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Comment by jimnotgym | Hacker News Reader

The ancients did not know this, but for some reason a trip in the car has always made my kids sleep. Once you have fed and changed them of course. Anecdotally formula milk from a bottle seems to help them fill up quicker than breast feeding, and stay quiet for longer. Although I seem to remember that may have the bad side effect of increasing the likelyhood of cot-death, presumably because they are sleeping more deeply and for longer

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Ford is on to that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ic6vWoSd8Fk

Wow, I like it. It seems like the approach is, "we have no clue what exactly is it about cars that works this way, so let's replicate as much of the experience as possible". Brute-forcing the problem, but sounds like it could work well.

A friend of mine (another crazy tinkerer, which is how we got to know each other) built something like that in the 90's for one of his children that could not sleep anywhere but in the car. It was a crazy contraption but it did work.

The ancients did know it. I think babies would have gone to work with mom and dad (=movement) instead of hanging out at the cave on their own

The noise is very important. Any kind of white noise is soothing for a baby... noise from water, car or even vacuum cleaner.. I used to generate a noise with:

  sox -n soothingnoise-3mn.wav synth 3:0 pinknoise tremolo 0.5 30 fade q 5 3:0 30

Worked a treat to make my son sleep.

Awesome! You could do an iterative approach with a grid search to find the most-soothing parameter set!

You're using pink noise, right? I wish it would be less common to kind any kind of noise "white noise", as people might instinctively search for / generate actual white noise, dislike it, and abandon the concept. Pink noise is a particular kind of noise that's much nicer to listen to than white noise. I used it from time to time to block my cow-orkers off.

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