There's an app to find actually quiet bars/restaurants? https://www.soundprint.co/ mentioned in one of the linked articles.
That hadn't occurred to me as a thing I wanted, but wow do I. I was out for work drinks yesterday, and I was smiling and nodding through incomprehensible conversations because the place was so freaking loud. I think my hearing is questionable -- I seem to have more trouble hearing in loud places than most people, or maybe it bothers me more than most people -- but I would be just as happy to never be in a loud bar ever again.
(This is one of the many things that makes me feel like no fun. I like fun, really! Just not at high decibel levels.)
There was an article somewhere recently about how loud restaurants have become. I wonder if that's a sign that the trend will start to reverse.
2: I'm pretty sure it's one of the ones at the link.
Also that'll be really neat in 2029 when local users fill out the decibel data rating for area restaurants around here.
Publicize it on your local FB group, or NextDoor, or whatever the 'around here' social media thing is? I mean, if it works, it sounds terrific. I have already looked up neighborhood bars I want to go to now.
1.1 Should come in handy for the next meet up. I wonder how Fresh Salt scores.
I like fun, really! Just not at high decibel levels.
Said the actress to the archbishop.
Anyway, as one does, I spent a couple of summers assembling grain bins. Using impact wrenches to tighten bolts on what is basically a giant steel drum while you stand inside them.
My hearing has definitely gotten worse over the last 5-10 years. It's not a problem, but I'm aware that I miss detail when somebody is speaking quietly (or, more often, if somebody is speaking at a quiet-normal volume while facing away from me). I can't blame loud music, or loud restaurants, since I already tried to avoid loud environments (which quickly make me feel tired). Just aging I guess . . .
De-lurking to say that my brother-in-law is an audio engineer who has to be hyper conscious of this stuff (including the dB meter app). We were at a friend's wedding reception and the music was so bumpin he pulled out his phone to take a reading and freaked, saying "this is career-endingly loud!" He didn't bring his fancy filtering earplugs so just had to pop in some balled up napkins.
8: I suppose the decibel levels get even higher when the grain bins explode.
My hearing is fine, but loud bars aren't any good for genuine human interaction.
At a concert though, if you are 10 feet away, facing away from me, and I can still hear you talking while the music is playing, they need to turn it up. (People won't shut up, apparently.)
10: Asparagus tips work well for that.
Also that'll be really neat in 2029 when local users fill out the decibel data rating for area restaurants
By 2029 the data will be so polluted by restaurateurs sabotaging their competition with anonymous reports of high noise levels that it will again be useless. Remember: we can't have nice things!
he pulled out his phone to take a reading and freaked, saying "this is career-endingly loud!"
I remember hearing about a friend of a friend who had worked as crew for rock concerts in Hawaii, and said that a lot of bands doing a tour in Asia would begin and end the tour with a concert in Hawaii, and the volume was significantly higher by the end of the tour (the speculation being that they abused their hearing over the tour and kept turning it louder to compensate).
I had an over-inflated bicycle tire explode next to my head when I was about 12. My hearing has been shit ever since then.
And that's why you switched to a pillow.
Despite all the hardcore and punk shows I went to in my misspent youth I can still hear a pin drop on the other side of my apartment.
Must be all the LSD expanding your sensorium.
There was an article somewhere recently about how loud restaurants have become. I wonder if that's a sign that the trend will start to reverse.
It's not just the pendulum of fashion, though - it may make the establishments more money regardless of how miserable people get, as the journalist notes.
I can also still hear all those high frequency tones that supposedly only young people can hear.
21: I wonder if it reduces time spent over the entire population, though. That is, I would spend more time in bars if they were quieter, even though I might drink faster on the occasions that I do go out in a louder bar.
Just in general, I have my doubts about how generalizable research like that is.
Although I systematically doubt any kind of social science or psychology research after the last few years, that one seems very plausible. I know I drink faster and eat more when I'm straining to hear what anyone else is saying, because I'm talking less and I'm less caught up in the conversation.
I think the association may also be conventional wisdom among actual proprietors, which would give it more legs, even if not fully true.
The house of wisdom is the house of legs.
Anyway, I suspect this results are accurate in a given setting but that the scope conditions are very important and poorly understood.
Anyway, maybe the noise is just to chase off old people.
The article about restaurants made me realize that there are advantages to having a 3-year-old. Yes, some of the places Cassandane and I would go if it were just the two of us but not with Atossa can be pretty loud, now that you mention it.
I'm not sure if this is a matter of my neighborhood or my personal tastes or what, but when I think about loud vs. quiet venues I'm familiar with, the worst are the ones that are closer to the "bar" side of "bar/restaurant". Both the really fancy restaurants and the bars with no kitchen at all are easier to have a conversation in.
10 years ago I was very rarely around really loud noise. Cassandane likes live music, so we've gone to concerts now and then for Iron & Wine, Janelle Monae, acts like that. My hearing is probably worse than it was 10 years ago but still better than hers so far.
A metric that accounts for extra drinks but not for people who decided against coming to a bar in the first place seems worse than useless.
I have had tinnitus ever since I read the OP.
Iron & Wine, Janelle Monae, acts like that
I might need one more hint before I can continue that series.
How are bar/restaurant owners supposed to know who's staying home because they're so loud? Even if noise is what hurts their business, they're probably going to latch onto other explanations they have more of a direct view into - lamppost data principles.
33: Heh. I named the first two that came to mind, not the two most recent or most famous, and didn't say they were all the same genre. I'm definitely not the music buff of the two of us. Checking my email, some more names are Portugal: the Man, The Shins, and Ryan Adams.
Oh I know, I was just teasing. I'm sure there are algorithms by now that could do it! Maybe you can explain Ryan Adams to me, though, because I absolutely can't shake the idea that he's a teen-idol ("Summer of '99") version of Bryan (sp?) Adams, which is so profoundly aversive that I can't even google it. Might be an actual phobia.
Have I mentioned that one of Jammies' favorite songs ever is "Life Is a Highway"? Whenever "Don't Stop Believen'" became a kitschy cultural touchpoint instead of merely the worst song, I think it was displaced by LIAH.
36: This guy. Very little resemblance to Bryan. Reading the email a bit more, I'm not sure if we ever actually went to one of his shows, or just talked about it.
I have had tinnitus ever since I read the OP.
Not sure if you're kidding, but mine bizarrely spiked. It's not just me noticing it, as I sometimes do, but it's gotten genuinely loud. Huh.
36: Ryan Adams is haunted by the "Summer of 69". The NYT even published his article about the trauma.
By the time Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings came out to sing on my song "Bartering Lines," the vibes were tense. We got to the quietest moment where it is just our three voices a cappella, and suddenly that voice yelled the song that would then follow me for nearly 15 years: "Summer of '69," by Bryan Adams
40: Not kidding. I'm suggestible on that kind of thing.
I think I don't notice it until somebody mentions it, but it's always there.
There's always ambient noise in my ears if I'm silent and listening. If I'm sleep deprived, it starts to sound like voices.
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I'm so annoyed by this "Mexican DNA test discount" thing. I have obtained oodles of documentary evidence of forebears living in Mexico and immigrating here, but none of it would show up as "Mexican DNA." Do you think a "so, they don't count because they were Jews?" complaint would get me a discount? I really want to go.
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Thanks for the Ryan Adams explainer.
46:
A. Yes, technically cute troll of you-know-who.
B. I didn't even realize it was a done thing to look for ancestry within other Western Hemisphere countries (taken as a whole). Mexico is as much a melange of different ancestral groups as the US, if not more, so how do you differentiate? It seems technically fraught-to-impossible.
C. Pricing on a sliding scale according to a genetic test result? Even as a publicity stunt, ick ick ick.
I unironically like "Life is a Highway". "Don't Stop Believing" is a fucking garbage song, and the sooner it goes back to being forgotten the better.
the sooner it goes back to being forgotten the better.
Was "Don't Stop Believing" ever forgotten? My impression is that it transitioned from contemporary hit to "classic" cheesy song that everyone knows for some reason without ever falling out of popular consciousness.
One of my colleagues met her future husband freshman year at the first meeting of Hillel, and met him again an hour later at the first meeting of the Hispanic student association. They like to say they have a mixed marriage since he's Peruvian-Jewish-American, and she's Mexican-Jewish-American.
This is the same colleague who had worried that it would be difficult to find a nanny who was fluent in Spanish. It turned out not to be a problem.
Life hack: If you have only crumbled bits of chips, just put them in a bowl, stir in the dip, and eat with a spoon.
I finally read the article in the OP. I'm happy to blame Mario Batali for the whole thing.
If you have only crumbled bits of chips anything, just put them in a bowl, stir in the dip, and eat with a spoon.
Now I want junk food. I'm happy to blame Moby Hick.
Good news for those of us with shitty hearing - you can now get a tactical hearing aid. You know, for when you need your hearing aid out on your militia camping trips. Or if you just need to hear the TV better.
There are some really ingenious sorts of ear defence out there which use noise-cancelling electronics, so you can still hear quiet sounds clearly but the loud ones get blocked; some even amplify quiet sounds, so you can hear someone breathing fifty yards away but you don't get deafened when he starts shooting.
I have good hearing -- solid up to about 16-17kHz which I think is pretty decent for someone in their mid 40s -- but have always found the cocktail party effect tricky. If I'm in a busy and loud pub, I find attending to another person's voice harder than some seem to do. I have always been like that, even 20 years ago, when presumably my hearing was better than it is now. Voices on TV are also problematic with the stupid way in which film and TV audio is mixed these days -- buggering around with the audio to make sure that its not doing some kind of bad mix-down of 5+1 to stereo helps, as does turning off the various virtual surround options, but the relative levels of background music and FX to voice is usually/often wrong. Ironically, if I'm listening to music, I often have the volume much lower than my wife would, for example, because my hearing in general is quite sensitive.
58: that sounds both very cool and potentially weirdly hallucinatory.
How do you know he going to start shooting?
I can tell from listening to his heartbeat accelerate.
Though sometimes that does just mean he's had an espresso.
If you aren't careful with the settings you might get deafened by the coffee machine.
The coal strikes back. It's going for our bridges. Fortunately, it can't read a calendar or clock, so it hit them too early in the day and on a holiday.
If it plays its cards right it can get stuck midriver and burn for decades.
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At least between different parts of the Pacific Coast, TSA staffing or conduct did not hamper my air travel beyond the usual. So much for heightening the contradictions.
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There are some really ingenious sorts of ear defence out there which use noise-cancelling electronic
I'm guessing you won't get that kind of tech on a hearing aid sold for $19.95 through commercials on FOX News?
I'm pretty sure that is just going to be a lump of congealed bacon fat with a spare bit of Don 10 stuck in it.
67: No issues with travel yesterday, but AJ was bummed that they hadn't resorted to playing explicit lyrics like the stories out of JFK (https://www.travelandleisure.com/travel-news/tsa-agents-blasting-rap-jfk). This stupid shutdown is going to last until it starts to hurt people with power. I still feel like it hasn't really sunk in yet. Friends are starting to hurt financially - a month with no pay on short notice is a lot. But things like the TSA are still running. Mostly.
70 is nothing new; last time I was at LAX they were blasting the Imperial March from Star Wars.
Are they still getting benefits or after a month do they start getting cut off from health insurance? I assume most are in FEHBP but is that shut down? Do doctors claims of people in that program stop getting paid at some point?
52 is not a life hack, it's just common sense.
50- It was because of its position in the Sopranos finale I assumed. Another example was Clinton's use of Don't Stop in his campaign- suddenly everyone knows this cheesy classic rock song.
My sensory problem is not hearing but a persistent floating spot (actually two very close together) in one eye. I know exactly the day it started and has lasted for a year and a half and will probably never go away. The eye doctor says it's just an aging thing when the goo in your eye gets crystals and eventually you don't notice it, but I still notice it. Apparently the only treatment is to replace all the liquid in your eye with artificial liquid which leads to more problems than it solves. I would have assumed they could dissolve the crystals with lasers or ultrasound or something.
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He Zikai, a metropolitan censor, reported to the throne's incredulous consternation that a wild tribal had cut the nose off a Qing squad leader, apparently without reprisal, in 1817.|>
I spoke too soon: there was some kind of glitch in the automated system that resulted in us waiting 15 minutes for our gate to open up. The pilot said something about them obtaining counts of passengers and luggage and having to do manual calculations. Lots of strain on the air traffic controllers, I assume this is reflective of!
59. Voices on TV are also problematic with the stupid way in which film and TV audio is mixed these days
I've always heard that called "British sound editing*." I know I first encountered it on British TV shows which were edited to have "realistic" speech instead of "theatrical speech." Either that or they couldn't afford ADR.
* Of course, now everyone does it because it's cool or something.
75: I was told there would be no math on the test.
Hey, did you guys realize that the scourge of racial prejudice has not yet been eliminated in this country? I was totally unaware of that fact until I opened up FB today.
Also, that guy with all the streets named after him apparently said some pretty awesome stuff.
72: Basically still covered. No changes to existing plans (even with QLE because data entry requires staff), and there may be some fuckery with premiums deducted from paychecks.
https://khn.org/news/shutdown-mostly-spares-health-coverage-but-other-issues-loom/
Eventually, when they stop paying the guards at the National Zoo, I'm going to get me a free panda.
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"He put great effort into his teachings on both the general and specific, and thus attained increasingly efficacious methods."|>
80: Divorce and Marriage qualifying events won't take effect until they are back in paid status. Luckily, children who are born or adopted in to a family will be added on to policies.
Also, that guy with all the streets named after him apparently said some pretty awesome stuff.
That would be Oliver Main, guitarist for the Pigeon Detectives.
re: 73
I have that. I have a really prominent vitreous floater, right in the centre of the visual field of my dominant eye. My eyes test just fine -- very very mild prescription for driving* -- but I find certain kinds of things hard to attend to properly because the out of focus floaty spot is right in the core part of my vision.
* and I'd easily pass the requirements to drive without them.
I've had it for years, and it's absolutely not below the threshold of conscious perception. I'm aware of it, a lot.
A vitreous floater sounds like a much more serious problem to have.
|| The legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.
Different branch of government, but my current research reveals that, in disputes involving race, Republican judicial appointees are about 4x as likely to quote MLK as their Democratic counterparts. More than 85% of the time they then go on to rule against the person of color.
https://twitter.com/nancyleong/status/1087459020250570753
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Now do "Jesus" and "ruling against the poor or powerless."
How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?