What Is 10 Trillion Times More Powerful Than A Heartbeat? | Hacker News Reader

What Is 10 Trillion Times More Powerful Than A Heartbeat?

npr.org

75 points127001brewer31 comments

"The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy notes that Disaster Area, a plutonium rock band from the Gagrakacka Mind Zones, are generally held to be not only the loudest rock band in the Galaxy, but in fact the loudest noise of any kind at all. Regular concert-goers judge that the best sound balance is usually to be heard from within large concrete bunkers some thirty-seven miles from the stage, whilst the musicians themselves play their instruments by remote control from within a heavily insulated spaceship which stays in orbit around the planet - or more frequently around a completely different planet.

Their songs are on the whole very simple and mostly follow the familiar theme of boy-being meets girl-being beneath a silvery moon, which then explodes for no adequately explored reason.

Many worlds have now banned their act altogether, sometimes for artistic reasons, but most commonly because the band's public address system contravenes local strategic arms limitation treaties."

>The Kiss concert in Ottawa was, says David, "17,000 times louder and ten trillion times more powerful than a heartbeat."

Can anybody convert this to libraries of congress for me? Or perhaps elephants standing on a postage stamp?

http://futureboy.us/frinkdocs/index.html

Try this.

Hey it's Canada we use poutines/decilitre or the ratio of hockey rinks to lacrosse rink, even more rare is the Thicke but that's more for density.

"that's roughly the sound of the volcano that erupted in Karakatau, Indonesia in 1883 and was heard 3,000 miles away. In these drag races, the sound is trapped in the automobile."

Wrong. This all depends on how far are you standing from the sound source. Probably the car audio is much less powerful than the volcano, only the mic is closer.

Now I want to go and find one of these drag events, so I can experience it. Further curious I was searching and found this chart...not sure of the accuracy. http://www.makeitlouder.com/Decibel%20Level%20Chart.txt

The world's 'Quietest Room' is omitted:

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2012/04/03/dail...

I have an associate who's big into these competitions. I've never checked one out, a mutual friend did though. He said it freaked him out, that the force of sound was so powerful he felt like he couldn't breath.

Yeah, breathing difficulty is listed as one of the effects of sonic weapons:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_weapon

I was at kiss within the last two weeks and you didn't hear the music, you felt it as your hearing slowly failed. I forgot to bring earplugs, something I would never recommend, and I could hear not a thing at the end of the concert.

Thinking of something so loud that it makes objects move.... nope.

248 dB: Hiroshima bomb, blast center.

320 dB: Tambora Volcano. Ejected 36 cubic miles of dirt.

http://www.makeitlouder.com/Decibel%20Level%20Chart.txt

The loudest concert I ever went to was Rush in 1990 at the Charlotte Coliseum (the "Presto" tour with the inflatable rabbit). Even though I wore earplugs, my hearing still rang for 3 days afterwards. No more indoor concerts for me!

Unfortunately 'ringing' in the ears is a sign of permanent hearing loss. The hairs in the cochlea snap. The brain eventually adapts and filters out the ringing, but the actual damage can't be reversed.

Well, it's not hard to make things move with sound. I'll bet there was a good amount of wind being generated by the speakers at that concert, and indeed every concert. My home stereo system can blow papers around if I set those papers right in front of the subwoofer. The speakers in my car and blow papers around if they're laying on the floor.

Speakers move air. That's what they do. Making objects move is a simple as them being light enough to blow in the breeze or vibrations created.

There's a subjective jump between "this is loud" and "I can feel the music rattle my chest."

This seems... hazardous.

Odd sport the "dB drag racing". Made me remember of this Gavras video http://vimeo.com/9357434

First thought was: "10 trillion heartbeats?"

My first thought when I saw that headline:

Prejudice

Doesn't that permanently damage the hearing?

Certainly can.

Yes it does.

It's permanently damaged in the sense that a bridge is permanently damaged by people walking over it -- simply put, hearing sound erodes your ear drums regardless of how minute it is. Now, whether listening to really loud things escalates the hearing loss is probably what you were asking.

If a million people were shuffling along a bridge and they all walked gently then the bridge will be damaged minimally, but if a hundred trucks that weigh several tons drive across the bridge then that damage would be quite severe. A million people regularly shuffling every day would be quite damaging over a long period of time, but the effect of a thousand large trucks is far more damaging.

My point is, listening to really loud low frequency sounds isn't as damaging as listening to really loud high frequency sounds.

Now, my comparison is really poor and heavy trucks cause far more damage than people, but the comparison between 'low frequency' and 'high frequency' is apt -- high damage to roads comes from high weight concentrated on a small point of impact in the same way that high damage to hearing comes from high frequency sound.

> It's permanently damaged in the sense that a bridge is permanently damaged by people walking over it -- simply put, hearing sound erodes your ear drums regardless of how minute it is.

Except that bridges aren't self-repairing organisms, so the analogy is flawed in that sense too.

The damaged nerves in the ears do not heal.

He was talking about "eroding ear drums".

This would be a valid comparison if the bridge healed itself. Similarly, walking damages your leg bones due to the impact / stress of gravity - but your bones actually strengthen due to use, as they are continuously being rebuilt, and they adapt to such changes. Too much can definitely cause permanent damage, but below that point it's not necessarily cumulative.

Bridges generally do heal themselves - they have a small colony of symbiotic (parasitic?) humans that take care of them. Some bridges fall into disrepair because their symbiotes have been compromised.

I stopped reading at "Sound erodes your ear drums", you obviously wrote all this but have no clue about how the ear actually works. Its not the ear drum that gets damaged over time, its the hair cells inside the cochlea that eventually die.

Yeah I tried to keep domain-specific terminology to a minimum, most people don't know their sense of hearing comes from sensitive hairs in their ears. Good catch though, and sorry if it made you cringe.

Hearing damage is cumulative. Between my time in the military (my work-center was near some F-16 hangars) and several years participating in competitive pistol shooting (hearing protection worn), I now sometimes have trouble understanding people.

Just like getting your vision checked, you should get your hearing checked periodically. Age plays a factor. As you get older, the nerves in your ear become less sensitive and the structures in the ear can become less responsive to sound.

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