> An audiologist friend told me to go to an ENT physician if not better by 48 hours or the damage could be permanent. Much longer than that and it would be too late to try any of the interventions
This seems like poor advice. If there is significant, realistic concern about permanent damage, I'd suggest checking immediately, rather than give it extra time...
Yes, I always find it amazing how patients can have a sudden sensorineural hearing loss and wait days before presenting.
In my opinion patients and the public should treat it as urgently as a sudden sight loss.
High dose steroids are regularly prescribed in this sort of scenario in an attempt to minimize damage, and are likely to be more effective the sooner they are given.
As I am not a doctor, I have always assumed that weird sesorimotor effects might be indicative of a stroke - though in this case, the author had an apparent cause.
After hurting my neck in the shower,
Me calling primary care: The earliest we can see you is next Tuesday
Me skipping primary care & going to ER instead: After a 2 hour wait, I get condescendingly asked: why didn't you go to your primary care?
That's a bit uncharitable. The choice is rarely as clear as that. It's often hard to know whether an affliction is serious enough to warrant immediate attention. So the person must weigh the risk of delaying immediate treatment against the inconvenience and embarrassment of an unnecessary ER visit.
It will be really nice when everyone has access to a medical AI that can assess these things instantly wherever you are.
Japan has a nice system: when you're not sure your issue is bad enough to call 119 (Japanese version of 911), you can call 7119 which will tell you if it's really an emergency and you need an ambulance or if you should just rest and see a doctor in the morning.
We have similar in the UK (NHS 111) - but because they're rather err on the side of caution, they usually refer you to A&E anyway.
They do seem to have some sway over the GPs though - Rather than A&E, they've refereed me to the Doctors instead. When I said it's impossible to get an appointment 111 told me to tell the Doctors they've referred me. At that point the Doctors seem to _have_ to see you the same day.
Or you live in a country with no BS medical pricing, take 2 zeros from that value and you get a more realistic pricing estimate for places in Europe (or pretty much elsewhere, probably lower, apart from Japan and Australia, I'd say)
went to ER, they took a single xray, 5hours later doctor shows up and say "yeah its broken, we will put a temporary useless immobiliser worse than the one you came in with. here's the phone number of a specialist you can try calling monday". it was $4k for out of pocket btw. my top of the line insurance just said "we can't dispute anything from er visits".
Several years ago I was visiting my mom on vacation. I took her to the ER after I was sure she had a stroke. The doctor came in, didn’t listen to anything either she or I had to say, and wrote off her statement that she could only “see half of [the doctor’s] head” as a joke. He told her that she was fine, maybe just a little dehydrated, and that the fact that I brought her to the ER for such a problem represented everything that is wrong with today’s healthcare system. He was essentially calling me an idiot for bringing her.
Concerned my mother hadn’t improved and was being discharged, I called my sister, who happened to be a nurse upstairs at the same hospital. She came down and explained to the doctor that my mother was having a “visual disturbance”. As soon as that terminology was used, they took her for an MRI and sure enough, she had indeed had a stroke and was immediately admitted. This was after 4 hours of wasted time and an attempted discharge - simply because the doctor refused to listen and would only go by symptoms.
The doctor never apologized for his comments. While I wound up feeling justified in this case, had my sister not intervened, I would likely never have taken her to the ER again unless she was unconscious or bleeding.
I wanted to, but my sister worked at the same hospital and was afraid it might ultimately affect her job or at least her social life there if we did. So I just let it go.
I experienced an audio trauma when I was 17. Tinnitus followed. Parents told me "let's wait a week or two and if it isn't gone away then we'll make an appointment". Once the verdict of definitive hear loss and permanent noise was confirmed my dad told me: "don't stay too close to hammers next time".
To this day I still wait until I can't move/breath/feel to go to the doctor.
edit: unfordable health care and/or bad money education is how people end up putting health to the bottom of the list.
> Yes, I always find it amazing how patients can have a sudden sensorineural hearing loss and wait days before presenting.
Having gone to the physician with complaints many times and be told to wait to see if the issue goes away (most of them didn't) or that there's nothing to be done about it, one is quickly trained not to bother going to a physician for anything short of a major injury.
(And this behavior is from a physician who is a Ph.D at a teaching hospital, no less.)
If you're looking for something with a profound anti-inflammatory effect you can get more out of high potency CBD(Cannabidiol) than from high potency steroids. Side effects are generally less with the CBD, although it's exponentially more expensive.
A friends daughter got a brain injury from a car-pedestrian accident. He learned a lot, and told me his take away: If you hit your head and have any concern about it, take Ibuprofen to prevent swelling/inflamation and drive to Ann Arbor (we're in Michigan but that's over an hour away). The first part made sense, the second he said that town and UofM are known for treating that kind of thing. He has them in such high regard that it's worth the drive not even knowing who you're going to see ahead of time!?!?!?
One of the challenges in first aid treatment for stroke is “is it ischemic or hemorrhagic?”. The symptoms are similar, but the treatments almost the reverse of each other. Do you want to increase clotting to stop the bleeding, or decrease clotting to keep an existing brain clot small?
Sometimes (for example if it would take hours to bring the patient to a MRI/CT machine) an educated guess as to the answer is the optimal strategy.
Prescription Ibuprofen actually carries a Black Box Warning about increased stroke and heart attack risk in general. The OTC version never got the updated warning.
Protip: NAC prevents hangovers. I take one before and one after if I'm expecting an epic night out. The downside is, I don't get drunk so all the drink spend is wasted money. The upside, I come across as impervious instead of naturally being the lightweight of the group. Very useful when hanging out with alcoholic salespeople if you need to work the next day.
Test it out before you need it because the taste/smell makes some people puke like crazy for half an hour...
As odd as it may sound, Amphetamine is a key part of 'one of the most promising pharmacological strategies studied for recovery after stroke'. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/14960125/
It’s often a cost/risk trade off. A lot of things do fix themselves with time and if you default to going right to the doctor every time you’re injured or feel sick it’s going to cost a fortune, unless you have some kind of gold plated insurance. Some things have to be looked at right away, but for some things it’s unnecessary, and it can pay to wait it out.
(of course the above reasoning is pretty specific to the USA— could be different for people in more civilized places)
It's not even a cost, I have free healthcare through the military and I hesitate to visit doctors. First off, 99% of the time whatever it is fixes itself with time. Going to the doctor requires lots of time and effort, outside urgent care or the ER you're going to have to be going during the workday. Then they might refer you to other doctors and each one wants more and more of your time. I know a guy who goes to the doctor every time he has a viral infection to get antibiotics. Then he has to go back for different antibiotics because he doesn't feel better right away. That seems like a lot of effort when the alternative is doing nothing for the same outcome.
The other big issue I have with doctors, I don't know if they are going to prescribe me some bullshit because the real treatment is "you'll get better with time" or the real answer is "there's nothing we can do about that." Or, much worse, something that they believe will help you but is not evidence based. Before you get upset - I once had an MD refer me to a (licensed) physical therapist for craniosacral therapy (complete woo) which billed it to my insurance as something like "physical manipulations."
It's also just how I was raised, when I grew up, my parents would say "we'll see if it gets better," and it always did. When I grew up and starting visiting the doctor for things at the advice of others it didn't improve my health outcomes yet significantly increased my annoyance level.
Going to war in Iraq a few times I have heard and experienced a lot of loud sounds. Being about 20m away from the impact of a 105mm canon from an AC-130 was pretty loud. Being right next to a M1 Abrams was probably the worst. A Marine near me actually had a collapsed lung from being in the blast zone. I also RSO’d for a range that shot off 41 SMAW rockets. I had a bad headache for a couple of days after that. Then there was that time that I parked my LAV-25 about 100m from an artillery battery right before they fired a mission where they had to be using a charge 8 or something because a kept losing my train of thought for a minute or so every time they fired a volley.
And yes my hearing is pretty bad now. Hopefully I can get hearing aid later on.
Dortor specialized in hearing loss told me to "overdose" on vitamin C as high levels apparently raise blood pressure and thus lead to more blood flow in ears which should help on the recovery of the hairs. There's also pressure tank treatment but I doubt one would get access to one in time. And time is at essence when it comes to hearing loss.
I wonder about that too. It seems like they could write a blog post somewhere else, like Blogger or Tumblr or their own blog, and then link to it from Twitter? That was how Twitter first came into existence, was to link to content that was elsewhere. Perhaps the author feels they would lose their audience if they tried to send people elsewhere? That would be somewhat ironic, if we got to the point where people were unwilling to follow links from Twitter, to other sources of content.
(I'll refrain from making a joke about all the Russian bots that really have nothing better to do.)
You could do that, but nobody would think an essay was good if it were written with no transitions and mechanically started a new paragraph every few sentences.
1/5. I actually thought it was easier to read in this form. I can't be bothered with articles that have too much padding.
2/5. I think I like features like "paragraphs" that are not possible in this form.
3/5. People can and do use line breaks in tweets, but if you think of each tweet as a paragraph it makes sense too.
4/5. You could do that, but nobody would think an essay was good if it were written with no transitions and mechanically started a new paragraph every few sentences.
5/5. It is interesting how small paragraphs divide a meaning of the whole article and can confuse you, reader.
One argument for it is that it forces the writer to be concise. Many blog posts seem to have a lot of "fluff" for whatever reason, which is usually absent from a "tweetstorm".
If this causes people to write more concise stories, I'm all for it! On a page like the linked one, you can still read it like an article, and it doesn't have too much superfluous content.
Some people found out their audiences actually tend to read threads more thoroughly than articles. Personally I've found that Twitter enforces a certain discipline that makes things easier to read. In particular you don't get to do enormous paragraphs, and there's a natural limit to sentence length.
On the other hand, I know people who can't focus on anything within Twitter's interface. So, uh, it's subjective.
Many young people today can't comprehend a story unless it's broken down into small texts, like a child book, twitter, or any other chat app. As this is their only exposure to text. If you are a parent, force your kids to read books!
yes and no, I got told by a teacher. I tried looking at PISA et al. but it's really hard to find data. So I just take the teacher's word on it. It would be really interesting to see actual data. Even if the teacher and school plan is wrong I don't think it's bad to read more though.
OMG, now you just released a "national security threat" into the wild.
No doubt Cuban / Russian spys will reading your story and incorporating this into their schemes near our Cuban embassy !
That's insane! Never would of thought it would mess with your hearing. I figured just a nasty mess to clean up.
Our toilet seems like it wants to run every so often but usually wiggling the lever helps. I hate lifting that thing up, always imagine what a mess it would be if you dropped it.
I thought so too when these started to get common, but for one reason or another I _never_ had to fix one of these in like 15 years I've lived with them, compared to the almost regular maintenance the old stuff required.
I think the 'regular' style toilet tanks only require more frequent maintenance because they're inexpensive and people use crappy home store parts in them. You can buy five regular old toilets for the price of that wall-mount Toto.
My policy is to use high quality parts in the tank and I've found it pays dividends -- it's been years since I've had to do any maintenance on any of our toilets aside from cleaning.
I'm almost 40 and so far there has been only once in my life I had to do maintenance on a toilet, and I've always had "regular" ones. It was to replace a gasket.
My understanding it you go through the rectangle up top for most things. I've never done maintenance work on one, but they are practically ubiquitous in some parts of Europe. I would assume that if they required you to rip out the install to fix minor issue they would have been phased out.
They can be completely serviced from the button cutout - you can remove any parts through it (it was designed this way). I think almost all newer toilets in Europe are wall mounted. It looks better, it's very quiet (refill), saves space and works exactly the same... Here is an example video how to take it apart https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=es8SJ-1CFcU
This and they are basically maintenance-free. I think most people don't know that these things are serviceable at all. They also often have two buttons that release a different amount of water. Good for the environment and saves you money.
It's serviceable, but it looks harder to access than a visible-tank toilet. At the 3m mark in the video, my hands are instinctively cramping just by looking at that tight space.
The difference is like working on a car in the 70s versus a Japanese compact car from the late 90s.
Most American homes are not roughed in for a toilet like that. The waste pipe will be in the floor, about 12 to 14 inches from the wall. So installing one of these in an existing home is going to require changing both your water and waste plumbing and opening a pretty big hole in the floor and the wall to get at all of that. Additionally this is about 6x the price of a standard toilet. Not too surprising why they aren't that common.
Dr. Philip Metzger is a planetary physicist who recently retired from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, where he co-founded the KSC Swamp Works. He now is now at the University of Central Florida -- but still a part of the Swamp Works team
Fixing a toilet is dead simple, as are most household tasks. Either you'd have to be very rich to not have it be worth 1 hour of your time, since a plumber will surely be $100 at least, or you can't be bothered to watch a couple short videos on youtube.
Yes, and then you have to book them, be there when they come (possibly taking time off work) and call them when they are late or don’t show.
Then you find the counter top scratched and the problem reoccurs 3 days later, except when you look there is a massive goop of some crappy sealant instead of an actual part in there.
Do it yourself, it’s quicker, cheaper and you don’t get as angry when it goes wrong.
As an independent contractor, if you're charging $50/hour, I question your finances/skills unless you're in a very low cost area and even then it's pretty unbelievable. The risks for household tasks are so rare that they do not come into calculations, it's like worrying about tripping every time you take a step.
If you work in an office, I presume your home is where most of your physically risky activities happen? But even then, changing a toilet, basic plumbing and electrical, paint, drywall, and wood is all pretty safe if you take basic precautions.
If you somehow manage to develop silicosis from fiberglass whilst trying to fix a toilet, then you are definitely someone who shouldn't be attempting any sort of hands-on repair.
Not being depended on craftsman for small things like fixing your toilet safes you a lot of stress in my experience. Not problems with appointments, no waiting, no arguing in case if improper work, no other people in your home.
It takes about 5 minutes and $15 max in parts to fix anything inside the cistern on a toilet if you have a wet/dry vac, you don't even need any other tools. A bit of knowledge can save you a $150 service call from a plumber.
I wonder if another issue is that the hard surfaces of the typical bathroom would make the energy reflect more before dissipating. Even worse if the dimensions of the bathroom lead to resonances with 3.5kHz.
Bathrooms are famously reflective, producing the reverberation that makes shower singing sound palatable.
Wonder if that applies to kitchens too.. Last time a thick mug bounced off a casserole dish and was left holding my ears wondering how the F it could be so loud
I have mild tinnitus in one ear, from what I suspect was a friend screaming into my ear that she was going to the bathroom at a noisy club.
I'm relatively lucky, my hearing is still better than most, but it does suck.
I've decided I will never go to another club, and in bars I wear ear plugs. I have more to lose, since any additional damage will likely make my tinnitus more severe.
Seriously though, hearing is one of those things you don't think about until it's too late. Protect your ears.
I have the balance problem, too. A hearing specialist suggested that one of the bones in my ear was made of a spongy material rather than bone, which can cause it.
I get to visit clubs/shows every few months and I always use a pair of musician earplugs, (Etymotic, standard - not custom fitted). It gives a nice and even attenuation, which after few minutes you don't even notice (other than perhaps slightly elevating very low frequencies relative to the rest).
Your mind is very quick to normalize the volume level anyway, no matter if you're with or without protection. Why suffer permanent damage then?
Those are the kind I use. They try to be flat but there's really nothing you can do to stop concert level bass from getting through, so they end up being a bit boomy. I've found that I can move them in or out of the ear to adjust the dampening. If they are in too far I tend to not like the way it sounds. I like it at the most minimal dampening I can get. It sounds good and it still keeps me from getting concert-ear.
Also I've noticed that I can hear the music much better with them in (when it's too loud I have a hard time distinguishing pitches—singers often sound like the Chipmunks) and some groups don't fare well when you turn down the volume a bit (they use volume to mask lack of ability).
I use the Alpine [1], and I use them to protect my ears from the screaming of my toddler. They cost 13 EUR, custom-made cost around 150 EUR. Custom-made can be worth it if you use them a lot, and if your ears are non-standard might be downright mandatory.
But I've been using them too late because recently I have tinnitus in the evening before I go to sleep (I do wear the plug at night as well). Am in mid 30s.
I use the happyears: http://www.happyears.co/
I recommend them, they're cheap, easy to clean and quite comfortable.
Sound quality is always harder to tell (and subjective, it's hard to own hardware to measure it), however they're fine if you ask me. I own pairs of ER-20 XS and pluggerz music, and the happyears are my favorite (pluggerz is quite good as well, happyears are slightly more difficult to fit in the right place. ER-20XS are just uncomfortable in my ears).
This exactly. Wear earplugs to shows. The levels are generally WAY TOO LOUD to begin with, and in my experience I actually hear/enjoy shows better with halfway decent earplugs.
I can also leave shows, take them out, and hear normally immediately after. No more laying in bed that night being annoyed by minor hearing damage.
You don't even have to be self conscious about it, they're barely visible when they're in.
> The levels are generally WAY TOO LOUD to begin with, and in my experience I actually hear/enjoy shows better with halfway decent earplugs.
Most venues I don't find it to be an issue, but one I was at recently was absurdly loud. I was sat at a 90 degree to the stage, and in one ear I could hear the sound crashing off the back wall to the point vocals were difficult to make out because it just sounded so muffled. Blocking that one ear instantly made it a much better experience.
It is so refreshing to come out of a club early in the morning, pull the earplugs out, have the rush of cold air enter your eardrums and there be no ringing.
On the plus side, I find it way easier to understand people talking to me in the club when I have them in.
They probably dull the high frequencies a bit, which can be annoying if you have hearing loss already. And of course earplug don't really block deep bass.
Any competent sound engineer is wearing ear protection, so you're usually hearing a better mix with ear plugs in. Your plugs colour the sound slightly, but the mix engineer is subconsciously compensating for the colouration of his own plugs.
If the sound engineer isn't wearing ear plugs, the same logic probably applies. Noise-induced hearing loss has roughly the same effects on your hearing as earplugs, acting like a shallow lowpass filter.
That might be why when I go to clubs/etc it seems like the treble is cranked up to 10 on those large speakers. I've changed my EQ preferences as I've gotten older to prefer a somewhat diminished treble/higher frequencies.
If the sound engineer tunes for the coloured sound, and the sound that he is hearing is coloured the same regardless of whether he is wearing ear plugs, does it not then follow that the sound that you are hearing is coloured the same regardless of whether you are wearing ear plugs?
* Sound engineer is wearing ear protection -> sound is tuned according to that bias (unless they are completely auditory neutral) -> you get the best sound by also wearing hearing protection
* Sound engineer is not wearing ear protection -> sound engineer probably has hearing damage due to prolonged exposure (and has a similar effect as hearing protection) -> sound is tuned according to that bias -> you do NOT have hearing damage, so you get the best sound by wearing hearing protection
The effect on the sound is the same in both cases and the correction is the same in both -- wear hearing protection. It only becomes the same sound regardless of what _you_ do in the long term, if you also get hearing loss due to prolonged exposure.
I recommend DownBeats earplugs. They are tiny and barely noticeable, which made me so much more likely to wear them to shows. Nice little carrying case too.
I've found the disposable Bilsom 303 earplugs to be the best for me, both for motorcycling and for concerts. Very comfortable, nice and even attenuation.
One of the fun parts about the club experience is feeling the sound with your entire body, and you don't get that without the sound being far louder than is safe for your ears without protection.
No, not at all. You only get to feel the low frequencies anyway, which is why infrasonic speakers are nowadays a standard for electronic music venues. You then sync those with audible output and people think they "feel" the music.
What they feel are inaudible sound waves at a frequency that makes some tissue/bones(?) resonate. But this is as much "feeling" the music as is being punched in the face in sync with the base rhythm ;)
Inaudible sounds are precisely those that don't resonate with your hair cells at any frequency, so if you only feel the sound but don't hear it there's no way it can damage your hearing.
The volume required to cause damage goes up as the frequency goes down. Bass has to be ridiculously loud to cause damage. A club which turned up the bass to create a good "feel", but turned down the treble, would save a lot of wear and tear on people's hearing.
Since a concert, I also have slight hearing loss on one hear.
Now I'm constantly being reminded to take care of my hearing due to the difference in "sound color" between left and right.
Fortunately I don't have a significant tinnitus, but was it certainly was a wake-up-call and I protect my ears much better now.
An unmentioned physiological consideration, remembered from a lecture long ago...
The rapid onset of the sound is an important factor. The ear has muscular reflexes that lessen the damage of loud sounds, but only if the onset of the sound takes longer than the time it takes the reflex to kick in. The toilet tank sound probably had onset approaching that of a square wave, so this neatly evaded the reflex.
Evolutionarily, one can understand why there was no need to protect the ear from loud rapid-onset sounds... those sounds don't exist widely in nature, e.g. a roaring waterfall roars continuously. Someone could smash two rocks together right next to your ear, but the fact that the rocks didn't smash your cranium is perhaps more important. :-)
To that end, Mercedes-Benz is playing around with technology to create a loud noise before the airbags deploy in a crash. The ideas is that by triggering this loud noise reflex, the ear will protect itself from the louder noises of airbag deployments.
> If an impending collision is detected, the vehicle’s sound system plays a short interference signal, which can trigger a reflex, whereby the stapedius muscle in the ears contracts, which alters the link between the eardrum and the inner ear for a split second and better protects the inner ear against high acoustic pressures, which can result from a loud crash.
> "I was fixing the mechanism inside the tank of the toilet. The only thing left to do was to put the ceramic lid back on the tank. Unfortunately it slipped out of my hands and banged on the ceramic of the toilet rim."
I'm guessing every other occurrence of "toilet bowl lid" is a typo due to the medium being Twitter.
Or the tank lid slipped and hit the bowl. That's not where it's supposed to go, but gravity might take it there anyway if you fail to get it on top of the tank.
One extra weight slab was "stuck" to the group that was supposed to get lifted. It was stuck because the weights at the gym were grimy from many years of use without being cleaned. The extra slab, when it reached the top, finally detached and slid down maybe 20-30 inches, and made a sound that everyone in the gym heard, but right next to my ear. A few people even made angry faces at me for being a noisy lifter.
Ever since then, to this day, I have had tinnitus in that ear, and many sounds come in like "static", for lack of a better explanation.
All I can say is be careful with those weights if they get sticky, and if they are near your ear...
Obviously off topic now, but as a youngster in the gym I used to use a similar machine that required me to lay down and push my legs. I worked my way up to max weights on that machine (very quickly). One day I pushed my legs out and heard this terrible crunch come from my lower spine, was barely able to hobble back home. It was near enough back to normal after 2 days or so, but scared the hell out of me.
For me it goes to show that humans are more fragile than we often like to think.
I love leg press, it's my second favorite lift next to deadlift (with a hex bar, I'm not competitive or anything, no need to risk the back). You have to be VERY careful not to lockout. I always end at like a 140-160 degree angle, far less than a straight 180. If you lockout, you're going to have a bad time eventually.
Yeah. It's basically dead lift with the weight shifted along your mid-line instead of in front of your shins. Makes it really easy to keep good form since you're not worried about getting it over your knees. I find the grip is much more natural as well, since your hands are at your sides rather than in front of you.
It's not the exact same stuff, but for all intents and purposes if you're not planning on competing in a powerlifting event anytime soon it's close enough that you could substitute it. It's actually used quite a lot for athletes who can't afford to have a sore lower back in training practice.
That happened to me too, don't think I got any permanent damage but that sound is super loud. Still a bit scared of that machine for no other reason than the sound.
I totally know what you mean by "static". Have had that issue in my left ear for decades. Not really even sure what caused it originally. Iirc I get the static at realty high decibels of some kind of frequency.
I'm not sure if it's the same thing, but I get sort of the same thing in my left ear, specifically with very loud deep bass. I've always thought of it more as a rattle.
My gym actually has a few machines were the weights regularly get stuck like this. I never considered this to be a danger. Thanks a lot for sharing that. I'll pay more attention to that in the future.
When I was a teen I dismantled a shotgun cartridge and removed the shot and paper charge (lots of tiny paper discs). I stuffed them down the thick end of a car telescopic antenna cut to about 4” with the end folded over. I threw in a couple of pieces of lead shot, tamped it down with a piece of paper, stuck the tube under a rock and set up a paper target 6” away. I was optimistic.
Then, with a friend, held a lighter under the closed end. Fortunately I was to the side. Predictably it fired out the back... it was very loud.
Possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. It could have gone wrong is so many way. The adolescent brain is a strange thing.
Oh, I just took a shotgun cartridge (the one used for hunting, but the old kind, made completely out of brass), flipped in with the primer up, and hit it with a hammer. Good thing my father stored those ones without the lead. The bang and flash made dizzy, and as I heard my father coming from backyard, I took cartridge to hide it - it was freaking hot, burned my hand as well.
I took all the powder out, wrapped it in tinfoil, and put it in the fireplace. I was impatient, and sprayed it with cooking oil spray. The instant I closed the door again, boom.
Makes me cringe to think I was only 7 or 8 years old.
Shortly after that, a retired cop saw us throwing rifle bullets down cement stairs with rocks taped to the primers, trying to set them off. He very calmly and sternly told us how dangerous that was.
It is amazing that any boys survive to adulthood. I don't think I could have kids, knowing what I got up to.
I think you have never met any eight year olds, if you think they are really that stupid that it would be a problem.
Unless you sheltered the poor kid to the point of making him a mushroom, he's more than rational enough to understand any hazard you take the time to tell him about. My daughter is 8, and I would have no worries with her encountering ammunition around the house because I would tell her how it works, which part of it causes it to explode, and how to handle it.
A kid that does stupid things has probably not had the 5 minutes spent with him, telling him the possible hazards.
Kids (and adults) also do stupid things because they know the hazards but feel like they are smart enough to overcome those hazards. Doing hazardous things that are known to be hazardous is no more likely at 8 than at 18. In fact it's less likely at 8. We get braver and do stupider things ("Hold my beer for a minute and watch this") as we get older.
Not that we couldn't get access to "ammo" at all here in Australia in the 70's, but my sources were mostly nail gun cartridges (stolen from building sites) and shotgun blanks used for the local sailing club's starting cannon. We'd also steal those explosive things rail workers put on tracks to warn of inbound trains.
One thing living in a country with somewhat stricter control on guns and ammunition (at least for us "city boys") - it meant we learned how to make our own explosives. We'd steal pretty much any sodium ad potassium nitrate the chemistry labs had for making gunpower - and there was significant "liberation" of nitric and sulfuric acid from the school chemistry labs too, and we had more or less success in producing home made gun cotton, tnt, and nitroglycerine. It eventually led to careers in chemistry for two of my high school co-conspirators from the time.
I grew up in a country with very strict gun control (Germany) and did almost the same thing that timonovici did. We used to collect blanks in the woods, thrown away by NATO troops during maneuvers. I don't remember what I was expecting, but I too remember the bang being so loud to make me dizzy - I think I wasn't sure for a few moments if I was dead or alive.
Just a few days ago I wrote a comment [1] about a boy who used to live a few kilometers from my house when we were children and lost half of his hand doing experiments in his parents basement.
I think fire and exothermic reactions in general are much too interesting for children to not find a way to experiment with them at one time or another, but parents should take care that children don't do it alone and that they do it in a safe way.
I also (partly) grew up in (what was West) Germany but I am British. My dad was an ATO but by that time he generally ran ammunition depots. From a very early age (5+), me and my brother were taught how to look for "devices" under cars and other skills that kids should not need.
Dad was called out to mop up after a young lad found an unexploded mortar shell and put it in a bench vice and whacked a nail into the firing pin. He has several more harrowing tales along those lines.
Gosh what fun old days those were. This was the era of the Cold War, at school we would have a bomb scare nearly weekly, Rheindahlen E mess was bombed, troops were shot at by quite a variety of nasty people and other fun and games. Mind you, a CSM pinched a Saracen or Saladin and tried to run down a bloke who was playing away with his wife. He drove it over the other bloke's car first. Shandy was involved.
On the bright side, I have friends from afar that I'm in touch with today - 40 odd years later.
This was not talked about much because it was a criminal offence, but growing up at that time in that area we were all the same and I could tell you a bunch of other stories like that.
Collecting the rounds was like a sport. The one with the biggest collection was the winner. Sometimes we found elements from ammunition belts too. They were rare and because of their small size and dark color much more difficult to find than the larger untarnished brass colored cartridges. One of the boys from my town had the perseverance to collect enough elements to assemble a belt that he could wear over his shoulder. He looked like John Rambo.
All of this wasn‘t a local phenomenon either. Much later I learned the story of a boy from a different area whose house was searched for pirated home computer games. Police didn‘t find any pirate copies but they found the blanks he had collected. Strict as the gun laws are he got a young offender sentence for unauthorized possession of a firearm (unerlaubter Waffenbesitz).
And this was all only about thrown away blanks from NATO maneuvers. When it comes to all the weapons that “disappeared” basically over night at the end of World War II, I know there is another trove of stories, but these are for someone from another generation to tell.
You might have heard about the BBC serial The Machine-Gunners, which tells a related story from the British perspective. It was very popular with us kids in Germany at that end of the Eighties. The opening theme Colonel Bogey March is now stuck in my head..
It’s fairly straightforward to get your children to survive if you don’t let them have access to live ammunition.. I think it just requires good parenting. I mean, I was a boy and I somehow realized that all of these things are incredibly bad ideas.
My experiment was on a .22 round, and when they say it's a rimfire type cartridge I can tell ya they're not kidding. Not sure how I survived childhood, but I grew up to be a productive & well rounded member of society. More or less
> ...but I grew up to be a productive & well rounded member of society. More or less
It's almost as though play, of the sort which could end your life, is a natural part of growing up (perhaps especially for boys). Then again, I don't really remember doing any very stupid things as an adolescent, probably due to spending more time in nature, trying not to die by falling, drowning, hypothermia, or impalement.
Sure, but what do you say to the friends and family of the ones that die? Or to the ones who end up maimed and disabled for life? "Oh, it's just natural, don't sweat it"
I'm 42 years old and spent much of my teens and early 20s going to loud rock shows, raves, etc.
I was rather stupid and always tried to get right up to the PA speakers at the front. I did not wear hearing protection. Many times I left shows with ringing for hours and that feeling like there is cotton stuffed in your ears for days. Not a handle of times - dozens of times.
By my mid 20s it appeared I had tinnitus around the 8k area, which really freaked me out and immediately caused me to change my habits. Also around this time I got into headphone audio in a big way. I got an SPL meter and made sure to never go above 85dBs for extended listening sessions.
By my mid 30s the tinnitus had dissipated considerably. Now it's effectively gone, at least that I can tell (ie. not aware if there is psychological compensation happening). My hearing is great too, right ear at 17.5 kHz, left ear at 16.9.
FYI, if you lose hearing from noise exposure, you'll generally lose it around 4 KHz (noise notch). You generally lose the really high frequencies (20 KHz on down) due to presbycusis, hearing loss due to aging. Even if you can still hear the really high frequencies, you could still have a noise notch around 4 KHz.
If you haven't already, go get an an audiogram. It's cheap (<$100) and will give you a baseline on how your hearing is.
> FYI, if you lose hearing from noise exposure, you'll generally lose it around 4 KHz
I used http://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator/ to quickly profile my hearing and found significant loss around 4.0kHz. I have ridden a motorcycle most of my life and it is much worse in the ear that is on the same side as the exhaust.
I am not sure what a spectrogram looks like for a motorcycle but I would have assumed that most of the energy is in the lower end of the spectrum, given the steady cruising RPS is around 40Hz-70Hz. But, your comment seems to suggest that there is not a direct correlation between the frequency of the noise exposure and the hearing loss frequencies.
Wind noise is at least as loud as engine noise at least at highway speeds.
While I can clearly hear my (loud piped) Ducati at 120kmh (~70mph) - on my Honda VFR800 with stock piped the engine noise is completely overshadowed by wind noise.
As a hint about how loud that wind noise gets, up around 130-140kmh, if I've got my noise cancelling earbuds in, they start clipping. I've heard them do that a handful of times in non motorcycle riding instances, always in reaction to sounds loud enough that people around look around and cover their ears.
(These days I _always_ ride with earplugs or noise cancelling earbuds in. Even on my "quiet" bikes. Gotta save that hearing damage up for loud concerts... )
Do you feel "less connected" to the world when you are riding with earplugs in? Does it make it feel more dangerous you might be less aware? It makes sense to wear the plugs, but I've never heard of a street rider doing it.
Definitely does not feel less safe. Plugs don't "disconnect" you, they just take all the sound down a few notches. The exhaust noise, wind noise, and other traffic noises are all still there, just not so loud and insistent.
I'm completely convinced that they make me safer on long rides, because you arrive significantly less tired - works great on planes too, I won't fly without earplugs any more.
While trying this tone generator out, I thought I had a ridiculous notch in my hearing at 532Hz, because the perceived volume dropped to about 10-20% of the neighbouring frequencies. But then I moved my head slightly to the side, and the normal volume was restored!
Turns out that I had inadvertently replicated a classic high-school "constructive/destructive interference" demonstration. Driving the pair of speakers on my desk at that frequency put the position of my head in one of the destructive-interference "nulls" where the effective volume approaches zero.
So if anyone else is playing around with it, be sure to use headphones instead of stereo speakers!
That's correct. Even in a factory environment, where most of the noise is in the lower frequencies, you'll still end up with a noise notch at 4 KHz. It has to do with the anatomy of the ear.
I'm mid 20s and my hearing is pretty much perfectly cut off at 11 khz but is fine below. I've had tinnitus since youth and have had lots of exposure to loud music but it hasn't gotten tremendously worse overtime and doctors either wave it away or say it's from noise induced hearing loss, which seems at odds with the 4 khz thing I've heard from you and others.
Any perspective on what the deal with that would be? I haven't ever used an ototoxic medicine or anything
Interestingly, when I was about 16 I was at a friend's gig in a pub. I hadn't gone to many before and haven't been to many since, but on this particular occasion I was stood talking with friends near the stage with my left ear directly next to the speaker cabs. I wasn't aware of the activity behind me, but the opening band had come on to do a sound check, and being heavy metal, it was basically just a mechanical, metallic sound, 30 cm away from my ears at max volume.
Here is what is funny though, the wavelength at which my hearing "kazoos" is the wavelength at which my young son cries. So while he was a baby, and even sometimes now as a toddler, if he's upset and I'm holding him, it's gotta be my right shoulder, otherwise my left ear bugs. It's a strange feeling too, a mixture of pain and grinding and broken audio that really sets me on edge.
I'm 43 years old, and in my 20s I went to a few loud rock shows. I had the same experience as you for days afterwards, but at the last one I attended without hearing protection, something funny happened in my right ear. It was like someone turned the tone control right down, and loud noises would distort so badly I couldn't make anything out.
A while later, I was watching a Scrubs episode where one of the characters ruptured an ear drum. That sound closely matched what I remembered hearing, so I've worn hearing protection to every concert since. Even had people make fun of me for it, but as soon as I say "probably ruptured an eardrum at a concert," they stop laughing.
I have tinnitus from a different cause, though. When I was very small, 5 or 6 years old, one of my mother's boyfriends would haul me around by my ears. I remember that my ear started ringing one day, and it never stopped.
I have two tones in one ear, and I think three in the other. 37 years later and it's as bad as it ever was, sadly. I have learned to just tune it out, but I can still hear it if I choose to - annoyingly, when I choose to hear it, I have to wait until I forget about it.
edit: Forgot to note, the ringing is very, very high pitched. Remember what CRT televisions would sound like when you turned them on? Higher pitched than that.
I literally cannot understand the mentality of people who'd make fun of you for wearing hearing protection at gigs. I go to a lot of gigs (like multiple times a week) and "simply trusting" that the sound engineer won't push the volume up into hearing damage territory is... naive at best.
Please folks, use protection. I like Etymotic earplugs, but to be honest i'm not even sure if they're "heavy enough", but my pain threshold is pretty low i think. In any case since i've been consistently using ear protection i've almost never had the ringing thing after concerts, which makes me rather glad.
It seems to be in the same bucket as people not wearing seat belts and making fun of you if you ask them to wear one in a car with you.
If it's not something everyone does, and if you mention you do it for safety, the reaction is often rather negative. I think people don't like the idea that they might have been doing something very unsafe this whole time.
Well if I'm passenger in a car with someone who won't wear seatbelts then my reaction will become rather negative until they put the damn things on. If we got in a car accident, I may be secure with belts, but I don't want their body parts flopping in my face either.
the abuse rate of stepchildren is something like an order of magnitude higher than of biological children, for whatever reason (correction: at least TWO orders of magnitude!)
"The Cinderella effect is well substantiated in crime data. Children growing up in step families are about 40 times as likely to be abused and 140 times as likely to be murdered as children growing up with both natural parents (murder still being a low probability)."
I'm really sorry you had to go through that. I was also physically abused by my bio mom up till about 9-10 years old (but she in turn was abused until she was 18, so she arguably reduced the snowball effect). All we can do is try to not repeat the same mistakes for our next generations. The problem is, I have temper issues to this day...
What? Who does that? Whenever I see someone wear earplugs I think "good for them" (and occasionally "shit I forgot to bring mine").
I saw loads of people wear them at the psy festival I was last summer (and wore them myself, too). And the music wasn't even that loud.
While I can hear the music just fine, it does, however, reduce that feeling of "sound presence" during a live show or set. The space feels "emptier" too, like, a huge crowd of people jumping to sonic vibrations (even stronger if it's in a darkened club with just a few bright white lights and smoke), it's pretty weird behaviour if you consider it. But the sound sort of blankets and normalizes this, at least, that's my feeling when that veil falls away when I put in the plugs.
I kind of wonder about the custom-mold plugs. I don't use the cheap yellow foam ones, but reusable ones about €20 I got at a hearing-aid store (asked for ones suitable for concerts/festivals), which I'm fairly pleased with.
Does the "presence" effect get better with the custom-molded ones? Because afaik they're about €300 or so. If they don't restore that "presence" compared to the €20 earplugs, but just some better quality (which is nice, but is it 300 euros nice?) I'm not sure if it's worth it. But if they do and they are also much more comfortable, it might be a nice present for myself :)
What brand are they? I wear Etymotic ER20XS earplugs (also cheap, about $20) now and don't notice any lack of "sound presence". I completely forget I'm wearing them after 20 minutes or so.
Wow, this gives me hope. I'm 22 and in the past two years I've gone to ~100 rock concerts, seeing a total of 270 sets. For the first 23 concerts I didn't wear any hearing protection, until I had a scary event with my hearing at a Neon Trees concert that left my hearing very distorted for three days. Then for the next 80 or so concert's I'd wear my hearing protection most–but not all–of the time.
In the past year I've had worsening tinnitus. Although now (and for the last ~30 concerts) I've worn ear plugs most of the time (and recently bought molded ear plugs), the tinnitus still gives me great anxiety when I hear it in quiet places like my bedroom at night. The permanency of it is what freaks me out the most. But your comment gives me hope that I'll one day be able to enjoy silence again.
I fully urge anyone who goes to rock and similar concerts with any frequency at all to wear hearing protection. I'm a fan of Earasers and custom-molded musicians ear plugs. Even if you don't care about your hearing now, once you do care, it'll often be too late.
I've had pretty bad tinnitus my whole life. In a perfectly quiet room it sounds deafeningly loud. I use a pink noise app in bed at night, but otherwise it doesn't really bother me. Point is, don't worry about it, your brain can adjust to anything and you'll be fine. As I understand it, tinnitus is only half physical damage anyway. The other half is neural. In my case I believe it's all neural.
At one point it got way worse for about a month, likely caused by stress. Freaked me out to the point of briefly having suicidal thoughts. Then I got used to it again.
That’s not too difficult if the area you live/work in has a good scene for your favourite genres of music. The music I listen to tends to be pretty DIY (very small gigs in front of 20-50 people), and more weeks than not I find myself at at least one concert.
I commute via plane for work so it gives me something to do that’s not sitting in the hotel watching TV or drinking too much alcohol.
I recommend an app called Songkick if you want to find local gigs you might be interested in, it scans your Spotify/last.fm and notifies you when artists you’ve listened to are playing nearby.
I live in Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK but not on the island of Great Britain. The company I work for is based in Belfast (capital of NI), and we bid for government contracts. For example, the government client that I'm currently working with is the DVSA (responsible for driving tests and roadworthiness tests), and the DVSA office I'm working out of is in Nottingham, which is a city on Great Britain, meaning I have the Irish Sea between me and the office I work in.
I fly out from Belfast to Nottingham at around 07:00 on Tuesday morning, and I fly home to Belfast around 20:00 on Thursday evening. Tuesday and Wednesday nights are spent in hotels in Nottingham.
From locking my front door behind me in Belfast to sitting down at my desk in Nottingham it takes around 3h30m. Thursdays are killers though, I don't get in my front door until at least 21:30. So depending on meetings, on Thursdays I frequently end up being on the go from 08:00 to 21:30, which isn't too much fun.
I ended up working this way basically because the company I work for bids for almost exclusively central government projects, and I can't think of any central government agencies that aren't based in England and therefore a flight away.
I first started doing this when I was at university and doing a year-long placement, at the same company I'm currently full-time for.
I was asked if I fancied flying back and forth, and as a 20-year-old, the prospect of getting flown around; staying in nice hotels; getting £5/£10/£30 for breakfast/lunch/dinner every day; and extra pay due to having to fly every week was quite attractive.
Currently 22-years-old and the constant flying got old pretty quickly, but I like where work and I like working on government projects that affect millions of UK citizens' lives.
Just a fan. I did several co-ops at west coast tech companies (San Francisco and Seattle) that gave me ample opportunities to see my favorite bands touring. I kept track of my concerts with a spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XIwkqPQmxT6jZE5UMjxU...
When I was doing my military service another conscript fired his rifle down into the ground as we where standing close together without any hearing protection on. Seconds later our captain orders us to put the hearing protection on and leads us down to a completely dark cellar with beds in it.
We then had to lay there for 48 hours in complete silence with noice canceling ear protection on with only breaks for toilet visits and quick supervised snacks.
Two weeks later we all took hearing tests that got compared with the tests we took when we joined the military and none of us had any permanent damage.
Not sure the complete silence helped with healing, but the science behind the decision to have us do that was that the little hairs in the ear heals faster if it’s not stimulated.
To this day I still think about not exposing myself to too much sound after I have heard some high noice, like someone dropping a metal weight in the gym.
Yes, modern soldiers wear “comtac” hearing protection with integrated microphones that pick up speech but block out the noise. So you can still communicate decent by shouting even though there is heavy fire going on around you.
My grandfather told me on his first day in the military he had to stand (without any hearing protection) next to the anti-aircraft cannons when they opened fire to “train” the ears. He did not have much hearing left when he was older...
My dad used to tell a story about when he got a hearing test as part of an employment medical fairly late in life, and the audiologist asks him "You're left handed, aren't you?" because he could see the typical signs of rifle shooting related hearing loss in his left ear. Turns out dad wasn't actually left handed, but shot a rifle at school cadets 30 years earlier left handed because he could only close his right eye independently - it was easier to just shoot left handed than to try to learn how to look through the sights with his right eye.
Pretty much. You watch any film from the WW-II era and only artillery crews wore any sort of hearing protection (cotton wads stuffed in their ears). But many of them gave up doing even that after a while.
I actually don’t think so. That would be a form of collective punishment which is strictly forbidden and the officers was really careful about not crossing that line. Was a bit chocking for me to learn that, I feel like American movies have lied to me my entire life when the military didn’t let the whole platoon do push-ups every time someone made a mistake :)
The guy who fired his weapon got a fine and was eventually kicked out though...
Do you mind sharing which country and how long ago was this? That's quite a strong risk-averse & duty-of-care-oriented response to the incident. Was this a teenage military service thing?
(I can see your username but I don't want to assume.)
I'm a sport shooter and on occasion I've shot rifles and shotguns without hearing protection.
The hearing loss dissipates after a day, even in normal conditions. I'm sure that it's bad for you long term, but short term your ears tend to fix themselves up pretty quick.
When I was a conscript, my initial hearing test indicated a small hearing loss. Before i joined up I had worked as a busboy at a nightclub, where I never wore hearing protection. Us conscripts with documented hearing loss had to wear double ear protection[0] on the shooting range, and during field practice with blanks.
The test I got when I left the military shown my hearing had returned to normal. Youth might have something to do with it, but my experience mirrors yours in that silence can heal some damage.
[0] Earmuffs over earplugs. Conscripts normal hearing only had to wear earplugs.
One summer when I was 8 or 9, I used a nail to scrape out the inside of a model rocket engine or two ("D" if I remember correctly) from my older brothers model kit into a pile on the concrete garage floor, then used a broken cord (literally a wall plug, a couple feet of cord, and two exposed ends) to ignite it by hand using the electric spark from the live leads.
After fleeing the garage in terror and slight pain (lucky not to have either electrocuted myself or burnt the detached structure down), I hung out doing nothing for a few hours and acted like nothing had happened. It was little use, though. Upon arriving home, my mother immediately know something was up. Not only was my face a little singed, I had burnt my eyebrows off.
Funnily enough, I'm fairly to heavily conservative when it comes to dangerous activity as an adult. I don't even drive all that fast usually.
I don't have any data but I think it's fair to assume that ANYTHING in front of the ear which reduces sound coming in will help on the protection front. It won't be a panacea, however.
I frequently wear headphones as much for the attenuation of dangerously loud noises in public places (gyms, trains, etc) as for actually listening to something. Your story is terrifying.
I've heard this noise, but then much less loud, and the fact that I remember it tells enough. I just let the weight lose for the last 5cm or so, and that was enough for me not to do this again. I wasn't close with my ears, so no problem.
I'm sorry for your loss and I hope you can find a way to handle it.
I saw someone do maintenance on a pile-driver while it was working right next to where the pile-driver hit.
It must have been really effective ear protection, but they didn't look so big. And never mind the sound, the whole head / body is going to be rattled by the vibrations. You wonder ...
[edit]
I looked up the data. 190db peak for this type (H steel piles)
Once when I was camping I decided to try to use a plastic bottle as a pillow. I put my head on it sideways and the plastic made a really loud pop and my ear instantly started ringing really loudly like nothing I've experienced before. I was deaf in that ear for about a minute while it rang and it terrified me. Luckily it went away.
More recently something happened to that ear. It started to get water in it every day then stopped getting water in it but now I have tinnitus in that ear.
Ears are extremely sensitive and it doesn't take much to damage them.
You may have a sticky wax or otherwise blocked ear that was trapping the water. Wax or other buildup in the ear can cause tinnitus (and of course attenuated hearing, ranging from imperceptible to completely muffled).
It would be worth going to see a doctor and get them to check inside your ears.
You certainly wouldn't want to spend weeks thinking you had permanent tinnitus or hearing loss when it could be as simple as an ear flush. I can tell you that from experience.
I doubt that one can calculate the sound amplitude accurately without doing experiments or complex simulations here. It's possible that the toilet bowl or lid focused the sound like a satellite dish, and the protagonist's ear was in the exact wrong place at the wrong time.
I work a lot in a wood shop/metal shop. I’ve always been a big proponent of ear protection. Recently, I’ve been using shure in ear monitors for blocking small sounds and supplementing with ear muffs when real tools are on. However, I’ve started to just wear those in ear monitors around even without listening to anything. The ear plug feature is actually really great. I can get on muni or bart in the Bay Area with them and listen to a book at 3-4 clicks of iPhone volume. It’s pretty great to get used to things being quiet.
I've tried Shure (and other) earphones like this before, but could never stand the rustling of cable noise. Does that bother you at all, or do you have any recommendations for stopping it? I've tried shirt clips and cable loops, but nothing ever worked. For now, I use either over-ear noise canceling headphones or just AirPods.
if i understand correctly, the noise is caused by physical vibrations (as opposed to electrical waves) propagating up the cables. i think it's basically insoluble for earbuds/iems.
Pretty close to how most people source. You can just leave out the ^ it's just an inline [1], [2] etc.
There are now hard and fast rules though, it's just common practice.
I think this is essentially people copying the ACM reference style.
I like the Shure's quite a bit and have used them professionally as a musician. I've experienced similar issues
Part of the issue is solved by running them over the backs of the ears so they exit down your neck. Additionally, mine have a cord pair keeper, and when I push that closer to the ends, that helps.
Another thing that's helped has been to get picker about which inserts I use. My ear canals aren't the same size (which I thought was strange, but whatever).
As others have said, over the ear wear helps a lot. Using a shirt clip to attach them to your shirt also helps. My etymotic IEMs came with such a clip.
Using both of those techniques makes the microphonics go from intolerable to barely noticable for me which is great because I wear them for 4-8 hours a day.
I very recently thought I might have permanently damaged my eyesight.
I was working from a library, and stood to start closing up for the day. As I started to close my laptop, the screen (hi, glossy MacBook Pro) directly reflected the sun behind me.
For the next 15-20 minutes a significant portion of my vision in both eyes was wavy. I could still safely drive home, thankfully, but it was a severe distraction.
While I expected it to eventually clear up, it struck home how fragile my career is. (I know it's possible to be a blind software developer, but I'm not sure I could afford to take the short-term hit, assuming my employer wouldn't pay me to spend months relearning how to live and work.)
My biggest fear right now as a developer is losing the ability to work due to an injury. I recently bought long-term disability insurance, which is expensive for sure, but makes me feel so much safer. (what I got - after 6 months of self-covered disability, it'd pay a significant amount every month until age 65)
My main worry is falling while biking or skiing, and knocking my head. But now I'm worried about eyesight, and my hands, and everything else around the modern world.
Max out the LTD insurance and enjoy life. I ride a motorcycle, there's only so much you can control in life. If you're that concerned about the chance of freak-odds events happening in your life, you might as well be buying lottery tickets too.
I know a dev who is paralyzed and types/codes (quite well, too) with a pen attached to his forehead, you'd find a way to adapt.
For sure, I took up skiing this year (I'm so bad at it, but it's so fun).
In no way is what I said meant to be "Crippling worry that affects my life". More of a rational: "this is the most likely way I get really screwed, so I bought insurance"
That much worry speaks to anxiety, in the medical sense, and may cause an injury just by itself. See a doctor, and more than one if you get a run-around.
They are just talking about long-term disability!? I have it as well, for mostly the same reasons. I worry that if something were to happen to my hands, eyes, or brain that I wouldn't be able to provide for myself or my family.
I don't think having disability insurance is "that much worry".
No objections from me to disability insurance. I was specifically referring to this part: now I'm worried about eyesight, and my hands, and everything else around the modern world. especially after having purchased insurance.
That sounds like a person who is on a lookout for something to be worried about, pretty much the definition of anxiety.
on one hand 'biggest worry' - your biggest worry, statistically speaking, should be driving to work, as a young person, and eating cheeseburgers, if you are older. If you're more afraid of other things, like crime or whatever, than you are of driving to work, yeah, that's not rational.
On the other hand, i think disability insurance is not even a little bit crazy; Of course, know that if you use it, you'll probably use it because you got screwed up in an auto accident (few people carry enough insurance to cover lost work for a software engineer for very long) but I think auto accidents are common enough to want to hedge against it.
I've had occasional ocular migraines for about 20 years. They aren't painful. They show up as golden, wavy distortions in my visual field. I can't work or drive when it's in effect. Typically triggered by staring at a screen for a long time without a break.
I've had ocular migraines for many years as well, maybe 10-15 per year. No pain either, but I've been unable to correlate their occurrence with any specific activity. They just (seemingly) pop up out of nowhere.
I have spent a lot of time flameworking 2200 degree glass on a giant flame right in front of my face, and also staring at a monitor... the monitor makes my eyes more bloodshot and sore.
Glossy screens really ought to be buried in the trash heap of technological hype history. They're worse in every way than matte screens (and dangerous, as you point out) unless you live in a dark cave. It continually amazes me that so-called "high-end" products use them.
I have never understood the shift to glossy screens. And it's funny that matte screens were briefly marketed as "privacy" screens because the angle of viewing was lower.
The matte texture diffuses light and gives you a relatively fuzzy picture compared to gloss. They just don't look nearly as clear and crisp when you compare side by side.
You can still see individual pixels on a matte screen, even high DPI screens. And a little bit of blur is anyway necessetated by sampling theory, to eliminate the high spatial frequency components of pixel edges.
I was of that opinion until I decided to test it out. It doesn't hold up. Clarity is the main factor, I found. A matte screen must by definition diffuse light, which causes image to become blurry - and visibly so.
A glossy screen, for all it's annoying features, is just clearer and colors have an easier time being represented accurately. And most modern glossy screens now have anti-glare as well.
Screens should diffuse the image somewhat, to eliminate the high spacial frequency components pixel edges create. Not that a matte screen has ever prevented me from resolving individual pixels in a screen, even high DPI ones.
And sharp reflections on glossy screens make color-sensitive work difficult. Diffuse reflections are much easier to adjust for. Can you better support your claim that glossy monitors represent colors better?
No, I refuse to work in a cave. Glossy reflections are bad for color work, and bad for coding. (And even a cave isn't sufficient to prevent glare when viewing bright images which light up my face.)
What do you mean by "vibrancy"? Either a monitor is calibrated to a given color space, or not. And the diffusion of an individual pixel is orders of magnitude too low to significantly affect the color of neighboring pixels.
I got a matte screen for the first time in several years, and immediately had a reflection problem from window light. On a glossy screen the problem is a relatively small highlight, but on the matte screen it was a giant blob that took up a significant part of the screen. The glossy screen is usable, the matte is not.
Anti glare has improved significantly on glossy screens, too.
I did that all the time as a kid too! Funny that I don’t think of it much, because now I work in a oddly similar field - melting glass with a torch.
A magnifying glass produces a small point of heat, with fairly low temperature and area. Many people in history have worked glass with no eye protection without serious consequences, other than cataracts perhaps (many older Italians still do not wear didymium glasses, much less the ones with welding shades).
You described similar symptoms to 'arc flash' (brief exposure to welding arcs). While its obviously best to avoid this, a decent first-aid measure is to set a 15-30 min timer and keep your eyes closed. That can help, and while it isn't always an option (driving/etc) it can help.
Thanks, that makes sense. I probably should have delayed my trip home but there’s a clinic along the way so I figured I could stop there if it persisted.
There is this story about Feynman looking at the explosion of an atomic bomb from behind a car window. He reasoned that visible light alone can not hurt eyes, only ultraviolet, which is filtered out by the glass.
I work in a field where we are continually concerned with filtering light emissions (flameworking glass), but I don’t know the answer to that, either, whether visible light can cause permanent damage.
I do know that infrared can cause serious problems, such as burns and perhaps macular degeneration. It is mainly what welding shades and our glassblowing glasses filter.
^ I should have noted that welding shades and glassblowing glasses also filter visible light heavily, of course (>90%). But what distinguishes them from sunglasses is the IR filtration. Glassblowing lenses also filter sodium flare, a glaring orange (visible) light emitted by some glass in a flame.
IR drops off adequately at spectating distances, and when I am at a demo, watching other people work, I don’t wear my glasses. Not sure about at a nuclear blast though.
Feynman also advocated for not brushing your teeth. He wasn't really any kind of health expert.
And even if he reasoned UV light wouldn't hurt him, he still had to duck to avoid the exposure. So if there's anything to take away from his story it's that he didn't know what he was talking about.
Stop worrying. You are way more fragile than you think. That's why humanity created 7 billion people at the same time and around the world. Decentralization is important.
On the other hand, it is bad news for you. You can catch a naughty bacteria and die. You can slip by the door step and become paraplegic. If you are concerned about your family, get insurance. If you are concerned about your life (paraplegic or blind is not fun) then... tssk... bad luck. There is no insurance for that.
ps: I'm not suggesting you go do irresponsible things but worrying beyond reasonable yield no better results.
Another possible source of unexpected extremely loud noises: cleaning things with compressed air. If you blow it through a small orifice of the right dimensions then it can act as a whistle. The energy will be concentrated at one frequency, and compressed air generally blows a lot harder than lung power.
I first heard of this from a Youtube video, possibly from one of AvE's, although it could have been from somebody else's.
I bought a compressor a couple of years ago, and good grief is that thing noisy.
I always wearing hearing and eye protection when using it, and I'm glad for it. First time I tested the emergency release valve, I didn't know which direction it would release the air. If I hadn't been wearing safety glasses, I could have lost my eyes as it released directly into my face. I now have a rule of not allowing anybody in the workshop with me while using it, if they're not wearing both hearing and eye protection.
In the UK employers have to provide eye test vouchers for employees who use screen display equipment. I keep thinking that if the government knew anything about dev environments they'd be providing us with free hearing tests instead.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 316 ms ] threadThis seems like poor advice. If there is significant, realistic concern about permanent damage, I'd suggest checking immediately, rather than give it extra time...
In my opinion patients and the public should treat it as urgently as a sudden sight loss.
High dose steroids are regularly prescribed in this sort of scenario in an attempt to minimize damage, and are likely to be more effective the sooner they are given.
It puts me in mind of the Cuban embassy thing...
That's why patients wait days before presenting.
It will be really nice when everyone has access to a medical AI that can assess these things instantly wherever you are.
And cost, now that insurance is playing the "we only cover ER visits that were necessary in hindsight" game.
For those of us at the top of the pleb pyramid it's not so bad, but for the average person, a single mistake can be ruinous.
They do seem to have some sway over the GPs though - Rather than A&E, they've refereed me to the Doctors instead. When I said it's impossible to get an appointment 111 told me to tell the Doctors they've referred me. At that point the Doctors seem to _have_ to see you the same day.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertglatter/2017/10/16/anthem...
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/1/29/16906558/a...
went to ER, they took a single xray, 5hours later doctor shows up and say "yeah its broken, we will put a temporary useless immobiliser worse than the one you came in with. here's the phone number of a specialist you can try calling monday". it was $4k for out of pocket btw. my top of the line insurance just said "we can't dispute anything from er visits".
Concerned my mother hadn’t improved and was being discharged, I called my sister, who happened to be a nurse upstairs at the same hospital. She came down and explained to the doctor that my mother was having a “visual disturbance”. As soon as that terminology was used, they took her for an MRI and sure enough, she had indeed had a stroke and was immediately admitted. This was after 4 hours of wasted time and an attempted discharge - simply because the doctor refused to listen and would only go by symptoms.
The doctor never apologized for his comments. While I wound up feeling justified in this case, had my sister not intervened, I would likely never have taken her to the ER again unless she was unconscious or bleeding.
To this day I still wait until I can't move/breath/feel to go to the doctor.
edit: unfordable health care and/or bad money education is how people end up putting health to the bottom of the list.
If you really want to shock a European, tell them that American children don't have free heathcare either.
(I remember discovering this when I was about 14, on holiday in the US, when my younger brother caught pneumonia.)
Having gone to the physician with complaints many times and be told to wait to see if the issue goes away (most of them didn't) or that there's nothing to be done about it, one is quickly trained not to bother going to a physician for anything short of a major injury.
(And this behavior is from a physician who is a Ph.D at a teaching hospital, no less.)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0012465/
"Avoid other pain relievers such as ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin IB, others) and aspirin, as these medications may increase the risk of bleeding."
See: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/concussion/di...
Sometimes (for example if it would take hours to bring the patient to a MRI/CT machine) an educated guess as to the answer is the optimal strategy.
Wow. Did I misremember and he said Tylenol (acetaminophen)? This is bothering me now, I don't like to carry bad bits of wisdom around!
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2808688/
Test it out before you need it because the taste/smell makes some people puke like crazy for half an hour...
(of course the above reasoning is pretty specific to the USA— could be different for people in more civilized places)
The other big issue I have with doctors, I don't know if they are going to prescribe me some bullshit because the real treatment is "you'll get better with time" or the real answer is "there's nothing we can do about that." Or, much worse, something that they believe will help you but is not evidence based. Before you get upset - I once had an MD refer me to a (licensed) physical therapist for craniosacral therapy (complete woo) which billed it to my insurance as something like "physical manipulations."
It's also just how I was raised, when I grew up, my parents would say "we'll see if it gets better," and it always did. When I grew up and starting visiting the doctor for things at the advice of others it didn't improve my health outcomes yet significantly increased my annoyance level.
And yes my hearing is pretty bad now. Hopefully I can get hearing aid later on.
Edit: changed ear plugs to hearing aid.
But I hope your bad hearing isn't too inconvenient.
It's fine to have anti-war views (as do many in the military, btw). Not fine to take them out on a fellow community member.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(I'll refrain from making a joke about all the Russian bots that really have nothing better to do.)
2/5. I think I like features like "paragraphs" that are not possible in this form.
3/5. People can and do use line breaks in tweets, but if you think of each tweet as a paragraph it makes sense too.
4/5. You could do that, but nobody would think an essay was good if it were written with no transitions and mechanically started a new paragraph every few sentences.
5/5. It is interesting how small paragraphs divide a meaning of the whole article and can confuse you, reader.
On the other hand, I know people who can't focus on anything within Twitter's interface. So, uh, it's subjective.
Our toilet seems like it wants to run every so often but usually wiggling the lever helps. I hate lifting that thing up, always imagine what a mess it would be if you dropped it.
I wish they made the tank lids out of plastic.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/300820608
My policy is to use high quality parts in the tank and I've found it pays dividends -- it's been years since I've had to do any maintenance on any of our toilets aside from cleaning.
The difference is like working on a car in the 70s versus a Japanese compact car from the late 90s.
(It's amazing how many things can go wrong and hurt you.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16717935
Turns out it might also help with noise-induced hearing loss:
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/286408.php
>Additionally, the team found that NR was equally effective when given both before or after the mice were exposed to the noise.
-- his website
- I like fixing stuff
- It would take longer to call someone and be in home while he is fixing it.
You can buy ear plugs and N95 rated masks for cheaper than paying someone to do the work.
> was responsible for lab safety including hearing protection.
Bathrooms are famously reflective, producing the reverberation that makes shower singing sound palatable.
(Yes, yes I'm joking)
I'm relatively lucky, my hearing is still better than most, but it does suck.
I've decided I will never go to another club, and in bars I wear ear plugs. I have more to lose, since any additional damage will likely make my tinnitus more severe.
Seriously though, hearing is one of those things you don't think about until it's too late. Protect your ears.
Your mind is very quick to normalize the volume level anyway, no matter if you're with or without protection. Why suffer permanent damage then?
That said, clubs/shows play music way too loud, and I occasionally hear the beginning of tinnitus, so I 100% agree that people should get a pair.
Also I've noticed that I can hear the music much better with them in (when it's too loud I have a hard time distinguishing pitches—singers often sound like the Chipmunks) and some groups don't fare well when you turn down the volume a bit (they use volume to mask lack of ability).
But I've been using them too late because recently I have tinnitus in the evening before I go to sleep (I do wear the plug at night as well). Am in mid 30s.
[1] https://www.alpine.nl
I can also leave shows, take them out, and hear normally immediately after. No more laying in bed that night being annoyed by minor hearing damage.
You don't even have to be self conscious about it, they're barely visible when they're in.
Most venues I don't find it to be an issue, but one I was at recently was absurdly loud. I was sat at a 90 degree to the stage, and in one ear I could hear the sound crashing off the back wall to the point vocals were difficult to make out because it just sounded so muffled. Blocking that one ear instantly made it a much better experience.
On the plus side, I find it way easier to understand people talking to me in the club when I have them in.
If the sound engineer isn't wearing ear plugs, the same logic probably applies. Noise-induced hearing loss has roughly the same effects on your hearing as earplugs, acting like a shallow lowpass filter.
* Sound engineer is wearing ear protection -> sound is tuned according to that bias (unless they are completely auditory neutral) -> you get the best sound by also wearing hearing protection
* Sound engineer is not wearing ear protection -> sound engineer probably has hearing damage due to prolonged exposure (and has a similar effect as hearing protection) -> sound is tuned according to that bias -> you do NOT have hearing damage, so you get the best sound by wearing hearing protection
The effect on the sound is the same in both cases and the correction is the same in both -- wear hearing protection. It only becomes the same sound regardless of what _you_ do in the long term, if you also get hearing loss due to prolonged exposure.
What they feel are inaudible sound waves at a frequency that makes some tissue/bones(?) resonate. But this is as much "feeling" the music as is being punched in the face in sync with the base rhythm ;)
Fortunately I don't have a significant tinnitus, but was it certainly was a wake-up-call and I protect my ears much better now.
The rapid onset of the sound is an important factor. The ear has muscular reflexes that lessen the damage of loud sounds, but only if the onset of the sound takes longer than the time it takes the reflex to kick in. The toilet tank sound probably had onset approaching that of a square wave, so this neatly evaded the reflex.
Evolutionarily, one can understand why there was no need to protect the ear from loud rapid-onset sounds... those sounds don't exist widely in nature, e.g. a roaring waterfall roars continuously. Someone could smash two rocks together right next to your ear, but the fact that the rocks didn't smash your cranium is perhaps more important. :-)
> If an impending collision is detected, the vehicle’s sound system plays a short interference signal, which can trigger a reflex, whereby the stapedius muscle in the ears contracts, which alters the link between the eardrum and the inner ear for a split second and better protects the inner ear against high acoustic pressures, which can result from a loud crash.
> "I was fixing the mechanism inside the tank of the toilet. The only thing left to do was to put the ceramic lid back on the tank. Unfortunately it slipped out of my hands and banged on the ceramic of the toilet rim."
I'm guessing every other occurrence of "toilet bowl lid" is a typo due to the medium being Twitter.
The weights looked like these: http://www.presentationzen.com/.a/6a00d83451b64669e201156eb4...
One extra weight slab was "stuck" to the group that was supposed to get lifted. It was stuck because the weights at the gym were grimy from many years of use without being cleaned. The extra slab, when it reached the top, finally detached and slid down maybe 20-30 inches, and made a sound that everyone in the gym heard, but right next to my ear. A few people even made angry faces at me for being a noisy lifter.
Ever since then, to this day, I have had tinnitus in that ear, and many sounds come in like "static", for lack of a better explanation.
All I can say is be careful with those weights if they get sticky, and if they are near your ear...
For me it goes to show that humans are more fragile than we often like to think.
When I was a teen I dismantled a shotgun cartridge and removed the shot and paper charge (lots of tiny paper discs). I stuffed them down the thick end of a car telescopic antenna cut to about 4” with the end folded over. I threw in a couple of pieces of lead shot, tamped it down with a piece of paper, stuck the tube under a rock and set up a paper target 6” away. I was optimistic.
Then, with a friend, held a lighter under the closed end. Fortunately I was to the side. Predictably it fired out the back... it was very loud.
Possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. It could have gone wrong is so many way. The adolescent brain is a strange thing.
The ringing lasted a few years but went away.
Makes me cringe to think I was only 7 or 8 years old.
Shortly after that, a retired cop saw us throwing rifle bullets down cement stairs with rocks taped to the primers, trying to set them off. He very calmly and sternly told us how dangerous that was.
It is amazing that any boys survive to adulthood. I don't think I could have kids, knowing what I got up to.
A kid that does stupid things has probably not had the 5 minutes spent with him, telling him the possible hazards.
Kids (and adults) also do stupid things because they know the hazards but feel like they are smart enough to overcome those hazards. Doing hazardous things that are known to be hazardous is no more likely at 8 than at 18. In fact it's less likely at 8. We get braver and do stupider things ("Hold my beer for a minute and watch this") as we get older.
Not that we couldn't get access to "ammo" at all here in Australia in the 70's, but my sources were mostly nail gun cartridges (stolen from building sites) and shotgun blanks used for the local sailing club's starting cannon. We'd also steal those explosive things rail workers put on tracks to warn of inbound trains.
One thing living in a country with somewhat stricter control on guns and ammunition (at least for us "city boys") - it meant we learned how to make our own explosives. We'd steal pretty much any sodium ad potassium nitrate the chemistry labs had for making gunpower - and there was significant "liberation" of nitric and sulfuric acid from the school chemistry labs too, and we had more or less success in producing home made gun cotton, tnt, and nitroglycerine. It eventually led to careers in chemistry for two of my high school co-conspirators from the time.
Just a few days ago I wrote a comment [1] about a boy who used to live a few kilometers from my house when we were children and lost half of his hand doing experiments in his parents basement.
I think fire and exothermic reactions in general are much too interesting for children to not find a way to experiment with them at one time or another, but parents should take care that children don't do it alone and that they do it in a safe way.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16698251
Dad was called out to mop up after a young lad found an unexploded mortar shell and put it in a bench vice and whacked a nail into the firing pin. He has several more harrowing tales along those lines.
Gosh what fun old days those were. This was the era of the Cold War, at school we would have a bomb scare nearly weekly, Rheindahlen E mess was bombed, troops were shot at by quite a variety of nasty people and other fun and games. Mind you, a CSM pinched a Saracen or Saladin and tried to run down a bloke who was playing away with his wife. He drove it over the other bloke's car first. Shandy was involved.
On the bright side, I have friends from afar that I'm in touch with today - 40 odd years later.
Collecting the rounds was like a sport. The one with the biggest collection was the winner. Sometimes we found elements from ammunition belts too. They were rare and because of their small size and dark color much more difficult to find than the larger untarnished brass colored cartridges. One of the boys from my town had the perseverance to collect enough elements to assemble a belt that he could wear over his shoulder. He looked like John Rambo.
All of this wasn‘t a local phenomenon either. Much later I learned the story of a boy from a different area whose house was searched for pirated home computer games. Police didn‘t find any pirate copies but they found the blanks he had collected. Strict as the gun laws are he got a young offender sentence for unauthorized possession of a firearm (unerlaubter Waffenbesitz).
And this was all only about thrown away blanks from NATO maneuvers. When it comes to all the weapons that “disappeared” basically over night at the end of World War II, I know there is another trove of stories, but these are for someone from another generation to tell.
You might have heard about the BBC serial The Machine-Gunners, which tells a related story from the British perspective. It was very popular with us kids in Germany at that end of the Eighties. The opening theme Colonel Bogey March is now stuck in my head..
It's almost as though play, of the sort which could end your life, is a natural part of growing up (perhaps especially for boys). Then again, I don't really remember doing any very stupid things as an adolescent, probably due to spending more time in nature, trying not to die by falling, drowning, hypothermia, or impalement.
I was rather stupid and always tried to get right up to the PA speakers at the front. I did not wear hearing protection. Many times I left shows with ringing for hours and that feeling like there is cotton stuffed in your ears for days. Not a handle of times - dozens of times.
By my mid 20s it appeared I had tinnitus around the 8k area, which really freaked me out and immediately caused me to change my habits. Also around this time I got into headphone audio in a big way. I got an SPL meter and made sure to never go above 85dBs for extended listening sessions.
By my mid 30s the tinnitus had dissipated considerably. Now it's effectively gone, at least that I can tell (ie. not aware if there is psychological compensation happening). My hearing is great too, right ear at 17.5 kHz, left ear at 16.9.
http://www.electronicbeats.net/can-we-cure-tinnitus-by-liste...
If you haven't already, go get an an audiogram. It's cheap (<$100) and will give you a baseline on how your hearing is.
I used http://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator/ to quickly profile my hearing and found significant loss around 4.0kHz. I have ridden a motorcycle most of my life and it is much worse in the ear that is on the same side as the exhaust.
I am not sure what a spectrogram looks like for a motorcycle but I would have assumed that most of the energy is in the lower end of the spectrum, given the steady cruising RPS is around 40Hz-70Hz. But, your comment seems to suggest that there is not a direct correlation between the frequency of the noise exposure and the hearing loss frequencies.
While I can clearly hear my (loud piped) Ducati at 120kmh (~70mph) - on my Honda VFR800 with stock piped the engine noise is completely overshadowed by wind noise.
As a hint about how loud that wind noise gets, up around 130-140kmh, if I've got my noise cancelling earbuds in, they start clipping. I've heard them do that a handful of times in non motorcycle riding instances, always in reaction to sounds loud enough that people around look around and cover their ears.
(These days I _always_ ride with earplugs or noise cancelling earbuds in. Even on my "quiet" bikes. Gotta save that hearing damage up for loud concerts... )
I'm completely convinced that they make me safer on long rides, because you arrive significantly less tired - works great on planes too, I won't fly without earplugs any more.
Turns out that I had inadvertently replicated a classic high-school "constructive/destructive interference" demonstration. Driving the pair of speakers on my desk at that frequency put the position of my head in one of the destructive-interference "nulls" where the effective volume approaches zero.
So if anyone else is playing around with it, be sure to use headphones instead of stereo speakers!
Any perspective on what the deal with that would be? I haven't ever used an ototoxic medicine or anything
Here is what is funny though, the wavelength at which my hearing "kazoos" is the wavelength at which my young son cries. So while he was a baby, and even sometimes now as a toddler, if he's upset and I'm holding him, it's gotta be my right shoulder, otherwise my left ear bugs. It's a strange feeling too, a mixture of pain and grinding and broken audio that really sets me on edge.
Peculiar.
A while later, I was watching a Scrubs episode where one of the characters ruptured an ear drum. That sound closely matched what I remembered hearing, so I've worn hearing protection to every concert since. Even had people make fun of me for it, but as soon as I say "probably ruptured an eardrum at a concert," they stop laughing.
I have tinnitus from a different cause, though. When I was very small, 5 or 6 years old, one of my mother's boyfriends would haul me around by my ears. I remember that my ear started ringing one day, and it never stopped.
I have two tones in one ear, and I think three in the other. 37 years later and it's as bad as it ever was, sadly. I have learned to just tune it out, but I can still hear it if I choose to - annoyingly, when I choose to hear it, I have to wait until I forget about it.
edit: Forgot to note, the ringing is very, very high pitched. Remember what CRT televisions would sound like when you turned them on? Higher pitched than that.
Please folks, use protection. I like Etymotic earplugs, but to be honest i'm not even sure if they're "heavy enough", but my pain threshold is pretty low i think. In any case since i've been consistently using ear protection i've almost never had the ringing thing after concerts, which makes me rather glad.
If it's not something everyone does, and if you mention you do it for safety, the reaction is often rather negative. I think people don't like the idea that they might have been doing something very unsafe this whole time.
what in the f*?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-human-beast/2009...
"The Cinderella effect is well substantiated in crime data. Children growing up in step families are about 40 times as likely to be abused and 140 times as likely to be murdered as children growing up with both natural parents (murder still being a low probability)."
I'm really sorry you had to go through that. I was also physically abused by my bio mom up till about 9-10 years old (but she in turn was abused until she was 18, so she arguably reduced the snowball effect). All we can do is try to not repeat the same mistakes for our next generations. The problem is, I have temper issues to this day...
What? Who does that? Whenever I see someone wear earplugs I think "good for them" (and occasionally "shit I forgot to bring mine").
I saw loads of people wear them at the psy festival I was last summer (and wore them myself, too). And the music wasn't even that loud.
While I can hear the music just fine, it does, however, reduce that feeling of "sound presence" during a live show or set. The space feels "emptier" too, like, a huge crowd of people jumping to sonic vibrations (even stronger if it's in a darkened club with just a few bright white lights and smoke), it's pretty weird behaviour if you consider it. But the sound sort of blankets and normalizes this, at least, that's my feeling when that veil falls away when I put in the plugs.
I kind of wonder about the custom-mold plugs. I don't use the cheap yellow foam ones, but reusable ones about €20 I got at a hearing-aid store (asked for ones suitable for concerts/festivals), which I'm fairly pleased with.
Does the "presence" effect get better with the custom-molded ones? Because afaik they're about €300 or so. If they don't restore that "presence" compared to the €20 earplugs, but just some better quality (which is nice, but is it 300 euros nice?) I'm not sure if it's worth it. But if they do and they are also much more comfortable, it might be a nice present for myself :)
In the past year I've had worsening tinnitus. Although now (and for the last ~30 concerts) I've worn ear plugs most of the time (and recently bought molded ear plugs), the tinnitus still gives me great anxiety when I hear it in quiet places like my bedroom at night. The permanency of it is what freaks me out the most. But your comment gives me hope that I'll one day be able to enjoy silence again.
I fully urge anyone who goes to rock and similar concerts with any frequency at all to wear hearing protection. I'm a fan of Earasers and custom-molded musicians ear plugs. Even if you don't care about your hearing now, once you do care, it'll often be too late.
At one point it got way worse for about a month, likely caused by stress. Freaked me out to the point of briefly having suicidal thoughts. Then I got used to it again.
TLDR try not to be anxious about it. Good luck :)
I commute via plane for work so it gives me something to do that’s not sitting in the hotel watching TV or drinking too much alcohol.
I recommend an app called Songkick if you want to find local gigs you might be interested in, it scans your Spotify/last.fm and notifies you when artists you’ve listened to are playing nearby.
Could you elaborate on commuting by plane? Do you go to work every day? How long does it take? Why did you decide to work that way?
I fly out from Belfast to Nottingham at around 07:00 on Tuesday morning, and I fly home to Belfast around 20:00 on Thursday evening. Tuesday and Wednesday nights are spent in hotels in Nottingham.
From locking my front door behind me in Belfast to sitting down at my desk in Nottingham it takes around 3h30m. Thursdays are killers though, I don't get in my front door until at least 21:30. So depending on meetings, on Thursdays I frequently end up being on the go from 08:00 to 21:30, which isn't too much fun.
I ended up working this way basically because the company I work for bids for almost exclusively central government projects, and I can't think of any central government agencies that aren't based in England and therefore a flight away.
I first started doing this when I was at university and doing a year-long placement, at the same company I'm currently full-time for.
I was asked if I fancied flying back and forth, and as a 20-year-old, the prospect of getting flown around; staying in nice hotels; getting £5/£10/£30 for breakfast/lunch/dinner every day; and extra pay due to having to fly every week was quite attractive.
Currently 22-years-old and the constant flying got old pretty quickly, but I like where work and I like working on government projects that affect millions of UK citizens' lives.
Not sure the complete silence helped with healing, but the science behind the decision to have us do that was that the little hairs in the ear heals faster if it’s not stimulated.
To this day I still think about not exposing myself to too much sound after I have heard some high noice, like someone dropping a metal weight in the gym.
I'm left handed in most things but right eye dominant.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocular_dominance
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuMytPAKQyU
Dad had significant hearing loss from his time in the infantry during the war.
The guy who fired his weapon got a fine and was eventually kicked out though...
(I can see your username but I don't want to assume.)
The hearing loss dissipates after a day, even in normal conditions. I'm sure that it's bad for you long term, but short term your ears tend to fix themselves up pretty quick.
[0] Earmuffs over earplugs. Conscripts normal hearing only had to wear earplugs.
One summer when I was 8 or 9, I used a nail to scrape out the inside of a model rocket engine or two ("D" if I remember correctly) from my older brothers model kit into a pile on the concrete garage floor, then used a broken cord (literally a wall plug, a couple feet of cord, and two exposed ends) to ignite it by hand using the electric spark from the live leads.
After fleeing the garage in terror and slight pain (lucky not to have either electrocuted myself or burnt the detached structure down), I hung out doing nothing for a few hours and acted like nothing had happened. It was little use, though. Upon arriving home, my mother immediately know something was up. Not only was my face a little singed, I had burnt my eyebrows off.
Funnily enough, I'm fairly to heavily conservative when it comes to dangerous activity as an adult. I don't even drive all that fast usually.
In my case, it also went away completely after two years, only to come back after another five. I'm stuck with it since :/
I'm sorry for your loss and I hope you can find a way to handle it.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ajb37ie-Juo
It must have been really effective ear protection, but they didn't look so big. And never mind the sound, the whole head / body is going to be rattled by the vibrations. You wonder ...
[edit] I looked up the data. 190db peak for this type (H steel piles)
More recently something happened to that ear. It started to get water in it every day then stopped getting water in it but now I have tinnitus in that ear.
Ears are extremely sensitive and it doesn't take much to damage them.
It would be worth going to see a doctor and get them to check inside your ears.
You certainly wouldn't want to spend weeks thinking you had permanent tinnitus or hearing loss when it could be as simple as an ear flush. I can tell you that from experience.
I doubt that one can calculate the sound amplitude accurately without doing experiments or complex simulations here. It's possible that the toilet bowl or lid focused the sound like a satellite dish, and the protagonist's ear was in the exact wrong place at the wrong time.
Visual aid: https://blueandgreentomorrow.com/energy/in-pictures-new-wave...
[1]: http://ear-buds.org/microphonics-and-how-it-affects-your-ear...
(I have no idea how sourcing things works here. Hopefully I did it right?)
I think this is essentially people copying the ACM reference style.
Part of the issue is solved by running them over the backs of the ears so they exit down your neck. Additionally, mine have a cord pair keeper, and when I push that closer to the ends, that helps.
Another thing that's helped has been to get picker about which inserts I use. My ear canals aren't the same size (which I thought was strange, but whatever).
Using both of those techniques makes the microphonics go from intolerable to barely noticable for me which is great because I wear them for 4-8 hours a day.
I was working from a library, and stood to start closing up for the day. As I started to close my laptop, the screen (hi, glossy MacBook Pro) directly reflected the sun behind me.
For the next 15-20 minutes a significant portion of my vision in both eyes was wavy. I could still safely drive home, thankfully, but it was a severe distraction.
While I expected it to eventually clear up, it struck home how fragile my career is. (I know it's possible to be a blind software developer, but I'm not sure I could afford to take the short-term hit, assuming my employer wouldn't pay me to spend months relearning how to live and work.)
My main worry is falling while biking or skiing, and knocking my head. But now I'm worried about eyesight, and my hands, and everything else around the modern world.
I know a dev who is paralyzed and types/codes (quite well, too) with a pen attached to his forehead, you'd find a way to adapt.
In no way is what I said meant to be "Crippling worry that affects my life". More of a rational: "this is the most likely way I get really screwed, so I bought insurance"
They are just talking about long-term disability!? I have it as well, for mostly the same reasons. I worry that if something were to happen to my hands, eyes, or brain that I wouldn't be able to provide for myself or my family.
I don't think having disability insurance is "that much worry".
That sounds like a person who is on a lookout for something to be worried about, pretty much the definition of anxiety.
On the other hand, i think disability insurance is not even a little bit crazy; Of course, know that if you use it, you'll probably use it because you got screwed up in an auto accident (few people carry enough insurance to cover lost work for a software engineer for very long) but I think auto accidents are common enough to want to hedge against it.
I still haven't been able to identify a clear trigger, though I think it may be dehydration.
I was of that opinion until I decided to test it out. It doesn't hold up. Clarity is the main factor, I found. A matte screen must by definition diffuse light, which causes image to become blurry - and visibly so.
A glossy screen, for all it's annoying features, is just clearer and colors have an easier time being represented accurately. And most modern glossy screens now have anti-glare as well.
And sharp reflections on glossy screens make color-sensitive work difficult. Diffuse reflections are much easier to adjust for. Can you better support your claim that glossy monitors represent colors better?
I've been working on glossy screens for years and never had a problem. Perhaps people need to change their work environment instead.
What do you mean by "vibrancy"? Either a monitor is calibrated to a given color space, or not. And the diffusion of an individual pixel is orders of magnitude too low to significantly affect the color of neighboring pixels.
I got a matte screen for the first time in several years, and immediately had a reflection problem from window light. On a glossy screen the problem is a relatively small highlight, but on the matte screen it was a giant blob that took up a significant part of the screen. The glossy screen is usable, the matte is not.
Anti glare has improved significantly on glossy screens, too.
This is what long term disability insurance is for.
If you don't have it through your employer it can be pricy, but it it's a very small cost if you're concerned about becoming disabled.
If you have it as a group plan through your employer it's either employer paid (free for you) or incredibly cheap.
I haven't had any noticable problems because of it, but I do kinda wonder if it didn't cause a bit of damage.
A magnifying glass produces a small point of heat, with fairly low temperature and area. Many people in history have worked glass with no eye protection without serious consequences, other than cataracts perhaps (many older Italians still do not wear didymium glasses, much less the ones with welding shades).
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/04/what_its_like_...
I don't know what's the truth.
I do know that infrared can cause serious problems, such as burns and perhaps macular degeneration. It is mainly what welding shades and our glassblowing glasses filter.
IR drops off adequately at spectating distances, and when I am at a demo, watching other people work, I don’t wear my glasses. Not sure about at a nuclear blast though.
And even if he reasoned UV light wouldn't hurt him, he still had to duck to avoid the exposure. So if there's anything to take away from his story it's that he didn't know what he was talking about.
On the other hand, it is bad news for you. You can catch a naughty bacteria and die. You can slip by the door step and become paraplegic. If you are concerned about your family, get insurance. If you are concerned about your life (paraplegic or blind is not fun) then... tssk... bad luck. There is no insurance for that.
ps: I'm not suggesting you go do irresponsible things but worrying beyond reasonable yield no better results.
I first heard of this from a Youtube video, possibly from one of AvE's, although it could have been from somebody else's.
I always wearing hearing and eye protection when using it, and I'm glad for it. First time I tested the emergency release valve, I didn't know which direction it would release the air. If I hadn't been wearing safety glasses, I could have lost my eyes as it released directly into my face. I now have a rule of not allowing anybody in the workshop with me while using it, if they're not wearing both hearing and eye protection.