It’s a study published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America rather than the Journal of the American Dental Association as one might reasonably expect.

Like a lone, home-schooled Babel fish deciphering only one, rather than every language in the known universe, and as surprising as tapioca pudding in Arthur Dent’s prep-school slippers, this auditory enhancer doesn’t even go into your ear.

Neither is it yellow or leechlike.

Certainly it’s small. Not in a nano-tiny way, but rather boom-box-to-Walkman; and there’s a Neapolitan quick-shake exhortative for anyone not of this earth in the late 1970s, devouring Douglas Adams and pancakes at The Rocks after 1.30am.

“Probably the weirdest thing in the universe” the fictional species of Adams’ Babel fish was no longer a concept two decades later. Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and SYSTRAN S.A launched a web-based language text translation app, capable of articulating 13 languages.

Five years after that, Yahoo! thought Yahoo! and as an overture bought Overture Services Inc. Migrating with that was the biblically named, galaxy-roaming fish created by the creator’s first named man.

Unfortunately the buy wasn’t under a Pac-Man defense which would have made this short interpretation of Life, the Universe and Everything an absolute 천재의 일격.

Another five years went by before the translation app ‘Babelfish’ was spawned; killed off four years later in 2012 like a 2023 Murray cod.

2018 and 2019 had had Murray River mass fish kills too – lack of oxygen was given as the cause when really it was the result – decades of overuse and abuse, compounded by the insanity of government water allocations and sanctioned floodplain harvesting sucked the oxygen from the air in parliament and the from the water in the river.

‘So Long and Thanks for All the Fish’ might just be where we’re at upon reflection of Adams’ further work; in it there’s a significant shift in the former disparagement of technology, and here we are suddenly scuba diving with AI with no idea how long our oxygen might last.

Our hearing certainly doesn’t for the most part – so listen up to these sobering statistics while you can:

In the US alone, some 30-odd million people need hearing aids. Were that the number of people needing to see 30 Odd Foot of Grunts, fewer than 4.8 million of them get to go to the concert.

Don’t tell Russ. He’d never go-Russ-go for it.

Of that demographic, those older than 70 and often more heavily reliant on a hearing device, less than 30% have them.

For the majority of hearing loss sufferers there’s an average of 15 years between knowing they’re not hearing properly to purchasing the necessary hearing aid.

Few people ever feel comfortable acknowledging the failings of their physical self. often justifying The continuing requests for words and phrases to be repeated repeated is justified by anything other the slippery slippage of their auditory range. With a USD price range of between 1,000 and 4,000 a piece (not a pair) lack of money, is of course cited as the overriding issue for a delay of this kind of duration.

Interestingly, 15 years is precisely the amount of time Ford Prefect was away from Betelgeuse Five, trapped on Earth comprising the latest edition of that preeminent travel guide for all those galaxy hitchhikers.

Those who know what happened after that, know.

Those who don’t were probably expecting a spoiler alert and that’s clearly been spoiled.

(By a lert, boom tish…! Ah, the randomness and absurdity of deep thought after 42.)

Unnervingly for many, life now somehow feels that it’s transitioned into a trillion Tik Tok mockumentaries. A living of the lurching hapless set adrift, live. Influencers influencing with an Infinite Improbability Drive where literally anything can happen.

From the ordinary to the extraordinary, the Crisis Inducer is artificially set to selectable severity.

Just as it had people believing there’d been an explosion at the Pentagon in May 2023, AI could just as easily convince us that Vogons are heading our way; with the knowledge implied or supplied that the likes of Arnault, Musk and Bezos were already aboard an Earth-leaving craft.

Not as stowaways like Ford and Dent. Theie resounding arcs to those nouns are the shallow dripenomics of stupendous wealth that swathes an ever-hollowing depression in the land-mind-landscapes of planet-dwellers in this 21st century.

The impact of unremedied hearing loss is great.

Studies have shown again and again that failing to treat failing hearing has negative physical, mental and social consequences that lead to depression, loneliness and social isolation.

It has multiple effects on personal and family relationships including eye-rolling and shoutiness.

All in all, it’s hard for the hard of hearing.

While traditional hearing aids amplify the acoustics entering the ear canal, bone-anchored hearing aids (BAHA – sans the usual HAHAHA) is surgically implanted.

Introduced in 2013, it’s a hearing loss treatment that conducts the vibrations of sound through bone, to the inner ear. The system is magnetic both literally and figuratively. Under local or general anaesthetic and taking between 40 and 80 minutes, behind the ear is implanted two magnets, and a titanium conductor (not at all like Leonard Bernstein).

No telepathic excretor, no digestive nerve brain, no conscious or unconscious frequency sensors, no gill rakers. No gas bladder.

Not in your ear, anyway.

Obviously the skull is a brilliant amplifier. Ask anyone familiar with a clock on the head. Warner Bros has documented the resonance and fake news resilience of the noggin since 1949 through the life and times of one Wiley E. Coyote.

BAHA if at 74 he’s a might deef: not as an insult, as a process.

BAHA has auditory content perceived by the vibrational stimulation of the cochlea.

It’s the part of the ear nobody had much heard about until the availability of the cochlear implant in 1979; the same year Pan Books let Douglas Adams let loose a pop culture phenomenon that was pre-pre-internet. Where a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster – a drink said to be like having “…your brains smashed by a slice of lemon wrapped around a brick” makes the creamy foamy butterscotch of Harry Potter’s Butterbeer definitely need more scotch.

A drink like that may very well have inspired the development of BAHA technology. Certainly its boosted popularity coincided with the widespread sale of bone conduction headphones.

Curiously they’re not patented ‘Bone Heads’ as it seems patently clear they should be. Only a Melbourne micro-brewery proudly claims that name with no mention whatsoever of lemony bricks.

Recent studies show that stimulation of teeth also initiates auditory sensations – piano ones according to the aforementioned ACME-addicted Mr Coyote. Teeth are in fact comparable to the mastoid bone – part of the skull behind the ear used for BAHA, that’s on average, 26mm long and 8.8mm thick.

In terms of audio sensitivity, hearing assistive devices implanted in the mouth have the advantage of really good acoustics.

Were plutonium rock band Disaster Area from the Gagrakacka Mind Zones playing by remote control inside their heavily insulated spaceship, it would no longer be the only decipherable sound in the galaxy.

The unpleasant fact is that until generative dentistry becomes the norm in twenty years (the old Babel fish timeline) with age, teeth are likely to be replaced. Dental implant hearing aids kill two birds with one stone: a tooth-fix fixture with hearing loss treatment.

Finally more people will able to hear what those little birdies tell them, and throw that stone right from the glasshouse in which they live.

Less loudly.

Getting two things in one always feels like progress: a thong that’s a bottle opener; a phone that’s a torch; a towel that’s the massively most important thing in the universe.

For that reason there was a towel aboard the maiden flight of the Falcon Heavy rocket when it threw a Tesla Roadster into orbit around the Sun, close to Mars.

And that wasn’t Douglas Adams – it was Elon Musk.

In the Hitchhiker year of ’79, that type of uncanny double-slammy was Loniten – a Pfizer-developed blood pressure medication that inadvertently proved a successful hair re-growth treatment. One can only imagine how much more hectic the 1980s would have been without all those fingering fingers running through hair that once wasn’t, then was.

At the time it was all that could be reasonably done to retain the good looks of the masculine of the species patterned with male pattern baldness. The only fillers and polishes they used then were for cars.

It’s thanks to researchers at the prestigious Tongji University, Shanghai, China that there’s evidence of modern dental implants – connected to the alveolar bone by osseointegration – conducting sound to the jaw just as well, if not better, than biological teeth.

As well as the comfort of improved sound quality, the unique advantage of this developing technology is the superb concealment of a hearing aid.

The Tongji team found that front dental implants had superior results to those located in the posterior mandible – possibly because the anterior bone is harder.

Implants in the lower jaw worked just as well as in the upper; with the threshold of front dentals significantly lower than that of implants in the back.

Listen, dentists could soon be approved professionals trained in restoring hearing to people’s lives.

Wherever we’re headed, whatever’s headed toward us, as sentient beings there is allegedly no greater torture than total perspective.

The best perspective totally, comes only from the Total Perspective Vortex.

“You are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it there’s a tiny little speck, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, You are here.”

Don’t panic!

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