Signal for Help
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
"We've been here for five hours, everyone is hungry. Can we get some food, like order a pizza or something?"
An example of the gameplay with that call is https://youtu.be/tEpyboLQ7bk?t=360
And an actual dispatcher call https://youtu.be/ZJL_8kNFmTI
There’s pretty much no need to say your address either. The police will already have your location from the phone call.
"... for the toppings I want pineapple, feta and onions..." -> recommend you bring stun grenades, tasers and tear gas
... etc ...
alas, I, as a pineapple-on-pizza-phile will have to suffer your slings and arrows
in all seriousness, that could be a good way to encode additional meanings via term chord combos
You're supposed to write a long tale on Medium titled "Here's what happened when I tried to order food over the phone from a restaurant"
Then make a Tiktok Video about it tagged #lifehack.
It's the only way the loafing class will believe you.
I recently moved to a new (large) city, and have found that nearly half of the restaurants in my neighborhood aren't even in either Google Maps or Apple Maps.
There are a lot of nice restaurant in the middle of the cities, outside the centre or the most crowded places, where the food is great and usually cheaper than the others.
At least this is my experience as an European. If you go to Lyon, Madrid, Rome, or cities like that, you will have this kind of experience.
Every restaurant thinks they're special and they all want their own app. So if you have a regular group of restaurants that you order from you're installing potentially a dozen apps, all of which are probably riddled with spyware and security holes.
And as a user of UberEats, all my perceptions are wrong: The good experience I have is not valid, just an illusion, and I am dumb.
And literally all of the 100M users of UberEats are also wrong, and pretty crappy humans.
OR maybe you're just blinded by your ideology. Who knows!?
Plus, the restaurant loses the ability to completely control the experience the customer gets. If the pizza sits around for half an hour before it gets picked up, gets to the customer cold, and then the customer complains, how is that the restaurant's fault?
I'm not negating your point: it is a pain and a risk to install a dozen apps. But I also understand why they do it.
I do not want your app of crap!
I done that last Saturday, and the call lasted exactly 39 seconds. No app install, no registering, and no entering my card information.
Ants use specific chemicals (pheromones), producing odors, for communication. Their signals for food and other sustaining activities are fairly complex and long-lasting, and tend to be specific to a species.
Alert signals are comprised of small molecules, are sharp, are not specific to a given species (there may be multiples of these, but they're shared across species), and they spread and disperse below detection threshold quickly. That is, once emitted, the signal permeates through the immediate area quickly, but it's also not long-lasting, so that later-arrivals won't erroniously interpret a danger signal.
See:
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(06)...
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3509_eowilson.html
https://achievement.org/achiever/edward-o-wilson-ph-d/#inter...
(I'm finding overviews but not a specific description of the processes / methods.)
Audio alerts among other animals seem to be similar. Alarm or threat cries are clear, unambiguous, and broadcast widely. Friend or mating cries, calls, songs, etc., are typically far more complex, specific, and more localised. These are behaviours which have emerged under selective pressure over millions of years.
We scream at terror, shout at enemies, and whisper to lovers and children.
I'd be very interested to hear of any secret or covert alert calls in nature.
Complex or secret help calls are ... probably not especially useful in most cases. Instead, those who are likely to receive a call should be primed to act and verify quickly.
Put another way, the method suggested in the article is a form of responsibilty-shifting to the victim, though it's all but certainly not intentionally constructed as such.
"Mayday", "SOS", "Securitay", and "Pan pan pan" in aviation and boating. For aviation also 7500, 7600, and 7700.
A list of codes used in hospitals, including combative individuals, armed confrontations, bomb threats and the like:
https://www.calhospitalprepare.org/sites/main/files/file-att...
For lists of codes used in other contexts (police, subways, ships, air travel: https://www.theclever.com/15-secret-emergency-codes-youre-no...
Note that without specific training and regular drilling, these are likely to not be especially useful. For communicating to the public a plausible-but-clear explanation, e.g., "police investigation" (usually code for suicide, possibly other death) is used especially in transportation systems. A "police investigation" on a transit line or bridge is frequently a suicide or attempt.
From your list, I've hear "inspector sands" being used, and avoided the exit they called someone to.
https://reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/qeq0fq/the_m...
The point appears to be to use it if you are in a situation where for example your abusive partner is next to you, for example on a video call, and you want to signal on this call (as opposed to on a separate call when your abusive partner is not next to you?) that you need help. This then relies on 1) the people on the other end of the video call recognizing the signal, but also 2) your abuser not recognizing it.
This seems extremely unlikely. Am I missing something about its utility?
Also consider that revealing the abuse can be life threatening to the victim. How certain can you really be you’re not being overheard? And is even a 1% chance worth your life?
As you said:
> And is even a 1% chance worth your life?
Is the 1% chance that the abuser sees and understands the symbol worth your life?
https://reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/qeq0fq/the_m...
Edit: reading some of the comments in the Reddit thread, as the article states, this was started in Canada during the COVID lockdown, so the likely scenario there is that you may give the signal out during work/while video chatting with a friend/relative while the abuser is unobservant but within hearing distance.
To your point, this still seems unlikely, but if someone is in an abusive relationship but is still working during lockdowns, I suppose it’s still one way to signal for help.
It just seems like an extremely dangerous thing to do. If someone sees you doing some weird gesture with your hands, their first impulse may just be to blurt out "what are you doing with your hands?", which would in this case draw the abuser's attention.
It seems way more straightforward to type out in that scenario explicitly that you are in danger.
(a) you can disguise the action as making a fist then said fist goes on to rub your nose, for instance.
(b) your chin can rest on the back of your hand in position (1). Then it occasionally switches to (2). You can keep doing this while pretending to be listening thoroughly, like it's some unconscious gesture.
(c) you can do this gesture two or three times in a row disguised as a hello or goodbye wave.
The important observation here is, even if your abuser recognizes what you are doing, they are unlikely to prevent you from doing this immediately. Otherwise if they do then it's just explicit confirmation that you are indeed being abused. That situation is no good for them, if they are trying to hide the fact.
The second point is that you maintain plausible deniability even if your abuser recognizes the sign. Of course it's not foolproof but it's easier to sell this as casual gestures as opposed to explicitly telling the video chat of your situation. If your abuser confronts you about it (if they even catch you doing it), it's easier to defuse the situation and less likely to end up in another altercation.
This is I think precisely why this signal is a non-starter. For it to be successful, it seems to require that a large percentage of people are able to recognize it. But if a large percentage of people can recognize it, that logically means the abuser is more likely to recognize it as well.
> Addressing concerns that abusers may become aware of such a widespread online initiative, the Canadian Women's Foundation and other organizations clarified that this signal is not "something that's going to save the day," but rather a tool someone could use to get help.
If the abuser is in the room a hand gesture would be quite dangerous and if they’re not voice could be used instead. In situations where the abuser is too close for verbal communication, surely text would be the next safest option?
Perhaps there are some situations where only video is available making this necessary, but I can’t think of any video conferencing software which doesn’t also support text messaging.
I’d be worried promoting this will either result in people trying to alert others and failing because of a lack of awareness, or people simply misinterpreting someone waving to say hi or bye as a call for help and wasting people time.
If enough people know about the signal for it to be helpful, the abuser may know it too. And what if the abuser knows it and nobody else notices?
There’s also a term that bartenders learn. A certain name asked for (I forget). I feel that one might work better because it is targeted knowledge for women and bartenders.
Nevertheless, there’s a logical complication here I struggle to reconcile. I’m guessing this is a very well trodden problem space in cryptography.
The point is that it might be easier than hide than verbally or writing a note etc. So while the risk of course remains it is an added tool that is silent and doesn't require access to anything else.
I think this sign was in particular meant to be used while on a video call. An abusive partner may currently not be looking at their victim, so they could do the signal, while making an auditory signal would not work.
SOS is still officially recognized as a distress signal, is universally understood across language and cultural barriers, and works well with a variety of signaling methods.
The way you tap it is
. . . .. .. .. . . .Why? There, by definition, is always a moment when you learn something. You're not born knowing SOS. At some point in your life you learn of it. To reply to someone who expresses that that this was such a moment with "I hope you're joking" comes off as extremely condescending.
I'm not trying to be harsh or anything, it's just that I can't imagine someone not knowing such a basic thing like that - similar to not knowing what the number for the emergency services in your country is.
Never mind, sorry for the bad comment.
I can't do this ( https://www.medmd.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Bend-Your-T... ) because I can't bend the tip of my thumb while keeping my fingers straight. The index and middle finger bend with the thumb tip.
I can do what this picture describes as opposition ( http://i2.wp.com/boneandspine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09... ) with a combination of little finger movement and straight thumb or bent thumb and clawed fingers, and so I can make a fist with my thumb rotated around and tip covered by fingers.
The PT didn't help them get more range of motion, just helped reduce some pain they were having.
Non-triviality of the context: this morning this friend of mine had to call an emergency number. The country he was in had structured years ago the workflow as follows: first you talk to an operator, which compiles a form "with your help". Then you wait on hold, until a switchboard tune stops and you talk to the police (as in, "Hello, five minutes ago when I first called somebody was shooting around"). The operator reports being legally bound not to pass any information directly to the police: there is no action if the police does not talk to the caller, and there is no police if you do not spend the preliminary minutes. I am sure a few issues are clear.