Stuff That Really 'Grinds My Gears...'

I looked at braille displays and keyboards, out of curiosity. They’re crazy expensive (like $10,000 for a display that can handle 80 characters of text) and seem to be still using 80s-era technology. Voice recognition and speech synthesis have come a long way, but in terms of graphics…

With VR and AR and haptic-feedback and touchscreens and computerized image recognition and all, our technology sounds so advanced that it seems like there would be something that could make things usable without sight, but I get the feeling that there isn’t. We’ll probably have self-driving cars long before a computer can describe an image, let alone video.

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Also, most blind and visually impaired people do not read braille. The low demand is probably what’s stalling development and keeping prices high.

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I’m annoyed at myself because in the last few days I have managed to make three posts with, respectively, typos, a misquote and factually incorrect information (not here).
When you reach my age there’s a constant worry that your mind is losing the plot, and I’ve had it now for several days.
I try to console myself by thinking I’ve already outlived many of my childhood heroes such as Alan Turing, but the disadvantage of being in your late 60s is that a part of you still feels about 20.
Shit, I’m now older than T S Eliot was when he wrote Four Quartets, which was in a way his farewell to the world in case he was killed in the Blitz. And although I could afford a 911, I’m certainly not safe to drive one.
I still just about trust me with the vote, but I’m now firmly convinced that nobody over 65 should be allowed to vote on matters that will have long term effects.

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I have this little apartment freezer that people often mistake for a bar fridge. It is very handy and works great except for one design flaw: it’s easy to think the door is shut and sealed when it really isn’t.

Last night I got bread from the freezer and shut (I thought) the door. I have got into the habit of double-checking it.

Today I went to get some frozen chicken breasts out for dinner only to discover it hasn’t quite closed.

I had to toss two unopened boxes of chicken breasts, plus move four jars of homemade peach jam to the fridge because they’d thawed. Everything else seemed all right; even the chicken was only thawed in places.

Not really asking for solutions, just needed to vent 'cos I hate wasting food.

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My cat knocked open the door to my fridge freezer once. Never was I so happy I put things in ziplocs and vacuum bags.

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And the painfully loud construction pain is back. It often hits 70 dB. Getting hit by a car was equivalent to 65 dB.

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So I’m trying to get some fresh air.

I’m in a lot of pain, so I was just going to go to the place where no fearbeasts are allowed, and sit down, and read a book in the tennis court where no fearbeasts are allowed, so I’d have a fence between myself and the people walking their fearbeasts through the place where no fearbeasts are allowed.

But of course someone was playing with her fearbeast in the tennis court where no fearbeasts were allowed, and as soon as we saw each other, the fearbeast ran straight at me, and I ran away.

There aren’t many places where no fearbeasts are allowed, so maybe people who keep fearbeasts could respect those places and respect people with phobotherophobia?

And now the loud construction pain has started again, so it’s moot.

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Wait, you were hit by a car, and you care how loud that was?

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The only thing to fear is phobophobia.

This is not good. People shouldn’t crap their dogs on the tennis courts, for various obvious reasons. I don’t know why anyone would take a dog there, except maybe to let it out without a leash but not have it run too far away. Sounds like bad and/or lazy dog-parenting to me, but what do I know, I’ve never had a dog.

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I’m not talking about how loud it was, I’m talking about how painful it was. Getting hit by that car hurt as much as 65 dB, and 65 dB hurts as much as getting hit by that car. More when I have a bad migraine.

I know doctors prefer “on a scale of 1 to 10,” but that’s really uninformative without reference values.

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Most dog owners I know have voiced disgust and disdain for the minority of dog owners who:

  • don’t clean up after their pets when the pets defecate on private property
  • give their large dogs a 10’x10’ area for running (pen) and complain about haters who ask what value there is in raising the dogs to be neurotic and to bark from 7:30 am to 11 pm
  • let their large, vicious dogs run loose in dog parks to attack other smaller dogs
  • chain their dogs in the backyard all night (this month a cougar from a nearby reserve jumped a fence and killed the dog)
  • bring their dogs to school sports events on school grounds against posted regulations so the dogs can yelp over the sounds of play calls or cheers
  • bring their leashed dogs right onto the property with signs ‘Leashed Pets Only’ or ‘No Pets on Playgrounds’, and unleash them, leaving the animals to run while they busy themselves with phone calls

My gripe is people who let their large dogs in very small food retail spaces where there are food safety regulations against allowing non-service animals, or sprawl on customer seating in human hair salons. “Oh I’ll just stand, no point in a paying customer displacing a Great Dane.”

I feel comfortable calling these behaviors out as negligent or antisocial, because loving dog owners who care for their pets call them out too. If you don’t have a disability and are habitually bringing your Pekingese with you into a supermarket and sitting it in the grocery cart basket, you need to reorder your life like order your groceries online or pay for a dog sitter if your dog has separation anxiety

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One of our local restaurants advertises that it welcomes “dogs and their well behaved owners”, which for me sums it up.

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But, I feel the need to point out, so is the Bel scale. That’s why, for instance, sound has to be referenced to dBmWm-1 - deciBels relative to 1mW at a distance of 1M - or dBmW at ear, which is very different indeed.
So I can’t understand your scale because knowing that the construction noise was about three times worse than being hit by the car doesn’t tell me how bad either is compared, say, to my recurrent backache.
I’d like to understand your problem better if writing about it would help you, but your dB scale is no more helpful to me that 1-10 (which is really a log scale anyway and would be 10-100dB,.)

Edit - actually I’m wrong. The reliable level of discrimination for humans is approximately the 5th root of 100, or about 2.5, which was the original “order of magnitude”, the relative visible brightness of stars that observers agreed on.
A 0-10 scale in perceptual terms is roughly a range of 10 000 therefore. That would be a range of 40dB.

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How can you accurately measure that?

Also, either 65 dB is way low, it was a minor accident, or your sensory issues are so bad that normal talking causes you intense pain.

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I took a sound level meter to an equivalently painful sound; it wasn’t beeping and it wasn’t high-pitched, so I don’t know what may have thrown off the measurement.

It was a minor accident, though my scars often still hurt.

And my hearing is more sensitive than most people’s. Normal talking doesn’t usually hurt, but busy places do, waiting areas with flashing and blaring painscreens do, lawnmowers and leafblowers and helicopters do, etc.

But the really frustrating thing is that ear protection never fits right, so it only provides 1/4 the rated attenuation in decibels, so I have to wear the heaviest and most uncomfortable protection I can for errands, and it’s not enough protection.

It’s mathematically screwy, but it’s probably possible to convert from a noise scale to a pain scale by setting values for the limit of hearing, the loudness discomfort level, and the pain threshhold.

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The high-frequency noises are the worst. I can hear coil whine and some outlets - which makes work a living hell. The electronics security system emits a high-frequency noise constantly.

(I’m only a high-freq hearer, I can’t possibly imagine the pain high sensitivity to sound would be.)

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As an owner of three small dogs, one dominant, one neurotic and one terrified of his shadow, let me tell you, I also hate those people. Add in the people that don’t pick up poop! C’mon! Thats just so rude!

And side to that: I hate people that bring small children into the off leash areas! We’re in here to keep you safe! Dont bring your toddler in here! Sure, your freaking toddler “loves” dogs, but she is going to get knocked down in here and you’re going to be upset but you’ll still be in the wrong! And yes, my dogs are small, they are not puppies, do not pick them up and no you cannot pet them, they do not like children. (The looks I get from parents when I say that my god, I’m being proactive here! Don’t give me shit!) my old Doxie loved knocking down toddlers so she could lick their faces. And she weighed 12lbs! 12lbs of dog will knock your child down, I’m sorry they’re crying but tears are delicious and you shouldn’t bring your toddler into the off leash!

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You know, we don’t have a dog, and it’s not because we don’t like dogs, far from it… it’s because we know that our current life (2 parents with jobs and a teenager in school) means that we can’t take care of a dog the way it needs to be taken care of. Dogs are higher maintenance than cats, in many ways (though they tend to be more loving towards their owners). If people can’t put in the time and effort to take care of an animal that’s depending on you, they really shouldn’t get it. It’s just cruel to the animal.

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When I was winding my way across Texas on a bicycle, on highway 90 between Langtry and Marfa, there were places you could hear the telephone lines buzzing. There were also places where it was so still, all you’d hear was an occasional bird.

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People that mistreat or don’t take of their animals have a special place in hell.

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