud, to as many places as possible before you leave town. If you have an iPhone, read this article on how to find the iTunes backups on your system.

Next, when you are looking for a mail-order SIM, make sure you are actually buying it and not just renting it. Check to see that it will work in all the countries on your itinerary. Or wait until you get to your destination, and buy a local SIM from a phone store or airport kiosk.

Finally, examine the calling plan for what it will entail and match it with your expected usage on texting, data, and voice volume. Examine whether your calls back to the States are included in the plan’s minutes or not. If you don’t use a lot of data, you probably can get by with a cheaper voice-only plan and finding WiFi connections.  Happy trails, and hope they don’t turn into travails.

As I grow older, I tend to forget about events in my youth that shaped the person that I am now. I was reminded of this last week after seeing a Thomas Struth photography exhibit at the St. Louis Art Museum. Struth’s pictures are enlarged to mural size and depict the complex industrial environments of the modern age: repairing the Space Shuttle, a blowout preventer at an oil rig (shown here), the insides of physics and chemistry labs, the Disney Soarin’ hang glider simulation ride, and chip fabrication plants. Many of these are places that I have had the opportunity to visit over the years as a technology reporter.

The pictures reminded me of a part-time job that I had as an undergraduate student. My college had obtained a set of geometrical string models that were first constructed back in the 1830s and demonstrated conic sections, such as the intersection of a plane and a cone. Back then, we didn’t have Mathematica or color textbooks to show engineering students how to draw these things. These models were constructed out of strings threaded through moveable brass pieces that were attached to wooden bases, using lead weights to keep the strings taut.

The models were first built by a French mathematician Theodore Olivier, and were used in undergraduate descriptive geometry courses up until 1900. I was one of the students who helped restore them. While the models look very nice now, back when I was a student they were in pretty bad shape: the wooden bases were cracked, the brass pieces were tarnished, and the strings were either tangled or missing. It took some effort to figure out what shapes they were trying to display and how to string them properly. Sometimes there were missing parts and I had the help of the college machine shop and local auto body shops to figure out what to do. The best part of this job was that it came with its own private office, which was a nice perk for me when I needed to escape dorm life for a few quiet hours. After I graduated, the college put the finished models on display for everyone to see.

The intersection of art and technology has always been a part of me, and it was fun seeing Struth’s work. it was great to get to see the details captured and the point of view expressed from these images, lit and composed to show their colors and construction. And the photos reminded me of the beauty of these advanced machines that we have built too.

A friend of mine, Dave Crocker, has been volunteering for Red Cross activities around the California fires and Houston floods over the past several months, and has been working as a volunteer for them for more than nine years. I thought it would be an interesting time to chat with him about his experiences and consider why the media is so often critical of the Red Cross .

Crocker was in Houston for two weeks, starting two weeks after the hurricane hit. He has been a shelter supervisor at both small and large operations, a dispatcher for daily, local disasters, and helps out in other situations, both in the field and in their offices. Given his tenure as a volunteer, he has taken numerous Red Cross training classes, including learning to drive a fork lift (although not that well, he ruefully notes).

The work is challenging on several levels. First are the 12 hour shifts, usually 7 to 7. Except they often don’t end exactly at 7:00; so your shift lasts 13 or 14 hours or more. If you are on a night shift, that can be even tougher. You get one day off per week, if you are lucky. You sleep wherever you can find a bunk, sometimes that means you don’t exactly have five-star accommodations, or even one-star. “I’ve slept on a shelter’s army cots, but in Ventura I paid for my own accommodations and got a hotel room. I don’t sleep well on cots. Some of my fellow volunteers have slept in their cars or on the ground.”

He is very proud of his volunteer efforts, although he doesn’t carry any personal hubris in what he does. “First and foremost, it’s about helping our clients,” he told me in a recent phone call and over a series of emails and Facebook posts. “Self-praise almost never shows up in anyone’s behavior. The focus is the work.”

One of the things he learned from the recent series of disasters was to expand his definition of a “client”. Originally, he thought just the people displaced by the floods or fires were his clients, but other volunteers pointed out that the Red Cross ecosystem is much greater, including someone who donates items or funds to a relief effort. “The rest of the community is also our client, because they are also affected by the disaster and are compelled to be connected to it, by coming to the shelter to donate or by asking how can they help.”

One of the challenges is that these spontaneous donations can become overwhelming. In the Ventura County fires, Crocker experienced this first-hand. “We saw an enormous amount of donations of water, snacks, face masks, diapers, clothing, toys, and more, That was all brought to our shelters, and our warehouses quickly got filled. Processing all that requires a lot of staff. Historically, these donations have been turned away by the Red Cross, with a request to just send money. This has regularly produced word-of-mouth criticism of the Red Cross. This year, Red Cross policy changed and the rule is to say yes and then figure out how to make it work.”  Crocker said that many tens of thousands of bottles of water were donated, as were donations that had been ordered online, with enough showing up to fill a shipping container.

Running a large disaster response is sometimes compared to the logistics of running a military deployment. “Even the smallest shelter has an enormous amount of detail to it,” Crocker told me. “There is the whole setting-up of beds and linens, and then taking it all down, the ongoing cleaning of various items as clients leave and new ones register; then there is feeding three meals a day plus snacks. It is a massive logistics game and the situation is highly dynamic. Communication is challenging because you have to deal with a lot of noisy information. And equipment and geography can be difficult.”

Fires are unpredictable, especially when the wind changes, and that puts a wrench in your plans, for who is affected and where to locate the shelters. The Ventura Fairgrounds shelter he worked at had roughly 250 clients, with a peak of about 500, before he arrived. The range of quality in facilities that are available is also highly variable. At Ventura, the shelter was in a building that is typically used for livestock shows. “We were in better shape in the wine country fires because we had use of a church with excellent kitchen and shower facilities and had been explicitly designed for be used as a shelter.” That church-based facility has hosted a disaster shelter 11 times in the last few years. In Houston, there were roughly 4,000 volunteers in the relief effort, divided amongst 25 different shelters.

The timing of the Ventura fires produced an unusual benefit for the shelter’s clients. Because the fires were around the holidays, a lot of corporate parties were canceled and as a result restaurants had surplus food that they repurposed as donations to feed the volunteers working the shelters.

One of the frustrations Crocker cites for himself and his colleagues is the negative press surrounding the response of the Red Cross volunteers to these disasters. “Sometimes the reporting focuses only on the negative, citing only one or another disgruntled person.” While certainly there are issues, for the most part he sees the relief efforts as run as well as they can be, given the complex and dynamic circumstances that any large effort like this will have. “Certainly, there are people who try to scam the system, something that I’ve seen in my limited volunteer efforts. But Red Cross policy is to err in the direction of helping rather than rejecting people who ask for assistance.”

“The work itself, and the privilege to do it, is what I enjoy, and being around people with a similar attitude, and getting the work done.” Crocker mentioned in one Facebook post that “everyone has had a collaborative tone” including Red Cross volunteers, employees and even clients, which could be because many clients have been displaced by multiple fires in past years. Note that more than 90% of Red Cross staffing is done by volunteers.

I highly recommend taking a moment, and getting involved in your local Red Cross chapter. Give blood, give money, give your time. You are working with a great group of people and for something very worthwhile.