An old quip says "The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place". Sure it applies to #scicomm too: let me tell you about the curious case of baritones and cellphones.

1/n

Some 4-5 years ago I wrote a piece about mobile phones and the difference holding them in your left or your right hand makes. It's not about the brain hemispheres or health effects, as conspiracy theories at the time implied: the difference was in the quality of reception.

2/n

Given that phones in the mid-2010s had to be compatible with 2G, 3G, and 4G standards, several antennas had to be packed into the housing, and usually they wouldn't be symmetrically positioned. That would mean that during a conversation, your hand would cover some of them.

3/n

If that antenna was in use during the call, that might mean poor reception--I found a study that tested this for a wide range of phones. I happily reported their findings, explaining how if an iPhone is using higher frequency band of radio waves during a call...

4/n

... holding it in your left hand might be better. The opposite would hold for a Samsung. Nothing amazingly useful, but a fun piece of geeky trivia, I thought. The article was picked up by several global outlets, and just the other day I saw the worst derivative of it.

5/n

The author of the piece read my article and decided to retell it to their audience. Somewhere in the process, however, they managed to mix up the frequency of the radio waves through which mobile phones communicate, and the frequency of sound waves; our voices.

6/n

Hence, they enthusiastically reported that if we're talking to someone with a *deep baritone voice* using an iPhone, the right ear is the right ear.

That's a nice little pitfall we didn't avoid; the intuitive leap of "oh, yes. Frequencies, waves, we have a grasp of that."

7/n

I want to write more about the basics. What's a radio, what's AM and FM, how does voice travel over the airwaves and why do antennas look weird. How to fix a radio, and why is it important that our radios can be fixed. Someone else can keep writing about 5G, sure.

8/n, n=8