Calgary student has been studying decibel levels in hand dryers since age nine
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
Already an impressive combination of curiosity and perseverance to get a scientific paper published for any non-academic, let alone a 13 year old!!
edit: The absolute worst things are these https://www.ehanddryers.com/hand-dryers/tap-hand-dryers, my kids just plain refuse to wash their hands out of fear of accidentally triggering the dryer
At least put some anodised aluminium somewhere on it to make it look 21st century!
But yeah, I guess most Dyson items do look pretty awful.
I've only seen those taps with trough sinks[1], which limits the mess.
I'm guessing that hair dryers have a scream in the upper register that adults don't normally hear.
Nowadays, I have no idea if I can hear that whine anymore or not, as CRTs are quite uncommon. Probably not. Much for the better, as it used to give me headaches.
https://open.spotify.com/track/3B4q6KbHbGV51HO3GznBFF?si=Fgy...
https://open.spotify.com/track/6PsISpFaCEKwysPfwO9SfC?si=NQa...
(Or if these whines aren't CRT related, I'd be curious to learn the source).
> The Mosquito or Mosquito alarm is a hand wound machine used to deter loitering by young people by emitting sound at high frequency, in some versions so it can be heard mostly by younger people.
> The sound was made into a mobile phone ringtone, which could not be heard by teachers if the phone rang during a class.
Though it might be that since i really loved computers, i associated it with computers and liked it via association.
The dimensions of the cochlea are basically fixed at the time of birth. As the dimensions of the cochlea are the main contributing factor in what tones are able to be heard, the tonal bandwidths are then set at birth as well (minus hearing loss due to damage as we age). If you are interested in how sound is interperted by the brain, be aware that it is not a straightforward process and takes a bit of research. Still, the cochlea is essentially fixed at the time of birth.
More on how the dimensions of the cochlea determine tonal bandwidths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hair_cell
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3970226/
[1] http://www.ajnr.org/content/ajnr/early/2011/09/29/ajnr.A2713...
I'd be interested in hearing more about this. I understand the mechanism whereby audio sensitivity is progressively lost but I don't see why getting older would result in seeing fewer colors. Is this perhaps instead that we are less sensitive to color, requiring more photons to have the same color experience, but not actually seeing "fewer colors" in the sense that there are colors that fall off our gamut entirely? That would make sense to me.
As we age, we lose some hearing power and visual acuity, for physical reasons on the organs.
As our brains mature, they learn to not discrimate among certain "unimportant" sounds and colors. Adults can't lose the ability to disambiguate among novel language phonemes from foreign languages (as perfectly as kids can), and similarly they lose ability to distinguish similar colors that they learned are irrelevant. This isa tradeoff adaptation, so you can see a shadow gradient as single color instead of a complex spectrum, understand that traffic lights are showing the same signal despite variation in frequency, etc.
On another level, very small children (babies) have poor color vision, because their eyes and brains are still missing basic development.
So it's a curve: newborns have poor hearing and vision tha rapidly improves for a few years and then decays slowly, for both physical breakdown and for mental "optimization"
The cone cell of the human eye is the main type of photoreceptor that senses differences in light bandwidth, aka color. The dics of the cone cell are tuned to be receptive to certain bandwidths of light. These bandwidths are well understood and do not change as humans age (outside of damage to them)[0]. Humans only have 3 sets of these cones and do not gain or loose new types of cones as we age. The receptive bandwidths of the pigments are set by the biophysics of the molecules.
The perception of color does change as humans age, however. Typically, a newborn cannot yet use their eyes well. They can percieve light and dark, then red, then they can process depth, etc. This learning process takes a few weeks to months[1].
The cognition of color is a very in depth and facinating field. Thus far, it appears that color is a cultural and learned thing, in that if your language does not have a word for a color, it seems to be very difficult to determine the color as a different one from among other colors. Translating the mix of photons that your photreceptors are affected by into usable language is a very complicated process and is not well understood yet.
Fun Fact: The Illiad does not include the word blue and the Bible uses it very rarely as well.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_cell
[1] http://www.bausch.com/vision-and-age/infant-eyes/eye-develop...
In short they specifically go into how we perceive color etc. great show!
Wow, I was recently in an airport bathroom where a young boy absolutely refused to wash his hands. His father was extremely patient and said that he needed to wash his hands. The boy was near tears saying that they would miss their plane. It was all a really strange and illogical situation. Until I read your sentence. I don't know if this is why the boy wouldn't wash his hands, but it makes me realize that sometimes kids have reasons for what they say or do, even if they can't explain it. Reminds me of the hand licking incident: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18842009
I thought I had read all about the hand licking incident and learned not to make presumptions about kids. Today, I realize that the lesson hasn't really been ingrained into me yet.
You don't want to let your kid be the boss of everything; you don't want to let your kid ignore your intructions or choose to do something fun instead of necessary work, but if your kid would rather stand there and do nothing while getting upset instead of doing some small work item, they aren't "cheating" you out of anything by getting their way.
There are many things my kids were saying that I only figured out days, weeks or years later. Listen, guide them, let them be, and don't be a helicopter parent.
It took me years to realize things such as, the reason I would chew on my shirt color all day even though I would routinely get sent to the principal's office and publicly embarrased by teachers or beaten at home was just because my jaw would get very tense and chewing motions relaxed it, and my mouth was the Sarah Desert and sucking on the fabric pulled moisture into my mouth.
My shirts would be sopping wet in the front and would all have tooth holes from my chewing them, I'd go through a shirt a week nearly.
I wasn't on any meds but my teacher at the time would dole out punishments regularly to me in class. I've put 2 and 2 together before, but I never knew I wasn't alone in this behaviour! Thanks for commenting, this really helped me.
I wonder how common it really is in young children. Certainly seemed I was the only one dealing with it at several different schools. Is it too late to form a club?
Similarly, I had issues with scratching my nose in public, nail-biting, hair-pulling, picking at scabs, sucking my thumb at night... punished and beaten all the time for it, and some particularly nasty teachers would try to make a public example... come to find out in my adulthood that I have a literal disorder, body-focused repetitive behavior (BFRB) syndrome, which is related to OCD and bipolar disorder and ADHD which I also deal with, and heavily exacerbated and permanently worsened by my forced exposure to intense medication.
When I was first placed on medication at five, I developed a pretty awful tic wherein I would swallow every five seconds. I was sent to therapy and the therapist first thought I was lying to get attention and then thought I was crazy and needed more medication. This tic was causing gastrointestinal distress, dental issues from lack of saliva, and was a major speech impediment for me. My esophagus would get pretty raw. This was my first experience in learning how to deal with these on my own.
One tic that seemed to go away without extended cognitive effort (on account of its lower frequency) was extended periods where I would laugh uncontrollably over nothing for half an hour or longer until I was red in the face and choking for breath and my diaphragm was convulsing. This lasted for a few years until adolescence. My family thought I wanted attention again and would punish me when I couldn't stop at their command. It's honestly insane how some people respond to behavioral anomalies in their children.
His pediatrician said it's likely a mild form of tic and tourette syndrome which often goes away by age 13. We haven't brought it up to him besides once or twice asking if he feels any discomfort. We haven't talked to him about stopping the tics and don't plan to. I hope his classmates continue to ignore it and that they remain mild.
Sorry your experience was not supportive and I hope BFRB does, in fact, go away for you.
You're doing the right thing by not making a big deal out of it or making them feel different, but as your son gets older and more able to have these kinds of conversations, it's worth opening a dialogue with them about finding ways to form new habits that break the old ones.
Many of my tics only went away after much effort, and growing up I felt like I had no one to talk to about them. My family didn't understand and I didn't have good experiences opening up to other children about them because they also either thought it was an attention thing or that something was really wrong with me.
At some point your son is going to become stressed by his seeming inability to control his own body and he will want to have positive dialogue about it. He may not have the courage to initiate the conversation though or he may be worried you won't understand. I wouldn't approach it with a bag of tricks but rather learn together with your son and encourage them to pursue better habits when apt. I know for me, accepting my disorders as purely physical and maintaining the belief that I could overcome them mentally was instrumental in my healing.
Good luck! I'm sure one way or another he'll figure it out as long as he is surrounded by positivity.
Oh the pathos! If only they had known of the "Six Step Reframe" algorithm (which is actually deprecated now in favor of even more effective algorithms.)
In pseudocode: https://gist.github.com/calroc/4719702
Raising two kids I've come to think that this is almost always the case. The reasons may be based on misunderstandings but they are logically coherent in the context. A lot of times they may have a hard time explaining it, especially when an adult loses their temper because they decide the thing is just a folly.
In my kids' school they are not allowed to wear shoes indoors, but my son refused to take his off and wouldn't explain why to the teachers. It drove them mad, and we got phone-calls and emails telling us this had to stop that he must obey the same rules as the rest of the kids! We spoke to him (without reproach) and slowly we realize that he knows his shoes are expensive (because they are pronation) and it turns out that someone had hidden them before. After we explain to the teachers he is allowed to keep is shoes by his desk as long as they are not on his feet. Problem solved.
One of the reasons why better ratios help kids is exactly to give this type of individual attention.
Looks like they thought to ask him, but a kid's parent will be able to extract better info out of them.
I know the professional dryer my mother uses is specifically designed to put out good airflow but does so with by using a slower speed but larger vane fan. the motor and input is near the user with a long exhaust tube exiting near where the dog is, they are always mounted to allow ease of movement.
I've seen it myself: a child would have no problems with loud music, but any kind of noise (as in, white noise) would be painful. This included hair dryers, vacuum cleaners, some power tools, and sounds of water/sea.
That's probably fine, air dryers make your hands dirtier than if you haven't washed them at all.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/0...
I wish every ecommerce store looked as good and simple as that one.
Those devices are literally painful for me to be around. I view them as a scourge and will consider not washing my hands if there’s no soundproofed alternative.
"This device saves trees"
No, it doesn't. We should be (and AFAIK often are) at the point that paper towel pulp is coming from forests we replant. Also, I don't know, maybe those dryers "save trees" but the paper towels provide a forcing function for someone to always have a couple of ready forests on hand, which seems better?
Or, hey, we could go with your interpretation that I'm a raging asshole that thinks you don't know how to wash your hands. Whatever floats your boat.
I was being ever so slightly hyperbolic in my statement about not washing hands. For the record, I do use the time-honored air-dry, shake-hands-vigorously and/or dry-on-pants methods when circumstances demand.
It's probably that you're participating online in a discussion about hand-dryers, and, by proxy, washing your hands -- and expressing your disinterest in using them (hand dryers) .
It might even be the fact that you've said that you considered not washing your hands all together when posed with no alternative -- a danger to others besides yourself.
I find your tone to be entirely unwarranted and rude.
'Just saying.'
Many years ago, I actually had a desk in an office that was maybe 10-15 meters from a nearby Excel hand dryer, separated by two doors. I hated it with a passion. Every time somebody dried their hands, I'd hear it. I left that job for a lot of reasons, and the hand dryer wasn't exactly one of them, but I wasn't sad to be rid of it.
And I'm not 9. I'm 35. I find that I have pretty good hearing, at least as compared to my partner.
What gets a little weird is that since leaving software and making a career change to woodworking, I've gotten more sensitive to loud noise. I used to take the subway to work like many other people. Now, I find that the noise of the train is too loud.
I'm religious about wearing hearing protection in the shop. I don't know if my hearing has gotten objectively better, or if I'm just more aware of loud noise than I used to be. It'd be hard to do a study on that without a time machine though.
At the moment it's like that old joke: "What do you call a drummer without a girlfriend? ... Homeless." I do make some money on commission work, but not enough to cover my living expenses. What I do make I'm largely investing back into the business, which I just started. This is probably fewer tools than you might think; I pay for annual access to the bigger tools I don't have, and I have a pretty decent selection of the moderate-sized tools that I got for pretty short money (band saw, drill press, and table saw. All good tools, total: <500 USD).
Mostly it's stuff like a camera and lights to shoot my work, a logo, and the other sorts of things that separate a hobby from a business. A better website [0] is on the list as well, but never having been a web developer, my partner and I are likely going to use squarespace or something similar.
Am I glad I made the switch? Emphatically yes. I love the woodworking aspect. I'm happy to report that my partner is helping with the business-y things. Also: she's a way better photographer than I am. Any of the pictures on my existing website that look good are probably hers; the crappy ones are mine (and need to be re-shot around the time we get around to settling on a logo and commit to getting a real website up).
TL;DR:
I'm lucky to be married to the world's most supportive partner.
[0] http://longwalkwoodworking.com <- HTML like it's 1998, CSS lifted pretty much straight from the "68 bytes of CSS..." article posted here a while ago. There really do need to be pictures on the home page, a contact page, an about page, etc. Hosted on github pages, no Jekyll, etc. I threw something up so that I could put a URL on business cards and have it go to something.
Really perfecting them would mean getting them both accurate and fast. I definitely need to cut a few more to get to that stage, and do it regularly to keep it there.
If you're interested in making a few I'd love to buy a few veneered boxes ( in the pictures presumably taken by your wife ;P )
...For real, I have a primal need for boxes that don't feel threatened by a stiff wind or a few ink wells stacked inside...
email is in my profile if you're interested :)
Fans are loud, especially small powerful ones. There's plenty of other comments here complaining about the Dysons, and I agree; and I also much prefer the older ones (with a heater), which seem to have a far slower fan and a deeper note. That said, I find towels/paper most effective for drying.
But if insisting on air drying, perhaps a design with the blower elsewhere (maybe centralised, like a vacuum --- another fanned device that's also very loud), a local heater, and slower air flow would be more ideal.
There's no shower anywhere nearby, but this object which I consider to be obviously a hand dryer is labeled "hair dryer". Surely the people who make these know what they're for...
And I agree, a large tank of compressed air with an on-demand heater on the human end would be pretty nice.
I don't know that there's really any difference between this and a hand dryer, but I've certainly used them as hair dryers too.
http://www.xlerator-hand-dryer.com/ExcelHairDryer/RH76-C.htm...
Given that they also have an almost identical product that is a hand dryer, you can inspect the pages to find the key difference:
http://www.xlerator-hand-dryer.com/ExcelHandDryer/R76-C.html
"For hand dryers, timers are set at 30 seconds and at 3 minutes for hair drying."
That being said, even I cannot stand the sound of hand dryers in public restrooms. To me, it basically sounds like an extremely hysteric hair dryer. I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that they are mounted on a wall, which gives them more resonance.
One night they forgot to turn it off and the motor burnt out.
To this day, I sleep (and often concentrate) better with some white noise going - turning on the bedroom fan is an essential part of my night-time ritual. There's some evidence that loving white noise is linked to ADHD, but I don't think that it's predictive for a 4 month old. :P
One of my great joys in life is how much my daughter loves my stubble. She grabs my face with both her hands and declares “Sooooo scratchy!” and then squeals and laughs when I nuzzle her cheek with mine and pretend to be a horse. From ~3 yrs old, now going on 10.
My heart will definitely break a notch if the day ever comes she outgrows that!
I'm a guy, but I recall as a kid feeling my dad's stubble when I gave him a hug as a child, when he came home from work, smelling of sweat and tar (he worked as a road maintenance worker - a very hard job, especially in the summertime in California).
He passed away 14 years ago, and I'm turning 46 in a couple days; how time passes...
I can still smell that and the feel of the work denim he'd come home in.
I remember those things more often than I do the sight of his face, or the sound of his voice, or the smell of his cologne. By far.
Is it just my kids then that seem absolutely immune to cold water and will happily jump into unheated swimming pools, and will happily have a cold bath?
Now he's four years old, and a few weeks ago we swam together in a cold lake. He was happy to get in, but after ten minutes I noticed that his teeth were chattering and his lips were blue, while I was quite comfortable.
I don't think they really get a good idea until they are about a year in to puberty, and even then they're more prone to mismanage their clothing (but I think that's just experience).
Also worth bearing in mind that younger kids have higher body temperature, and that they usually have lower surface area:volume ratios than bigger people.
For example, going out in the cold doesn't hurt at first, but the pain builds up. As an adult, you may react to the initial no-pain sensation because you correctly predict you'll be freezing later.
Also consider that as an adult the same feeling can be both good or bad by mental context: consider a warm toilet seat -- warmed by a fancy Toto heater at home vs warmed by a stranger's buttocks in a fast food bathroom.
Maybe I was that way as a child as well, and just wasn’t introspective enough to notice.
As an adult, I do get cold eventually, though; I can’t stay in cold water for hours, like I could as a child.
Motor cycles are the worst for this. It's not rare to have whole neighborhoods woken up because one of those passes through.
It’s just not true. He later told me he enjoys the feeling (vibrations) and that there was something primal about “taming” something that sounds powerful.
As for car drivers, you should be assuming they can’t see you. Driving defensively is the only way to stay alive and you can argue that it shouldn’t be that way but it doesn’t make it any less true.
Loud exhausts are definitely not designed to make motorcycles more noticeable to cars.
I had the pleasure of living on Overtoom in Amsterdam, which is a beautiful street but I'm a relatively light sleeper and even at the back part of the house you'd be woken up several times every night by some 'look at me' dude making as much noise as possible. Not a car pulling out in sight at that hour.
https://www.revzilla.com/common-tread/stop-saying-loud-pipes...
But those are rarely the 'loud' types, they're just people using their bikes as transport rather than as an attention seeking device.
I applaud the research of this young student, showing that noise pollution is not just a nuisance, but a real health concern. Young ears getting permanently damaged is one aspect. Entire neighborhoods losing nights of sleep is another.
Relevant article where police mention that they simply are not given a proper decibel meter: https://patch.com/california/berkeley/ask-a-cop-why-deafenin...
Based on how much a loss of sleep lowers performance (and increases health risks), the total cost of that one motorcycle driving one night might be huge. The cost of the health damage and lost productivity might be about as much as stealing a car.
Since the cost is spread out over a lot of people, we don't tend to care as much about it.
[0] Likely with the muffler deleted. While technically illegal, no one enforces any laws related to the noise output.
What is true that we tend to notice annoyances more than non-annoyances, and that the car may be louder because the driver want to accelerate or velocitate more than they should, and noise is a side effect. Or the stereo is louder than it should be, not because they want you to hear it, but because they want to hear it and they don't care about you.
I'm not so much annoyed as I'm curious as to how all of this noise affects the environment at large (people's sleep quality and mood, birds migrating, insects mating etc.)
I'm not sure how accurate that is. From what I can tell, only about half of states have some region that requires emissions testing for some vehicles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_inspection_in_the_Unit...
For example, Washington requires testing in part of 5 counties (out of 39), for non-hybrid, 4-wheeled vehicles older than 2009. But even that is misleading, as the emissions testing program is being discontinued entirely at the end of the year.
So even if they wanted to just add noise testing (it sounds so simple!), most cars don't get annual testing, and in another 6 months, none will. The state won't even have facilities for it.
The bigger issue I see is that emissions is generally seen as bad by everyone. Most people don't spend money to mod their car to pollute more, so if you test cars once a year, it's probably going to be OK the rest of the year. People do mod their cars to make more noise, though, so if you test once a year, they're going to fix the noise for the test, and then put it back the next day.
To fix this problem, you need to be able to catch people on the road.
Are there no noise regulations for vehicles in the US then? EU does have these thankfully, currently 74dB but meant to go down to 68dB by 2024.
It isn't just the "loud" noise, either. There's a giant white and dark grey yacht parked in the Vancouver Harbour about half of the year. (It's the one near Jimmy Patison's yacht, except at least twice as large and probably modelled after a Star Destroyer). I have never seen it move, but as long as it is there, it emits a low-frequency hum that causes noticeable churn in the water over a ~150 meter radius. It is like a giant, evil subwoofer of the unreasonably rich. It's frustrating to paddle anywhere near it, it gives me a headache, and I can't imagine what it does to animals that share the water. Whenever I'm near it I'm bothered that the thing is allowed to exist, let alone park there.
Basically, the loudness of a sound hitting your ear is a combination of multiple factors:
1. How loud the sound source is.
2. How close your ear is to it.
3. How much it reverberates or dissipates.
Imagine if a hand dryer were installed outdoors in an open field. Sound would emanate from the dryer, then wander off never to return.
Now imagine a hand dryer in a room with carpet and some soft furniture like a couch. Sound would emanate from the dryer, and some of it would hit surfaces that absorb it. But some of the sound would also hit reflective surfaces like walls or glass, and that reflected sound could come back to your ear and increase the total noise level.
Now consider what a bathroom is like. For ease of cleaning, it's entirely hard surfaces. Concrete, porcelain, tile, metal, etc. These absorb almost no sound. And bathrooms are typically pretty small rooms. It's basically the worst case for taking an already-loud thing and making nearly all the noise reach your ear.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/the-bacterial-horror-of-...
The way they work is based on the idea of a narrow stream of air that gets water off your hands better. But for the stream to remain narrow and not dissipate, you have to get your hands close to the equipment. It's based on almost but not quite touching it.
Positioning your hands in a careful and controlled manner is, ergonomically speaking, an uphill battle. So on average, it won't happen often.
In other words, Dyson hand dryers kind of trap you into accidentally touching the part you don't want to touch.
Worse, the same applies to all the people who used the hand dryer before you. It's a very reasonable bet that the surface where the air comes out has been touched by someone who didn't use soap when they washed their hands.
I use these all the time (they’re pretty much everywhere in the U.K.) and haven’t experienced this unbalanced pressure issue. They always seem pretty much equal pressure on each side to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExuvJkZ61Cg
With large hands, there's an extra degree of difficulty to avoid touching the sides and the bottom. It still leaves you with wet wrists and damp fingers.
They are terrible. Saving paper towels at the cost of spreading bacteria and giving everyone moist hands is not a good trade off.
Regardless of what common sense might say, the point is that the study didn't actually do a direct comparison.
I think the simplest solution would be for municipalities' health departments to outlaw them, or at least set VERY conservative noise limits.
I'm not sure why they're so common given that they seem to only make things worse.
- Paper towels? Environmentally unsound.
- Washable towel on a continuous roller/spindle thing? Common in past decades, now pretty rare. Requires regular servicing. Expensive? [1]
- Don’t offer hand drying at all? Uncomfortable especially in cold climates. Might discourage people from washing their hands at all.
While I agree they need to be quieter, Hand dryers are still the best technology we have right now.
[1] The British Library still uses these in their washrooms, presumably because of noise concerns with hand dryers.
I don't see why these paper towels would not be 100% recyclable or that much different to regular toilet paper. Also, what if people would like to wash other body parts that can't be put in an airblade e.g. face?
You're forgetting that we have to create paper towels/toilet paper, etc. from trees. And we aren't just talking a few trees, it's a deforestation issue.
Sure we could replant trees, etc, etc, but it still destroys the current eco-systems living there.
I still see the towel rolls around, they're a good option as well. Maintenance for (esp. public) toilets is never not going to be a thing, but it does require a bit more infrastructure to maintain (= washing out etc). But there's companies that will take care of that.
Not offering hand drying is the worst; drying your hands is arguably even more important than washing them when it comes to hygiene.
Anyway beyond that, fixing the hand dryers is also an option. Use larger but slower rotating fans. Dyson's machines have the problem that they have relatively small, high-speed motors.
On top of that, people might be using it to wipe anything, which could potentially ruin the rest of the recycling.
If you're putting any of that into your recycling, you're doing it wrong.
Also, do not recycle any paper/cardboard with grease or food contamination, especially pizza boxes with grease on, they will also ruin a recycling run.
Hence the main problem with recycling. No reasonable person can know all the rules about plastics, what kinds of papers, etc. Why can't sorters sort it all out? Because nobody knows what to pre-sort.
Recology has probably the most complicated arrangement I've had, and, well, this is not exactly rocket surgery:
https://www.recology.com/recology-san-francisco/what-goes-wh...
Humans...
Another poster mentioned that their child's high school didn't have any paper towels, which I can only assume is because the kids were wetting them and throwing them around the bathroom ceiling and walls to make them stick, which is something even I (regrettably) took part of as a middle school child.
It's not the outside temperature that'd discourage the already apparently slim number of people that do bother to wash their hands. It's water temperature. And if the water is freezing, no drying method will get the average joe to endure the pain of water hitting their hands.
yes, paper towels, perfectly recyclable and hygienic. Allows wiping face/neck as well.
I don't get the discouraging part and cold climates. It requires hot water, but that's it.
Not true by my experience. I'd say maybe a third of the toilets I use (in Europe) have these cloth rolls.
With paper towels, you need to visit a busy bathroom a few times a day to empty the trash.
When I was little I used to be worried they would eat my fingers, particularly ones that looked like https://i.imgur.com/hCMAQV7.jpg with that little shiny metal dome. It kind of made me think it was hot and i'd somehow burn myself.
I wonder whether those super-fast ones (like the dyson airblades) are better or worse for children these days.
Air hand dryer:
One purchase - zero daily maintenance needs.
Paper towels:
Continuous purchase expense (buying new stock) - continuous daily maintenance needs (resupply of dispenser), increased refuse expense (all the discarded paper towels increase the refuse stream size).
When you tally up the expenses for "air dryer" vs. "paper towels" for a busy restroom and over a reasonable time span (say 1 year) the cost differential is why air dryers are so common.
Of course, some owners also advertise the environmental aspects, but the true reality is the air dryer is there because it saves the restroom owner a significant amount of money each year.
Automated paper towels dispensers should be the rule, not some fancy air blade thingy.
If I'm healthy, it is also good for the environment.
I never liked hand dryers both because of noise and the risks of spreading germs. I'd only use them on a brand new restroom, then never any more.
The step-handle is a nice solution to this, sometimes.
or simply restrooms with no doors like most airports
* Heck, I even change clothes when I get home before seating in my bed or sofa.
"Patient Zero" doesn't usually exude symptoms until it's too late.
That person should have a piano dropped on them.
It's awesome that this young scientist decided to investigate and call attention to this issue, and even better that she's resolved to help come up with solutions!
I’ll rather walk out with dripping hands
It wouldn't surprise me if the UK regulations on these devices also only measure the noise levels without hands in the airflow... there's no way these are legal when they are actually in use.
This all makes more sense now, thanks to this kid for this, I've never realized how noise was different for kids.
I'm sensitive to loud noises and some public bathrooms have really, really, really loud and honestly just flat out aggressive toilets.
My kids hate the Dyson hand dryers. These things are incredibly loud.
Hand dryers. Leaf blowers. Hair dryers. Hoovers.
But bowling alleys and swimming pools are fine. I really want to figure out the spectrum of noise that hurts.
I suspect that, like most people in general, he's fine with lower-frequency sounds, but just more sensitive to high frequency ones.
It's obviously different for everyone, but for me it comes down to a few things:
* Generally the higher pitch noises are way worse then a low deep "growl"
* Sudden, high decibel noises, especially if they're unexpected are BAD
* High decibel repetitive noises (ever have only one window open in your car on the highway and hear a WOMPH WOMPH WOMPH sound?) are unbearable.
* Restaurant buzzers, alarms, etc. Even the alarms coming from inside McDonalds while I'm in the drive through make me uncomfortable/
* Anything shrilly, no matter the decibel.
Sounds that are lower pitch, and continuous are much easier to get used to. The AC kicking on is uncomfortable, but after ~30 seconds the fan noise doesn't bother me.
For me public places have an "ambient sound" that seems to get filtered out okay. Mostly only the occasional small child skrill bothers me. I also have social anxiety so I'll get uncomfortable anyway however.
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This seems to align with your observation that bowling alleys/swimming pools being okay. Most of the sounds are lower pitch, continuous, and most of the sudden noises are expected (kids splashing, bowling ball rolling, etc.)
The biggest difference is the decibel level though. Hand dryers. Leaf blowers. Hair dryers. Hoovers, are all LOUD.
Imagine your parents SCREAMING AS LOUD AS THEY CAN AT YOU. That's how those feel.
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I have a feeling my observations will apply to most people on the spectrum, but you'd have to multiply it by 10x/100x depending on the severity of the individual.
I'd avoid in-ear until you know whether he'd just be leaving them always in which could cause its own problems.
We really should just mandate that public restrooms use Cloth Roll Towel Systems for hand drying. It's economical in the long run, not a giant waste of resources, and it is proven to be more sanitary than paper hand towels!
In many ways it's very similar to the change from cloth diapers to disposables.
Also, why are germs on your hands after washing them? Surely you used soap which killed 99.9% of germs and given that the Dyson Airblade V blows air downward, you would need to contort yourself to put your face below your hands ...
The HN guidelines prohibit personal attacks and political or ideological battle (which includes attacks or inflammatory commentaries on gender, nationality, race, etc).
But using a curse word to convey strong displeasure towards a product from a giant corporation seems fine to me.
And yet, they're seen as a medium-high-prestige item.
There is, however, another Dyson design where the hand dryer is integrated into the sink/tap. This one actually blows particles/droplets from the sink up towards your face, which does give me some hygiene concerns:
https://www.dyson.co.uk/hand-dryers/dyson-airblade-wash-dry-...
You can find these in some of the washrooms at Heathrow airport.
The musty smell that ensues when it's on makes me believe that the dirty dampness is being accelerated into a cloud of bacteria.
if that is a problem then isn't the solution to wash hands more thouroughly?
on a side note, what concerns me much more is how many places i have to touch in a bathroom before even getting to the sink and start washing...
Or worse, how many places you have to touch after you've washed, and when you've seen people leave who don't wash their hands.
ironically, not drying my hands after washing seems to help as i will make an effort not to touch anything until the hands are dry.
Pic for reference: https://www.savemoneycutcarbon.com/wp-content/uploads/Dyson-...
Edit: if you find the older ones disgusting, make sure to let the place of business know by complaining to them, otherwise they're never going to change them unless they break.
Also it requires enough spacing not to blow onto the neighbor faucet(s).
Yeah, there are very common in the city I live.
But after reading this I think my subconscious hates the noise it makes on my over-sensitive hearing.
It's behind a paywall, but Sci-Hub works very nicely with a DOI…
I don't live in a particularly big city and when I visit bigger ones I do feel they are noisy. But not noisy enough to wear protection. I do wear protection when I'm on my motorcycle or at a concert or festival.
I don't really know what would qualify as high sensitivity.
I remember that my father did the same when I was a kid. At that point I laughed, now I understand. I'm guessing sensitive ears run in the family.
It's all about where you measure from, due to the inverse square law. For measuring things such as speakers for product specs, the standard is to measure from one meter away. But for rock concerts and hand dryers, you measure from the typical listening position.
I think you are considering your typical listening position for your child differently from the search results I found. If you were giving your kid a kiss goodnight and they screamed, it would be louder than if you were in the audience of a rock concert (but not louder than if you were kissing the concert speakers).
Every time you double the distance between the source and the meter, the meter reads 6dB lower.
Or one of these dryers, for that matter.
They are loud, but not as loud as one of these devices; not even close.
You're very likely some minimum distance from the speakers and from the dryer, but the minimum distance from your child could be nil (as in the 130dB claims) or significant (as in your experience), making it really hard to use something like a child in this conversation.
This reminds me of how Apple notoriously omits axis values during presentations just to make prettier-looking graphs.