Let's be Fwends #155:

Noise

"Always the line of beauty is a curve."

~ Henry David Thoreau

Hi, and welcome to Let's be Fwends number 155. Today, just two links: One about noise, and one about keyboards. They might or might not be related.

Another Thing us Humans Are: Loud.

We live opposite a small kosher supermarket. Last year, they installed a new A/C, which appears to be significantly stronger than the old one. It creates a constant, 24/7 hum that for whatever reason hits something in the brain that sets you to full alert when you hear it. Now I can no longer sleep with the window open.

We keep expanding our knowledge on how our human way of living is creating unwanted side-effects. Of course, we know about air pollution and its harmful consequences on the climate and on individuals for a long time now. We also know about light pollution, where urban lighting keeps messing with our internal circadian rhythms. But there's also sound pollution, a cause of many health issues that is only rarely talked about.

Noise - here broadly defined as "unwanted sound" - is causing a stress reaction from a body, responsible for negative effects like cortisol and adrenaline spikes, heart rate increases, elevated blood pressure and inflammation levels in the body, which in turn increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes.

And it's not just the cities. When we lived in the country, on the edge of a 3.000 inhabitants village, I always wanted to write a book about the Motorisation of Western Society, because every tool in use has a combustion engine attached to it (any saw is a chain saw, any appliance to remove leaves form the ground is a leaf blower, and so forth). And virtually every trip is made by car. You have no idea how incredibly noise the countryside is (during the day).

I still might write this book, but not until retirement. And it will be an accusation.

There is surprisingly little data on noise in general - the most commonly tracked categories are car traffic, air traffic and industrial plants. And while these might be the big contributing factors of the general noise landscape, I'm sure there are many sources of noise besides these categories.

You can check out the categories at the Lärmkarte Österreich for Austria, explore the noise levels of New York, London and Paris in this interactive map, or use this website for Brussels, another city notorious for its noise. And you can use the Hush City Map to find little islands of quiet in your area, found and marked by some fellow humans.

What I find interesting is that human-generated sounds seem to have a very different effect than natural sounds, which tend to be calming and relaxing.

On Keyboards

You might or might not know that I am a moderate and well-tempered keyboard enthusiast. As someone who types for between 6 and 8 hours a day, I consider the keyboard the main interface between me and my computer.

If you ask why "moderate" - well, check out /r/Keyboards to meet some people who really are into keyboards. Compared to them, I am just a casual keyboard connoisseur. Like, a part-time keyboard person.

I also consider myself well-tempered, because while I am not short of opinions about brown and blue switches, I wouldn't hold it against you if you'd consider brown ones superior. They aren't, but to each their own.

Did you pick up the subtle hint? Of course you did. When I talk about keyboards, I talk about mechanical keyboards, which are different from most modern keyboards. Mechanical keyboards use switches instead of membranes, making them clunky, heavy and very very unpractical. They also create a very nice clicky sound (if you use the right switches - see above) and often have a very accentuated mechanical feedback when a key is pressed.

If you're in the strange Venn diagram of people who've read this far, like mechanical keyboards, too, and think that computing was way better before the year 2000, then I have the right website for you:

A Timeline of IBM Keyboards, of course including the keyboard of my youth, the IBM Model M and all its different incarnations.

Surprisingly, the Model M uses a cheaper switch mechanism in form of a spring/membrane combination that nonetheless created a very pleasant feeling with notable haptic feedback. (See? I told you: well-tempered.)

Let's Be Fwends from the Past

One year ago, I wrote about ways transformative work fails, a topic that is today just as relevant as it was back then. And six years ago, the EU inadvertently introduced one of the most not-thought-through copyright systems because voting is hard.

What I like most about these two issues is how beautifully their intro quotes line up.

That's it for this edition of Let's be Fwends, as they say: One persons noise is another persons party, so go have that clicky keyboard you always wanted. You can always mute yourself. 🤫 ⌨️