You may think you're a cellphone expert, but there's at least one of these four things I bet you didn't know:

1. Cellphone microphones automatically adjust to the amount of background noise. So speaking louder never helps, and in fact makes it harder for the person on the other end to hear you. Always speak at a normal level. Even in a loud room. Even on a train. You don't have to hear yourself for the other person to hear you just fine. Not only do you annoy everyone around you with your loud cellphone voice, you actually also annoy the person on the other end.

2. Cellphone speakers all have volume controls (sounds like the LW needs hers turned way up) but often these volume controls can only be accessed when the phone is actually being used! Have a friend call you, and play with the "+" and "-" buttons while on a call -- they're usually on the "side" of the phone.

3. The correct cellphone "grip" is totally different from every "landline" phone you've ever used. Instead of "four fingers on one side, thumb on the other" for a cellphone you should employ the "index finger straight up the back" grip. This moves your hand around and makes your palm into an extension for the microphone pickup, dramatically improving the quality of your voice at the other end. This is most important for "candybar" phones, but also prevents you from "smothering" a flip.

4. With super-thin phones, putting pressure on the back of the phone can destroy the clarity of the call, for a variety of technical reasons. See point 3 for the correct "grip". You may want to tightly hold on to the call (or the caller!) but try not to too-tightly squeeze your super-thin cellphone.

Explaining one or more of these has seriously assisted many of my friends and colleagues, and even (embarrassingly) members of my own family!

Good luck -- and may your cellphone usage be useful to you and un-annoying to others.

...is to make it uneconomical.

Here's my back-of-an-envelope proposal:

A "postage stamp" cost of 1 cent (or local equivalent) for every email sent outside your home domain.

This money is collected by your ISP, and forwarded to ICANN and the other internet control bodies to pay for the infrastructure that underpins our online lives.

Since the 1c "postage" is only collected for email sent outside your domain, companies don't have to pay for internal email.

Since it's only 1c, it's at worst a tiny annoyance for legitimate email users (i.e. all of us) but would make spam totally uneconomical. A 1-million email spam burst would cost $10,000.

Yes it would raise the cost of running "I agree that you can tell me all about your new products!" email lists, but that's another positive, because it would drive legitimate users of such lists to correctly target them (i.e. I get no more ads for new ranges of bath towels from BBB).

People go to doctors for cures.

People go to practitioners of "tradition medicine" for help dealing with symptoms.

It's all about the expectations.

Against the benchmark of "a little help dealing with the pain" the traditional prescriptions of complex herb infusions, diet modifications, environment changes help provide distraction -- with its well known powers of pain reduction -- if nothing else.

Against the (impossibly high) benchmark of "cure", modern medicine, despite its innumerable spectacular successes, fails. A lot.

If people could somehow get into their heads that both systems were, in reality, simply offering "illness management" people would then be in a position to rationally set their own expectations.

But while we continue to expect miracles from cold, hard, rational science, and continue to expect "a degree of help" from warm, fuzzy, magical traditional therapy, our great expectations, no matter how flawed, will continue to run this debate.

You're right, Patrick, it's partly the "secondary" amenities which mean the difference between awful and alright in economy class.

I recently had the opportunity to compare two almost identical 10-hour overnight transits within just a few days.

As they were essentially north-south flights (CAN-SYD / SYD HKG), jetlag was not a factor. Which is why you can't fairly compare (for example) LAX-SYD (fine) to SYD-LAX (jetlag nightmare).

CAN-SYD was on China Southern, with a level of cabin service and amenities that American domestic passengers would feel right at home with. Horror flight.

SYD-HKG was on Virgin Atlantic, in a literally brand-new plane with all the mod cons, and an enthusiastic crew. Pleasant, almost-enjoyable trip.

Two essentially identical flights, all the difference in the world in how you feel at the other end.

But even more crucial than amenities and service for coach is simply how full the flight is.

I seem to recall it was almost normal in the 90s to be at 20-50% capacity, I were often able to get the coveted "row to myself" in economy. Those days seem permanently gone, with flights almost unfailingly at 70% and up these days, with a brief break in 2003 for SARS (being one of around 10 people in economy on a Cathay Pacific 747 is something I'll always remember).

The difference between a good flight and a bad flight in coach in these days of routinely full airplanes can literally be armrest-thin.