Reading a Reddit thread about sounds we used to hear.

Modems, rotary dials, antenna rotors, the 15750 horizontal flyback in TV (interestingly, the thread has 15,700 comments right now!), dial tones and busy signals.

I’m mostly analog, never switched from landline to cellphone, so some of these are still common for me.

One steady theme is sort of reassuring: Tinnitus replaces the hi-freq sounds. It’s universal above a certain age. I should stop worrying about it.

Another theme: Birds and crickets and frogs are less common now. I’m not sure if this is valid.

Birds are still common here, even in winter. Crickets and cicadas and frogs were never common in cold latitudes, so I can’t compare new vs old. If crickets and frogs are really less common now in warmer places, it must be from all the insecticide we use now. WHOOPSIE! We don’t use any insecticide now.

Remembering Kansas and Oklahoma in the ’50s, DDT was sprayed all the time in summer. Mosquitos were suppressed but other insects were extremely common. Birds were eating the DDT-infused bugs, and were not harmed. Frogs specifically eat mosquitos and they were not harmed. Now that all the insects are NONpoisoned by NONinsecticide, the birds and frogs have much less to eat.

Clearly there’s a missing piece in this attempted correlation. Either the observations of less insects are wrong, or we’re doing SOMETHING that kills vastly more bugs than DDT. (But it doesn’t kill mosquitos or termites. Both are common now in this cold latitude.) What’s the SOMETHING? Pervasive RF from cellphones?