Earlier quoted context omitted.
vehicles are make noise with the engine and wheels, so light electric vehicles are super quiet, but heavy vehicles tend to be loud regardless when moving fast
Electric cars are certainly far from silent, and somewhere at the high end of city speeds they are hard to distinguish from other cars because most of the sound comes from the tires. But subjectively I don't mind the tire noise nearly as much as the sound of an accelerating petrol engine.
Sounding the alarm: How noise hurts the heart (2021)
331–340 of 531 posts
Re: Sounding the alarm: How noise hurts the heart (2021)
#332Re: Sounding the alarm: How noise hurts the heart (2021)
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
People are so unbelievably disrespectful with noise in the US. Peaceful hike? Here's Katy Perry crackling out of my iPhone at full blast! Luxury apartment at $4k a month? No insulation between units, and the guy above you comes home at 2am and never takes his shoes off. Small country street? Here comes Chad with his straight-piped civic with the muffler removed!
I find by far the biggest disruption in US suburbs is lawn equipment. Suburbs are louder than cities imo because there is always a leaf blower, lawn mower, and weedwacker going at all times during the day within 100 yards of you. Often for hours. Moving from Palo Alto to SF things got way quieter.
To me it changes the mental end of the week cleanse. When the routine of nearly everyone gets changed it affects everyone. My generation going back to my father's and before kept Sundays quiet. Nothing to do with religion it was just a day everyone seemed to agree was the quiet day. Now in the past 10 or 15 years it's changed dramatically.
Re: Sounding the alarm: How noise hurts the heart (2021)
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
I fucking loathe leaf blowers. I can tell what day of the week it is by which neighbor is going for an hour or two straight with the leaf blower. Get a damn rake!
> I fucking loathe leaf blowers...Get a damn rake! I fucking loathe chain saws...Get a damn axe! I fucking loathe lawn mowers...Get a damn scythe! I fucking loathe loud diesel trucks...Get a damn wagon train! I fucking loathe cellphone ringers...Get a damn semaphore! Seriously, until you've done a full day's landscape maintenance yourself, you're not qualified to talk about leaf blowers. Luckily battery powered leaf…
Blowing leaves is perhaps not the way to manage the organic matter that needs to be embedded in that soil the temporary owner is trying to destroy by monocropping homogeneous “grass”, I’ll hope that generally makes collecting organic matter to waste wrapped in individual virgin plastic bags obsolete itself. Groundskeeping could do with a 21st century ecological update… we even had the native plants movement in the 80s
I dunno, what about mulching it in sítio?
Leaf blowers are also futile in wind.
Re: Sounding the alarm: How noise hurts the heart (2021)
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find by far the biggest disruption in US suburbs is lawn equipment. Suburbs are louder than cities imo because there is always a leaf blower, lawn mower, and weedwacker going at all times during the day within 100 yards of you. Often for hours. Moving from Palo Alto to SF things got way quieter.
I fucking loathe leaf blowers. I can tell what day of the week it is by which neighbor is going for an hour or two straight with the leaf blower. Get a damn rake!
Re: Sounding the alarm: How noise hurts the heart (2021)
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
People are so unbelievably disrespectful with noise in the US. Peaceful hike? Here's Katy Perry crackling out of my iPhone at full blast! Luxury apartment at $4k a month? No insulation between units, and the guy above you comes home at 2am and never takes his shoes off. Small country street? Here comes Chad with his straight-piped civic with the muffler removed!
I find by far the biggest disruption in US suburbs is lawn equipment. Suburbs are louder than cities imo because there is always a leaf blower, lawn mower, and weedwacker going at all times during the day within 100 yards of you. Often for hours. Moving from Palo Alto to SF things got way quieter.
It really is, if you're on a block where a bunch of people use a maintenance service it's very possible to have 2-3 hours of commercial leaf blowers at least once a week for a few months. It could be twice a week if you happen to have a situation where let's say the east and west side of your block each have 4-5 houses who use a service but the middle doesn't. That usually means 2 different crews will independently do it at different times. The block itself might only be a few hundred feet (10x quarter acre properties on each side) so it's extremely noisy for everyone on the block.
Then factor in being kind of close to a fire house and there's a massively loud siren every day at noon and random sirens / fire trucks for emergencies. Oh you live 3 miles from a small airport? Ok, there's going to be planes flying in / out almost all the time. Oh yeah, did you know they do helicopter training every Monday and Thursday night from 8pm to 10pm, so now you get to have your house shaken every 10-15 minutes while a helicopter flies a few hundred feet over your block while doing laps.
And you have trees too where Blue Jays love to pretty consistently squawk. That sounds like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6P7k4np0Js, but it carries far. Once one of them starts, it's like a chain reaction for 15 minutes. Even with windows closed and headphones on it's easy to hear it. I've had to stop recording videos because even a dynamic mic (very directional) will pick it up.
Suburbs are really loud.
Re: Sounding the alarm: How noise hurts the heart (2021)
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I fucking loathe leaf blowers...Get a damn rake! I fucking loathe chain saws...Get a damn axe! I fucking loathe lawn mowers...Get a damn scythe! I fucking loathe loud diesel trucks...Get a damn wagon train! I fucking loathe cellphone ringers...Get a damn semaphore! Seriously, until you've done a full day's landscape maintenance yourself, you're not qualified to talk about leaf blowers. Luckily battery powered leaf…
Reductio ad absurdum Blowing leaves is perhaps not the way to manage the organic matter that needs to be embedded in that soil the temporary owner is trying to destroy by monocropping homogeneous “grass”, I’ll hope that generally makes collecting organic matter to waste wrapped in individual virgin plastic bags obsolete itself. Groundskeeping could do with a 21st century ecological update… we even had the native plan…
You're doing your own reductionism. Not all leaf blowing is to collect leaves for disposal in plastic bags (and I'm 100% for using leaves as mulch where they fall on beds, and also with not having lawns). Leaves need to be blown out of gutters, drains, and ditches - otherwise the road will start being eroded. Leaves need to be removed from paths and patios, otherwise they will stain the concrete, let moss grow, and make the surface slippery. You try doing that by hand on 8-10 properties in a day, on minimum wage, without health insurance (the situation of most landscape maintenance workers in the US) - and then tell me that banning leaf blowers is a good idea.
Leaves on the lawn can easily be mulched in place and used to build up organic matter, as you point out - but that too requires a gasoline engine powered machine. The call should be for banning lawns, if that's the concern - not banning leaf blowers.
(I should also mention that if you don't live somewhere with a real winter or dry season that causes heavy leaf fall, your situation isn't representative.)
Re: Sounding the alarm: How noise hurts the heart (2021)
#338Also, just wanted to point out this gem:
"Children in loud, loud places like East Oakland are the ones who grow up saying, ‘Can I ax you a question?’"
Which someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe that that's how that word developed linguistically. It's my understanding that "ask" pronounced "ax" has been around and popped up from time-to-time in a lot of the English-speaking world. It was seen in England pretty far back, but I don't have an exact date or location off the top of my head. I don't think there's any evidence that it's caused by noisy environments.
The woman talking about her million dollar house and having to unplug her husband when he menaces their neighbors with his own leaf-blower seems like the sort of person that would be fun to chat with. Just my kind of sense of humor.
Re: Sounding the alarm: How noise hurts the heart (2021)
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
Earplugs can help if you want something less bulky when you sleep
On top of that, if anybody knows of similar for folks who sleep on their side I would like suggestions//insight.
Re: Sounding the alarm: How noise hurts the heart (2021)
#340> road noise during the day My understanding is that the vast majority of road noise is caused by vehicles outfitted with non-standard tires. Where I live, 90% of the road noise is caused by lifted trucks using massive off-road tires on local roads and highways. It isn’t clear if this against the law all over the country, but in various US states, the police will issue tickets. There are several employees of local bu…
The worst is jake braking [1] that tractor trailers use. I live about 300 or so yards from the highway, and constantly hear this noise during the day. https://youtu.be/xm0TSzagk-o?t=103