Speaker For The Diodes - May 2nd, 2009

05:25 am - QotD

otherbill:	"When I count sheep, I have the sense to declare sheepCount as an unsigned long int."
ravenblack:	"But you'll be screwed when you need to count an antisheep."
gfish:	"I think the presence of an antisheep would present far more pressing concerns than how to count it..."

Responding to an xkcd cartoon, 2009-04-20

02:23 pm - Checking In ...

• Didn't make it to WV for gig; was still not sufficiently recovered from ER saga. :-(
• Did not make it to Pacific cultural expo last night either, due to ill-timed headache.
• May make it to DW Open-Beta celebration in Silver Spring tonight, but don't hold your breath.
• Successfully imported IJ entries into DW several days ago.
• Have not imported LJ entries+comments into DW -- most recent error message is "XMLRPC failure: Exceeded XMLRPC recursion limit." Trying again whenever I see news that they've upgraded the importer tool.
• Still less dizzy than before ER visit, which is good. Have not yet tried to drive.
• Was sooooo dead yesterday I didn't even manage to move car for street cleaning. Fortunately the ticket-fairy seems to have passed over me -- I don't see a ticket on the windshield. *whew*
• Found web site claiming hyperacusis can be treated for $3000 but there may be DIY stuff that works too ... not sure whether the fact that mine comes and goes makes a difference or not.
• Also learned that dynamic range of normal human hearing (from least audible to start of pain) is 130 dB -- factor of 10¹³ (but if normal threshold of hearing is labelled "0 dB" then some hyperacusis patients can hear stuff at negative dB values^[*]); no wonder allegedly 32 dB earplugs are still letting a lot of sound through.

[*] (In case "negative dB values" sounds confusing...) N.b.: IIUC, 'dB' by itself is properly just a relative-magnitude measurement, and doesn't represent a quantity unless '0 dB' is fixed to some value, such as threshold of normal hearing, or a milliwatt, or thermal noise in a resistor at room temperature. So "20 dB" means "a hundred times as large", but doesn't translate to other units unless you know "a hundred times as large as what". But in fields where there's one customary 0 dB reference point, the reference unit is often left off. So "-10 dB" just means "a tenth (of the reference value)", and doesn't actually mean there's "negative sound". So if 0 dB is chosen to mean the size of a drinking glass, the proverbial half-full/half-empty glass has about -3 dB of water in it.