121–130 of 263 posts
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Well, they do need to overcome my noise-cancelled high-volume drown-out-coworkers music...
Listening to high-volume music every day can damage your hearing.
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I’ve taken up wearing earplugs while driving. I also work in a noisy environment, and it occurs to me that the road and engine and wind noise is probably loud enough to have a negative impact on hearing over time. Less so in newer cars, but both mine are over 10yo. Also, in the event of a collision I’m protected.
At least in most of the usa, wearing earplugs (or earbuds, headphones, etc) while operating a car, is illegal. Please check with your local PD to be safe. You may just be putting yourself and others at higher risk by attinuating your situational awareness.
Actually, it seems like it's legal in most states? [0] Unless your local municpal code says differently.
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> Does the mechanism eventually wear out? I hope not, because I have been able to control the muscle voluntarily and it is still works after almost four decades. It doesn't go off by itself all the time though. It's more for sudden loud noise, I don't think it works at all for sustained loud noises.
> It's more for sudden loud noise, I don't think it works at all for sustained loud noises. Yeah, it’s for when your brain thinks there might be a loud noise. I, too, was surprised when I found out that being able to deliberately tense it wasn’t ‘normal’.
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I’ve taken up wearing earplugs while driving. I also work in a noisy environment, and it occurs to me that the road and engine and wind noise is probably loud enough to have a negative impact on hearing over time. Less so in newer cars, but both mine are over 10yo. Also, in the event of a collision I’m protected.
At least in most of the usa, wearing earplugs (or earbuds, headphones, etc) while operating a car, is illegal. Please check with your local PD to be safe. You may just be putting yourself and others at higher risk by attinuating your situational awareness.
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There was a blogpost I read a few years back written by someone who damaged their hearing after dropping a porcelain toilet lid. They actually ran some back-of-the-envelope calculations to estimate the decibel level, I recall it being shockingly high.
There was a pretty good HN comment thread about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16723099 From the linked thread: """ 5. The stupid toilet bowl lid only fell about 8 inches. How could it damage my hearing so badly? I looked up the speed of sound in ceramic, divided by the length of the toilet bowl lid (and divided by 2 since the fundamental vibration is a half wavelength). This predicts 3.5 kHz. 6. This frequ…
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> It's more for sudden loud noise, I don't think it works at all for sustained loud noises. Yeah, it’s for when your brain thinks there might be a loud noise. I, too, was surprised when I found out that being able to deliberately tense it wasn’t ‘normal’.
It's not normal? Not sure about that.
"Some individuals can voluntarily produce this rumbling sound by contracting the tensor tympani muscle of the middle ear." (Emphasis mine.)
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I’ve taken up wearing earplugs while driving. I also work in a noisy environment, and it occurs to me that the road and engine and wind noise is probably loud enough to have a negative impact on hearing over time. Less so in newer cars, but both mine are over 10yo. Also, in the event of a collision I’m protected.
Fantastic, someone driving a deadly vehicle responsible for 40,000 deaths every single year, and now they can't even hear anything either. Hey, but as long as you are ok, right?
How do you think the 27dB reduction due to ear plug hearing protection compares to someone playing loud music in their car.
Also see my other comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20702195, reproduced for your benefit here:
At low speeds, driving around car parks etc, the ear plugs are out and usually have all the windows at least partly open, because I’m those environments hearing can be a huge boost to situational awareness.
I find above 40k/hr my hearing is better with ear plugs because it attenuates the road, wind, and engine noise more for me.
Additionally, I've never been responsible for a serious accident, only a couple fender-benders when I was much younger.
Also, as per the site guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
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Well tell that to whoever built the engine in my wife’s GL450. Cylinder head replacement after 40,000 miles, which involved dropping the engine. I went to visit the shop while they were working on it. Wow, I do a bit of car work, but if I ever had my car in so many pieces I would never have gotten in back together again. Thank god for extended warranties. I’ve never made out on a warranty so well, but one thing is fo…
Well, you own an exceptionally complex car which still retains the form factor of a limousine. All the hardware for these features has to go somewhere and that usually means the space around the engine. There is not a lot the engineers can do to improve things. They are struggling to find usable space.
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The same reason Apple Doesn't sell an iPhone Zero in the US with a single core processor and 64MB of RAM. The US is a mature product. High end brands don't sell sub-lowend products.
But then it means that Americans are overpaying by buying capacity they don't really need. This is something I'm always wondered at, as in the 3rd world even well-off people try to minimize their expenses.
I lost most of my hearing in my left ear in a head-on collision with a drunk driver. No other injuries. The audiologist said that my eardrum was in the kind of state you usually only see in battlefields from exposure to large explosions. People are always surprised when I tell them this was my only injury, and as a result I've always wondered how common this type of injury is with vehicle collisions. This is the firs…
I’ve taken up wearing earplugs while driving. I also work in a noisy environment, and it occurs to me that the road and engine and wind noise is probably loud enough to have a negative impact on hearing over time. Less so in newer cars, but both mine are over 10yo. Also, in the event of a collision I’m protected.