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There's a Persistent Hum in Windsor, Ontario, and No One Knows Why

nytimes.com

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Re: There's a Persistent Hum in Windsor, Ontario, and No One Knows Why

#31

Post by berberous »

racl101 wrote: post #5
vonzep wrote: post #2

And trust me it's damn annoying, it's nothing ear plugs can't take care of but damn if it isn't enough to slowly drive you insane

Wonder if you can train yourself to ignore it. The same way some fucked up people train themselves to ignore smoke detector chirps. I've known a couple of these people in my life. They managed to live with a chirping detector for weeks on end and when you bring it up they think you're making mountains out of molehills.

I find that it's easier to tune out something that is totally periodic and unvarying. As annoying as a smoke detector chirp would be, your brain knows with certainty the timing and sound of it and can process it out completely. A noise that is generally around, but comes and goes and varies in pitch and volume without predictability, can be much more annoying.

Re: There's a Persistent Hum in Windsor, Ontario, and No One Knows Why

#32

Post by ocdtrekkie »

yathern wrote: post #28
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #19

Three people so far have suggested in the comments here it should be "easy" to triangulate it. Note that according to Zug Island's Wikipedia page, "As of April 2013, a Canadian scientist is using sound-level meters and a portable "pentangular array" of cameras and microphones to try to precisely identify the source of the sound, in order to know whom exactly to ask to fix it" and that "the City Council had already sp…

> I think there's a bit of armchairing going on here, in that people are definitely trying the obvious already. As one of these suggesters - I think it's the problem lies in that the article doesn't mention this obvious first step in determining the source.

"Since reports of it surfaced in 2011, the hum has been studied by the Canadian government, the University of Western Ontario and the University of Windsor."

Do you really think that between the Canadian government and two universities, over the past seven years, that you are the first person to suggest this "obvious first step"?

Re: There's a Persistent Hum in Windsor, Ontario, and No One Knows Why

#34

Post by fenwick67 »

narrator wrote: post #20
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #19

Three people so far have suggested in the comments here it should be "easy" to triangulate it. Note that according to Zug Island's Wikipedia page, "As of April 2013, a Canadian scientist is using sound-level meters and a portable "pentangular array" of cameras and microphones to try to precisely identify the source of the sound, in order to know whom exactly to ask to fix it" and that "the City Council had already sp…

They can triangulate it unless... (puts on tinfoil hat) ... the hum is coming from under the city.

It's probably something planted by the Wayne County government to try and get people to move to the US side.

Re: There's a Persistent Hum in Windsor, Ontario, and No One Knows Why

#35

Post by acomjean »

We had a "hum" sound in cambridge MA. Its one of those sounds when you walk through you don't think anything of it, but if you live near it.... (I was one of the lucky as I couldn't hear it from my bedroom). Incredibly hard to track down, it was determined to be Fans on top of a building. And it was fixed.

The sound bounces around so much, just walking around I couldn't pinpoint it on a couple nights of trying. Its wierd to hear it, but not be able to determine direction. The city figured it out.

Re: There's a Persistent Hum in Windsor, Ontario, and No One Knows Why

#36

Post by [deleted] »

narrator wrote: post #20
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #19

Three people so far have suggested in the comments here it should be "easy" to triangulate it. Note that according to Zug Island's Wikipedia page, "As of April 2013, a Canadian scientist is using sound-level meters and a portable "pentangular array" of cameras and microphones to try to precisely identify the source of the sound, in order to know whom exactly to ask to fix it" and that "the City Council had already sp…

They can triangulate it unless... (puts on tinfoil hat) ... the hum is coming from under the city.

[deleted]

Re: There's a Persistent Hum in Windsor, Ontario, and No One Knows Why

#37

Post by acqq »

yathern wrote: post #28
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #19

Three people so far have suggested in the comments here it should be "easy" to triangulate it. Note that according to Zug Island's Wikipedia page, "As of April 2013, a Canadian scientist is using sound-level meters and a portable "pentangular array" of cameras and microphones to try to precisely identify the source of the sound, in order to know whom exactly to ask to fix it" and that "the City Council had already sp…

> I think there's a bit of armchairing going on here, in that people are definitely trying the obvious already. As one of these suggesters - I think it's the problem lies in that the article doesn't mention this obvious first step in determining the source.

It mentions investigations many times:

"Since reports of it surfaced in 2011, the hum has been studied by the Canadian government, the University of Western Ontario and the University of Windsor."

Those are all the links in the article, the last one (https://www.dropbox.com/s/vi8ek3hqiof81ca/UW%20Study%20Repor...) gives us

"For the duration of the project, the Hum manifested on only a handful of days, which made the identification of the source difficult. Good data representative of the Hum was measured using the stationed noise monitors. Conclusive evidence of the source was not achieved using the NSI system since the Hum was not present on those days that this equipment was deployed on the river. The conclusion of the research is that the Windsor Hum does exist and has both qualitative and quantitative characteristics that surmise the likely source of the Hum to be from the blast furnace operations on Zug Island."

So the main problem of the article is that it tries to make a mystery from something reasonably good investigated.

Re: There's a Persistent Hum in Windsor, Ontario, and No One Knows Why

#38

Post by ameister14 »

vonzep wrote: post #9
rubicon33 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You live there? What are the leading theories of what it could be? The article didn't seem to lock in on anything.

I live there ... I was away for many years and saw a few stories in the news and kinda laughed it off ... now not laughing so much The leading theories are it has something to do with this mordor like place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zug_Island

uuhhh..."Originally a marsh-filled peninsula at the mouth of the River Rouge, it served as an uninhabited Native American burial ground for thousands of years."

Re: There's a Persistent Hum in Windsor, Ontario, and No One Knows Why

#39

Post by blattimwind »

A few years ago they drilled for gas a few kilometers outside the city (about 3 km from my house) — this caused a faint humming noise that seemed to come from everywhere but nowhere in particular. Stand still in a room, hear the noise. Lie down, cover your ears, hear the noise. Put earplugs in, hear the noise. Hugely annoying if you're the kind of person that doesn't sleep well with such nuisances.

Boy was I happy when they were done drilling.

Most interestingly, just a month ago they finished drilling for gas much more closely, right at the edge of the city, not even a kilometer from my house. I didn't hear anything.

My working theory here is that in the former case it was a drilling at a new location, so they must have induced vibrations into the bedrock layers that all the houses here are built on. While in the latter case there was an abandoned operation at the same spot - perhaps they re-used the hole and just drilled it deeper.

Re: There's a Persistent Hum in Windsor, Ontario, and No One Knows Why

#40

Post by fenwick67 »

sbarre wrote: post #13
hellbanner wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you located it -- it's coming from the ground? air? direction?

Wikipedia says that it is in fact Zug Island: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zug_Island#Noise_and_vibration

The Wikipedia page mentions this but doesn't make the obvious connection to the cause of the vibrations...

> it served as an uninhabited Native American burial ground for thousands of years

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