A few mysteries explained

Why are wrong numbers never busy? It's happened to me too...you call up someone and someone on the other end tells you that you have dialed the wrong number. The human brain ignores more than 90% of the information going into it at any given time, how comfortable clothes feel on your skin, the dandruff making you go blind as it accumulates on your eyeglass lenses, the smell of the trash in the kitchen that should have went out yesterday, the impending flash flood of fecal matter building up on the walls of your colon. It's selective memory. When you dial a wrong number and it goes through, you remember the voice of the person on the other end of the line telling you so. If you dialed that same wrong number while he was on the phone talking to someone else, you wouldn't have paid attention to it...you just thought you dialed the right number. You notice the times it succeeds and pay no attention to the times it fails. Phone psychics make a living off this. People call them and the psychic gets one thing right by chance which makes them feel good, so they make a note of it, but when the psychic is way off base they tend not to remember it.

Why do I hear the phone ring when I am taking a shower/using the hair dryer/holding the sustain pedal on the piano? You're about to rinse off all the soap off of yourself when you hear a faint bell sound in the background...then you try to stay still for the next two minutes trying to hear if the answering machine got the call...you strain and hear nothing...Ringxiety has struck again! The noise from the things that make you think the phone is ringing has a lot of frequencies in it. The human brain is always on the lookout for a ringing phone, and it notices a pattern in the noise and thinks "Ok, a phone just rang..." A similar thing is going on when you see a face in the moon. It's too much sensitivity.

What is that humming sound I get when I touch the pin on the phono plug to a stereo component with my finger? It's 0kHz on the dial. That's right, you are listening to the very bottom of the radio spectrum. Your body acts like an antenna and it picks up every radio station which is within hearing range. The humming sound is the power lines. They transmit/unintentionally radiate at 60 hertz in the US, 50 hertz in Europe.And it's not exactly stable, either. Its frequency can vary give or take 25 thousandths of a cycle per second over the course of many hours.

What is a twenty second pulse, and where does it come from? Speaking of the low end of the radio spectrum, there is a noise at 17.5 kilohertz which comes on occasionally (if you read the last question and got really good hearing, you can touch the input of a stereo and hear it), it occurs more often in the winter. Would you believe it's the spark ignitor on the oil burner in the furnace? The oil goes into the burner head where it is sprayed by the nozzle into the bottom of the boiler. Just before this starts, the ignitor sends a spark for about 20 seconds to ignite the spraying oil.
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