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Noise pollution hurts the heart

theatlantic.com

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Re: Noise pollution hurts the heart

#171

Post by jodrellblank »

young_unixer wrote: post #89
boredumb wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You believe we need a more authoritarian society because some people live lives that are louder than you deem appropriate and enough so that you are willing to 'respond with force' and you somehow see them as the people who are "fucking up the whole game"?

Counter-example: Sounds are pressure waves that transmit through the air. Given enough pressure, those waves could even kill someone (bomb). If we say that there should be no legal limit to sound pressure, then making a bomb explode and killing people should have no legal consequences. This makes no sense, so we should put a threshold of maximum allowed sound pressure. The discussion now is where is that threshold.

Counter-exampe: regulations exist relating to bombs, stabbing, and guns, without having any threshhold of maximum allowed pushing force or speed of matter.

Re: Noise pollution hurts the heart

#172

Post by dang »

jborichevskiy wrote: post #109

The Atlantic also wrote "Why is the World so Loud?" in 2019, a great read into the psychological effects of noise pollution and the legal means by which people try and fight back. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/the-end...

Discussed at the time:

Everything Is Getting Louder - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21229540 - Oct 2019 (305 comments)

Re: Noise pollution hurts the heart

#173

Post by wmeredith »

nitrogen wrote: post #92
elicash wrote: post #40

A bit unrelated, but I'd love to use a Zillow-like platform but filtering homes for noise pollution, light pollution, air pollution. (Also climate and flooding.) Most people wouldn't use it, because they've basically decided which city/town (bc of work/family) and are just trying to narrow down which home. But it'd be very useful to me, personally, as someone who can do my job from anywhere. Also, I'd imagine it's im…

I've thought about how one would design and market soundproofed apartments and houses. You'd need to condense full-spectrum measurements of ambient levels, indoor transmission, and outdoor transmission into just one or a few numbers or letter grades, and convince other apartment buildings and homebuilders to let you run measuring microphones and speakers for a week. Are there any standards for soundproofed constructi…

If you've ever been inside a house that has insulation installed in all interior walls, the sound mitigation is really something else. That's a feature quite high on my list, if I ever construct a home.

Re: Noise pollution hurts the heart

#174

Post by tawayyyy »

nickysielicki wrote: post #35
baron816 wrote: post #3

There are few things that make me angrier than when a Harley-Davidson style motorcycle (or a pack of them) drive past me while I’m walking down the street. I can’t believe cities haven’t prohibited them, especially at night. Those things are specifically designed to create noise pollution. They’re so fucking obnoxious, even just thinking about it while I’m writing this is working me up.

I get where you're coming from, but I also believe that loud pipes save lives. Ultimately, is it really that big of a deal?

i wouldn't care the lives of the pilots bombing cities.

Re: Noise pollution hurts the heart

#175

Post by tawayyyy »

wmeredith wrote: post #170
tawayyyy wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you have no idea. i can even sympathize with a murderer. you know, self-defense, impulse... can be anything. but this? this is premediated. just one asshat can ruin entire town. these people deserve lifetime-imprisonment after multiple offence.

> these people deserve lifetime-imprisonment after multiple offence. You can't be serious when you say that you'd lock someone in a cage for the rest of their life because they broke a noise ordinance.

why not? prisons are full of people that did much less. why a drug lord gets a life in prison? no one is forcing you to buy drugs. can you say same for these people?

Re: Noise pollution hurts the heart

#176

Post by bagacrap »

elicash wrote: post #40

A bit unrelated, but I'd love to use a Zillow-like platform but filtering homes for noise pollution, light pollution, air pollution. (Also climate and flooding.) Most people wouldn't use it, because they've basically decided which city/town (bc of work/family) and are just trying to narrow down which home. But it'd be very useful to me, personally, as someone who can do my job from anywhere. Also, I'd imagine it's im…

air pollution is highly localized, e.g. near (downwind from) freeways. Not enough people have purpleair sensors to make this a reality.

Re: Noise pollution hurts the heart

#177

Post by Karawebnetwork »

Guest42 wrote: post #15
belly_joe wrote: post #2

I feel the sound -> stress connection palpably. Especially sudden loud noises like a horn honking cause me to feel upset for a long while after being startled. Seems like a convincing argument to me for car-free spaces, although honestly I just wish we had stronger social norms against unnecessarily using a car's horn.

Agreed. I also don’t like it when locking a car via remote causes the horn to go off and in order to make sure people hit it multiple times.

New cars are starting to replace this with a less intense "beep beep". I was agreeably surprised when I locked my 2020 car and it didn't honk at me.

Re: Noise pollution hurts the heart

#178

Post by jodrellblank »

centimeter wrote: post #22
ryanianian wrote: post #13

Damaging the heart sounds right. My neighbor has a unique obsession with his leaf-blower. It's like his daily 30-120 minutes of exercise at random times of the day. Even with all the noise-cancelling technology in the world, it ruins me for at least 2-3 hours and makes both video-conferencing and deep work basically impossible. Here's the thing: Nobody cares. The neighbor can say no to polite requests to figure out a…

> high-pitch "safety" beeping This drives me insane. I know some shithead lawyer or safety “activist” somewhere is responsible for all the bullshit beeping I have to deal with in my life. A fire alarm going off for no reason. (I would accept the negligible marginal risk of burning to death than have to deal with legally mandated fire alarms.) My car beeping because I didn’t put the seatbelt over the luggage in the pa…

"I was in a school science lesson learning about Pavlov and thinking 'stupid dogs'. Then the bell rang and we all had lunch." - Gary Delaney.

> "I know some shithead lawyer or safety “activist” somewhere is responsible for all the bullshit beeping I have to deal with in my life."

Probably not; whoever set the Unix/Linux CLI to ding aggressively whenever you do literally anything is guilty of something or other. It's not just the nature of the beep sound, 8-bit music can be fun, it's combined with the nature of "safety" beeping being an audio wrap-on-the-knuckles for doing something "wrong" like ... pressing backspace when there's nothing to backspace DING! or turning on the induction hob DING! or turning up the power on the induction hob DING! or not hurrying quickly enough to the finished microwave DING DING! or reversing a large vehicle BEEEEEEP! or not plugging in your seatbelt NAUGHTY! (Not being awake for capitalism productivity time RING RING!)

They're not just audio noises, they're psychological soup nazis. Cracking twigs and sudden barks are sounds that somehting is coming to eat you, screeching is a sound that your infant might be about to die, none of it is relevant to trying to adjust a volume control one percent higher than it can go. DING!

I've run Windows with all sounds off, and Linuxes with muted error bels for so long that I can't imagine what it would be like if the entire computing audioscape was nice, encouraging, pleasant, positive feedback like message notifications on smartphones tend to be.

Re: Noise pollution hurts the heart

#179

Post by frankish »

belly_joe wrote: post #2

I feel the sound -> stress connection palpably. Especially sudden loud noises like a horn honking cause me to feel upset for a long while after being startled. Seems like a convincing argument to me for car-free spaces, although honestly I just wish we had stronger social norms against unnecessarily using a car's horn.

I strongly empathize. I usually wait a few seconds, then just flash my high beams for most situations.

Re: Noise pollution hurts the heart

#180

Post by Karawebnetwork »

belly_joe wrote: post #2

I feel the sound -> stress connection palpably. Especially sudden loud noises like a horn honking cause me to feel upset for a long while after being startled. Seems like a convincing argument to me for car-free spaces, although honestly I just wish we had stronger social norms against unnecessarily using a car's horn.

I wonder if ear plugs help at all. My partner snores so I wear them at night.

Even then, sometimes I get woken up by the low frequencies of large trucks idling (snow removal operations, mostly). The vibrations are not even felt in my ears but through my entire body.

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