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December 30, 2005
True or False?
Take your best guess, are each of the following true or false?
- Mohammed is now one of the 20 most popular names for boys born in England and Wales.
- One in 10 Europeans is allegedly conceived in an Ikea bed.
- It's possible for a human to blow up balloons via the ear.
- "Restaurant" is the most misspelled word in search engines.
- The name Lego came from two Danish words "leg godt", meaning "play well".
- Tactically, the best Monopoly properties to buy are the orange ones.
- You're 10 times more likely to be bitten by a human than a rat.
- Jimi Hendrix pretended to be gay to be discharged from the US Army.
- One in 18 people has a third nipple.
- Pulling your foot out of quicksand takes a force equivalent to that needed to lift a medium-sized car.
Check your answers in the comments.
Posted by John at 03:46 PM | Comments (1)
December 27, 2005
Top 10 Unexplained Artifacts
Truth is indeed stranger than fiction, and the world is full of things that we cannot explain. These puzzling artifacts are a good starting place.
Posted by John at 09:25 PM | Comments (0)
"Books on 'pod"
LibraVox is an impressive collaborative effort to make classic literature available by audio download, for free. The catalog is short, but growing with lots of works in progress.
Posted by John at 09:14 PM | Comments (0)
December 19, 2005
Signal-to-loss ratio (SNL) hearing loss
It's been along time since I've had any time to post anything here, but I came across an article I want to research further.
I have a hearing problem. It's not severe, but it's puzzling. I have really good hearing. Really good. I hear things before other people, I can tell immediately if a note on an instrument is out of tune, I can pinpoint sound location instantly, I can hear a dog whistle.
Julie and I laugh because I'm colorblind, and she's not very sensitive to sounds. She can see a thousand shades of red, and I can pick any instrument out of orchestra and follow that music.
But... in a noisy environment like a bar or a party or even a busy conference, I have a hard time hearing what another person is saying to me. I know it is a hearing problem that I have, because other people can carry on a conversation and I have a hard time following it. For a long time I thought this might be a side effect of having very sensitive hearing, that perhaps my ears were simply overwhelmed by the noise like a microphone going into feedback.
But my favorite set of earphones for music listening, the Etymotic 6i's - truly awesome equipment! - went on the fritz and I went to the Etymotic website to see what what was new and came across this paper that describes a different kind of hearing loss - "signal-to-noise ratio" hearing loss as opposed to the typical "pure tone average" (PTA) hearing loss.
It turns out that this is a common problem with hearing aids. And I'm betting that it's a more common problem than anyone realizes, but that people who have hearing aids get their hearing tested more thoroughly - and more often - than most other people. And the test is recognizing sentences in a background of noise.
Next time I go in for a physical, I'm going to ask about this, see if I can get tested. I doubt if there is anything I can do about (yet), but at least the mystery may be resolved. Here's what I suspect: I think I have some SNL loss that manifests at higher sound levels. I'll bet I score well on the QuickSIN test at low absolute sound levels and terribly on the test at high levels of background noise.
Posted by John at 10:49 PM | Comments (0)
